We called him Gentle Ben almost immediately. Not because we were making fun of him. It was because he was the calmest person any of us had ever met in the backcountry. The leaders kept handing us absurd instructions — carry this, don't do that, eat this granola that tastes like compressed barn floor — and Ben just nodded and got on with it. No complaint. No fuss.
We respected that. We also felt terrible about what happened to his feet.
Ben had never been backpacking before. That part matters, because if you've never done it, you don't know what you don't know. You don't know that cotton kills. You don't know that the weight on your back changes your gait in ways you can't predict until mile six. And you don't know — you genuinely cannot know without someone telling you — that boots are not an afterthought.
Boots are the whole thing.
Ben showed up in brogans. If you're not familiar, brogans are work shoes — the kind worn by people who stand on concrete floors for eight-hour shifts. Low ankle. Minimal insulation. Stiff leather that needs weeks of breaking in before it'll bend the way a human foot wants to bend.
His were brand new. You could tell by the way he walked in them at the trailhead — that careful, slightly sideways gait of someone whose shoes haven't learned their feet yet.
None of us said anything. I don't know why. Maybe we assumed the leaders had checked everyone's gear. Maybe we were teenagers and didn't want to be the ones to say something awkward to a stranger. Whatever the reason, we shouldered our packs and started walking.
By the end of day one, Ben had blisters.
Not the small, manageable kind that backpackers learn to tape and push through. These were water blisters the size of my thumbnail — raised and tight and sitting in exactly the spots where the unbroken leather had been grinding against his heel and ankle all day.
The leaders did what they could. They had a first aid kit, they drained and bandaged what they could drain and bandage, and they told him to put on an extra pair of socks. He nodded and said he was fine.
He wasn't fine. But he was Gentle Ben, so he didn't say so.
By the end of day two, the blisters were gone. That sounds like an improvement. It wasn't. The blisters had torn, and what was underneath them was raw skin — bleeding, open, rubbing against stiff leather with every step.
They doubled his bandages. He wore two pairs of socks the rest of the trip. He made it to the end.
I still don't know how.
The brogans were wrong in every possible way for what we were doing, but the single biggest failure was the ankle support. Backpacking — especially with a loaded pack, on uneven trail — puts lateral stress on your ankle that flat shoes simply don't handle. Every step on a root or a rock becomes a small stability test. With a full pack, a rolled ankle isn't just painful, it's a potential emergency.
What Ben needed was a mid or high boot with genuine ankle support, broken in before the trip, with moisture-wicking socks underneath. That's the whole prescription. It's not complicated. It's just not obvious if nobody's ever told you.
For a trip like that one — moderate terrain, multi-day, mixed weather — something like the Rocky Boots Outback line would have been close to ideal. Genuine ankle support, built for people who actually work in rough terrain, durable enough that the first ten miles don't destroy them. Georgia Boot's Carbo-Tec line is cut from the same cloth — work-grade construction that translates well to trail use. Both run around 15% commission through CJ if you're an affiliate, though that's not why I'm recommending them — it's because they're the kind of boots built by people who understand what happens when footwear fails.
If Ben had shown up in either of those, broken in for two weeks before the trip, we're talking about a completely different story.
Gear decisions exist on a spectrum of consequence. Pick the wrong stove and dinner's cold. Pick the wrong sleeping bag and you're uncomfortable. Pick the wrong tent and you might get wet.
Pick the wrong boots and you finish a backpacking trip bleeding through your bandages because there was no other option.
Boots are the one category where I tell people to spend more than they think they need to, buy earlier than they think they need to, and wear them more before the trip than seems necessary. Break them in on errands. Break them in around the yard. Break them in on a day hike before you trust them for four days in the backcountry.
Ben's brogans were probably fine shoes for the job they were designed for. That job just wasn't this.
I've thought about Ben a lot over the years. He never complained — not once, not when the blisters formed, not when they tore open, not on the long last day back to the trailhead. He just kept walking.
That's a remarkable kind of toughness. But toughness should be saved for the things you can't control. The weather. The terrain. The fact that someone made you carry a cast iron skillet for seven days.
The boots were something he could have controlled. If someone had told him.
Consider this your somebody.
If you're putting together your first backpacking kit and want to know what actually matters, start with the Gear page. And if you've got a story of your own from a trip that went sideways, I'd genuinely like to hear it.
]]>Two farm kids. Five hundred acres of Mississippi dairy land. Late at night, no lanterns, just the campfire. Three trees in a triangle with hammocks tied together at the top so we could talk until we fell asleep, which was our preferred sleeping arrangement when the weather cooperated.
Also — and this becomes relevant — possibly a bowl or two had been involved earlier in the evening. This was the early eighties. We were seventeen. I'll leave it at that.
Something woke us up.
I don't know what time it was. Late. Dark. The fire had burned down to coals and wasn't throwing much light. We looked around, trying to figure out what had disturbed us, and that's when we saw them.
Glowing orbs. Floating in the darkness at various heights. Maybe twenty of them. Thirty. Just hovering there, slightly reflective, definitely looking at us.
We screamed.
We did not exit the hammocks so much as eject from them. I have no memory of my feet touching the ground between the hammock and the truck bed. We were just suddenly in the truck bed, both of us, hearts going like we'd sprinted a mile.
The glowing orbs didn't move.
