How to Run a Gear Shakedown on Your Own Pack

A shakedown is a line by line audit of a pack you already own, done with a scale instead of an opinion. You weigh every item individually, enter the numbers into a gear list, sort by weight descending and work down from the top. Almost everyone finds 3 to 6 lb they can remove for nothing before a single purchase is justified, and the reason they had not found it already is that they were guessing at weights rather than measuring them.

Why does a shakedown start with a scale?

Because a gear list built from published figures is a work of fiction, and everyone discovers this at the same moment. Manufacturer weights are the optimistic case. They are often quoted for the minimum trail configuration, which means the tent weight excludes the stakes, the guy lines and the stuff sacks you will genuinely carry. Clothing weights are quoted for a size medium when you wear a large. Accessories are quoted without batteries. Every one of those is a small error, and forty small errors in the same direction is a pound and a half.

A digital pocket scale reading to 0.01 g costs about $9 and ends the argument permanently. Weigh everything once, write it down once, and every future decision is made against real numbers. Nothing else you can buy for $9 changes a gear list this much, which is why it sits at the top of this page instead of a tent.

Use one unit and stay in it. Grams are easier for small items because the differences are visible: 45 g versus 130 g is obviously a decision, 1.6 oz versus 4.6 oz reads as almost nothing. Convert at the end if you prefer pounds. For reference, 1 oz is 28.3495 g and 1 lb is 453.592 g.

What exactly do you weigh?

Every item that goes in or on the pack, individually, in the configuration you will carry it. That means the tent body, the fly, the stakes and the guy lines as four figures rather than one, because the stakes are a place you can save weight and the fly is not. It means the headlamp with its battery in. It means the stuff sack that the quilt lives in, separately from the quilt.

Base weight is everything in or on the pack except food, water and fuel. Those three are consumables, they change with trip length and they do not tell you anything about your gear choices, which is why base weight is the number everyone compares. Weigh them anyway, in a separate section, because a loaded pack is what your shoulders experience. Water is 2.2 lb per litre and food is roughly 1.5 lb per day in three season conditions.

Worn weight, meaning the clothes and shoes you have on and the poles in your hands, is a third category. Keep it separate and do not let it become a hiding place. Moving a fleece from the "packed" column to the "worn" column improves the spreadsheet and changes nothing about the hill.

How do you set the list up?

Enter the weighed figures into the gear list builder, then sort by weight descending. That sort is the entire method. The heaviest item is at the top, and your attention goes there first rather than to whichever item you happened to think about in the car park. Most people, on seeing their list sorted this way for the first time, immediately find two or three items in the top ten they cannot justify.

Group the list into categories: shelter, sleep, pack, clothing, kitchen, water, electronics, safety, miscellaneous. Category subtotals tell you something the item list does not. A kit with 4 lb of clothing has a clothing problem, and no amount of staring at individual shirts will reveal that. Check the total against the base weight calculator and against the base weight tiers, where under 20 lb is lightweight, under 10 lb is ultralight and under 5 lb is super ultralight.

Round one: what did you not use last time?

This is the free round and it is the biggest one for almost everybody. The rule is simple: if you did not use an item on any of your last three trips, and it is not on the safety list further down this page, it comes out.

The resistance to this round is always the same, and it is worth naming. Every unused item is in the pack because of a story about a situation in which you would want it. The story is usually true and almost always unlikely. Camp shoes exist because your feet hurt at the end of a long day, which is real, and they also weigh three quarters of a pound and spend most trips in the bottom of the pack. The question is not whether you can imagine wanting it. The question is whether you wanted it enough to use it, three trips running.

Do this round from memory immediately after a trip, when the memory is accurate. If you cannot remember, put a strip of tape on suspicious items before the next trip and remove the tape when you use them. Whatever still has tape on it at the trailhead on the way home is the answer.

Round two: what is in there twice?

Redundancy is the second free round, and it hides better than unused gear because each individual item is defensible. The pattern to look for is two things that do the same job.

The usual offenders: two cutting tools, normally a knife plus a multitool, when a small blade covers every genuine backcountry task. A backup light plus a headlamp, when a headlamp with a fresh battery and a power bank covers the same failure. Spare clothing beyond one sleep layer, meaning the second fleece, the third shirt and the fourth pair of socks. Two water containers plus a reservoir you never fill. A pillow and a stuff sack of clothes to put in it.

The clothing rule that holds up best is one worn set, one insulating layer, one rain layer, one dedicated sleep layer that never gets worn hiking, and socks in a rotation of three pairs. Darn Tough Light Hiker socks are the standard because the lifetime guarantee makes three pairs a one-time purchase rather than a seasonal one. Anything beyond that list is a spare, and spares are the definition of redundancy.

Redundancy is legitimate in exactly one place: the systems that keep you alive. A chemical water treatment backup for a filter, a second ignition source for a stove, and a map and compass behind a phone are not duplicates, they are contingency for single points of failure. Everything else is weight.

Round three: what can be repackaged?

The third free round is where a surprising pound lives, and it comes off in ounces rather than pounds so people skip it. Cutting the handle off a toothbrush is the joke that gets told about ultralight hikers. Decanting is not a joke, and the difference is that decanting removes packaging rather than function.

Work through this list. Decant liquids into small dropper bottles: sunscreen, soap, hand sanitiser and repellent do not need their retail bottles, and a full size sunscreen tube is 5 oz of which you will use half an ounce. Strip retail packaging from everything: boxes, blister packs, the cardboard sleeve on the fuel canister, the instruction leaflet in the first aid kit. Rebuild the first aid kit yourself, because a retail kit is 8 to 12 oz of items sized for a car and a self-built kit that covers bleeding, blisters, pain and an allergic reaction is about 3 oz.

Drop the stuff sacks. A set of five colour-coded sacks is 4 to 6 oz of nylon doing organisational work that loose items in a pack do for free, and loose gear packs into the gaps that rigid stuffed cylinders leave empty. Keep one for the quilt. Replace the roll top pack liner with a trash compactor bag: it costs about a dollar, weighs roughly 1.5 oz, keeps the quilt as dry as a dry bag does, and when it eventually tears you replace it with the next one off the roll.

Swap the bottles. A hard-sided 1 litre bottle is around 6 oz. A 1 litre soda bottle is around 1.3 oz, holds the same water, and threads directly onto a Sawyer Squeeze. Two of them save most of half a pound for nothing. Also trim what can be trimmed: cut a foam pad to torso length, cut the map down to the section you are walking, cut guy lines to the length you actually stake out.

Round four: the Big Three, and the only money

Only now does anything get bought. The shelter, the sleep system and the pack are roughly 55 percent of base weight at every level, so this is where the remaining weight is, and it is also where the remaining money is. Doing it last means you spend against a kit that has already been stripped, which changes what you should buy: the pack in particular has to match a load you cannot know until the other two are settled.

The order inside the round is shelter, then sleep system, then pack. Read the Big Three explained for the full argument and the weights at each level. A semi-freestanding shelter like the NEMO Hornet OSMO 2P at 2 lb 6 oz replacing a 5 lb freestanding tent is the single largest saving available in one purchase, and a Granite Gear Crown3 60L at 2 lb 3 oz is the pack most people should be looking at once the load is known.

One safety note belongs here, because this round is where people accidentally buy less warmth than they think. Sleeping bag and quilt temperature ratings under EN 13537 and ISO 23537 are survival ratings, not comfort ratings. The published limit figure is roughly the point at which an average sleeper survives the night curled up. The comfort rating typically sits 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, and the extreme rating is survival with injury and must never be used for planning. Treat a 20 degree quilt as comfortable near 30 to 35 degrees.

A worked example: 22 lb down to 14 lb

The table below is a complete shakedown of a realistic first kit, weighed at 22 lb 0 oz, which is 352 oz. Every round is itemised and the arithmetic closes exactly. Note where the money is: three of the four rounds cost nothing, and they account for 86 of the 128 ounces removed.

Two things are worth reading off that table. First, the free rounds removed 5 lb 6 oz, which is more than the single purchase did. Second, the purchase cost $479.95 for 42 oz, which works out at roughly $11.43 per ounce, while rounds one to three cost nothing for 86 oz. That ratio is why the order matters. Reverse it and you buy a lighter tent to carry a pack still full of items you do not use.

The commonly carried, rarely used list

Run this audit against your own pack before round one. These are the items that appear in most first kits, and the weight column is the range from published manufacturer specifications and verified owner reports for typical versions of each.

A note on two rows in that table. The power bank line assumes a Nitecore NB10000 at 5.3 oz, which is two to three phone charges and covers the standard four day resupply window, so a solar panel is carrying sunshine you do not need. And the foam pad line assumes a Therm-a-Rest Z Lite Sol, which is why cutting camp shoes and a chair is defensible: you are already carrying a sit pad and a dry surface.

What are you not allowed to cut?

Every shakedown needs a floor, and this is it. These items do not participate in the exercise.

• Shelter adequate to the actual conditions, not the forecast conditions.
• Insulation rated for the real overnight low, remembering that limit ratings are survival ratings and the comfort figure sits 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.
• Rain gear, even in a dry forecast, because hypothermia does not require winter. Wet plus wind plus a stopped hiker at 45F does it.
• Navigation, meaning a map and compass behind the phone, not instead of it.
• Water treatment plus a chemical backup, because a filter is a single point of failure and tablets weigh under an ounce.
• A way to call for help, whether that is coverage you have verified or a satellite communicator.
• A headlamp, plus a first aid kit that covers bleeding, blisters, pain and an allergic reaction.
• A bear canister where one is legally required, which is a growing list of places and not negotiable by weight.

How do you post a shakedown request that gets useful answers?

Forum shakedowns work well and they fail for one predictable reason: people post a list with no context and no weighed numbers, and the replies are generic advice they could have read anywhere. Give the following, in this order, and the answers change completely.

The trip. Where, how many nights, how many miles per day, and how far from a road. A 6 mile per day loop and a 22 mile per day thru-hike attract opposite advice. The season and the night lows. Not "autumn", but "expected lows of 28 to 35F with a chance of freezing rain". This is the single most useful line you can write, because half of all shakedown advice depends on it. Your experience. Whether this is your third night out or your third season changes what people should be telling you to cut.

A weighed list, in one unit, with every item. Guessed weights waste the time of everyone reading, because nobody can tell which figures are wrong, and one wrong figure in the top five items invalidates the whole ranking. Link the list rather than pasting a wall of text. Your budget and your constraints. Say if you will not replace the pack this season, if you sleep cold, if you cannot use a trekking pole shelter because you do not hike with poles, or if a canister is required where you are going. Otherwise you will get five recommendations you have already ruled out.

Finally, mark the items you are unsure about. A list with three question marks on it gets focused replies. A list with none gets a debate about someone else's kit.

How often should you repeat it?

Once at the start of the season, and once after any trip that went badly. The results shrink each time, and that shrinkage is the signal you want: a shakedown that finds 6 lb the first time and 4 oz the fourth time means the method worked. When a round stops producing anything, stop running it and move to the next expensive decision instead.

The thing to avoid is the opposite habit, which is running a shakedown every week and buying something each time. Weight is a means to a more comfortable trip, and past a certain point the ounces stop translating into anything you can feel. Compare your finished list against the worked gear lists to see where a real kit at your target weight spends its ounces, then read the full base weight method for the rounds that come after the free ones are exhausted.