It was the herd of Holstein dairy cows. His family's milk cows. They had seen the campfire from across the pasture, gotten curious the way cows do — which is to say, gotten extremely curious in an extremely slow and deliberate way — and walked over to investigate. What we saw in the darkness were their eyes reflecting the last light from the coals.
They just stood there. Looking at us. Probably confused about why two humans were now sitting in a truck bed hyperventilating.
We sat in the truck for a while.
Lanterns. Get one. Use it.
I say this as someone who thought a campfire was sufficient lighting for a backcountry camp and learned otherwise at the hands of a Holstein herd. The modern options are so good and so light that there's no real argument for going without.
The Black Diamond Spot 400 headlamp runs about $40, weighs two ounces, throws 400 lumens when you need them, and dims way down for camp use. It would have let us see what was coming across that pasture before it materialized as floating eyes in the darkness.
For actual camp lighting, the LuminAID PackLite is solar-rechargeable, weighs almost nothing, packs completely flat, and throws enough light to actually see your campsite. We carry nothing like this when we were kids because nothing like this existed.
After we determined that the cows were not, in fact, supernatural entities, we had to get back to camp. Which meant walking back through the herd. Which the cows found extremely interesting and followed us the entire way.
We rebuilt the fire — partly for light, partly because it turned out to be the thing that made the cows keep a respectful distance. They didn't like the fire. That's useful information.
The hammocks were still fine. The night was still warm. We climbed back in, and my friend said something like "I can't believe we just got scared by dairy cows," and we laughed until we couldn't breathe.
That's the thing about hammock camping — when everything goes sideways, you're still off the ground. Whatever was out there, at least it wasn't directly underneath us.
That triangular hammock setup we used — three trees, hammocks tied at the top so we could talk — wasn't something we read about or planned. We just figured out that it worked. You could see your camping partner, you could have an actual conversation, and it was stable in a way that a single hammock strung between two trees isn't.
Modern hammock camping has come a long way from whatever we were using in the early eighties. ENO makes excellent entry-level hammocks for under $60, and their DoubleNest fits two people for exactly the kind of camp conversation my friend and I used to have. Kammock's Roo series runs higher but is bomber-durable and comfortable enough to actually sleep in all night.
A hammock tarp is non-negotiable — I'd go with something like the Kammock Glider or ENO's ProFly rain tarp. Because the night we got caught by the monsoon rain was a different camping trip, and that one's its own story.
Next time: the cow pond campsite, the monsoon, and the mostly-raw chicken.
]]>No explanation. Just: here, carry this instead.
I was maybe 110 pounds. The skillet probably weighed ten of them.
This was a church backpacking trip, which meant I didn't have much say in the matter. Back then, if you wanted to get into the backcountry and you were a farm kid in rural Mississippi with limited transportation and limited options, you went where someone else was willing to take you. That was the deal.
My friend and I had planned. We'd saved up — Pizza Hut wages, farm work, whatever came our way — and put together what we thought was a solid kit. Aluminum cookware. A little propane stove that packed into a coffee can. Pre-mixed instant coffee and creamer in a single container, because efficiency mattered when you were seventeen and thought you had figured something out.
They took all of that away from us at the trailhead and handed us granola that tasted like it was assembled from materials found in a barn, and a cast iron skillet for reasons I still don't understand forty years later.
We ate three cans of corn that week. We'd smuggled them in ziplocks — poured them out of the cans to save weight, which in retrospect was the most sophisticated gear decision we made that entire trip.
I lost twelve pounds in seven days. I only weighed 110 to begin with.
The surface lesson is obvious: carry your own gear, choose it yourself, trust your own judgment.
But the real lesson was subtler. It was about the gap between what someone tells you you need and what you actually need — and how that gap gets papered over constantly in the outdoor industry, just like it was papered over by whatever adult decided a cast iron skillet was appropriate backcountry cookware.
The vendors make it sound seamless. The gear guides make it sound obvious. The influencers make it look effortless.
It's not.
The first time you sleep in a wet sleeping bag because you didn't check whether your campsite was level, you understand something no gear review can teach you. The first time you tilt a frying pan in a monsoon to keep one square inch of fire alive under your chicken, you understand improvisation in a way that doesn't come from reading about it.
The propane-stove-in-a-coffee-can setup we had back then was actually not far off from what modern ultralight hikers use — except that the best options today are dramatically better. A JetBoil Flash boils water in about 100 seconds, packs down to roughly the size of a water bottle, and weighs under a pound with the fuel canister. It's the technological descendant of our coffee can setup, done properly.
For a cook system that's even lighter and more versatile, the MSR PocketRocket Deluxe runs around $55 and weighs almost nothing. Pair it with a titanium pot — Snow Peak makes excellent ones — and you've got a complete cook system under 8 ounces.
The cast iron skillet weighed approximately the same as a small child.
I've carried the lesson from that trip through everything since — Navy service, twenty-plus years in enterprise IT, building businesses from scratch. The principle is always the same:
Know what you're carrying and why. Never let someone else make that call for you.
It seems obvious when you say it out loud. Most good principles do. The trick is applying it consistently — which means doing the research, making your own assessment, and being willing to push back when someone hands you a cast iron skillet and calls it standard equipment.
That's what this site is built on. Not expertise handed down from above. Just hard-won experience from figuring it out myself, with the gear I could afford, in the places I could get to.
Starting with three cans of corn smuggled in ziplocks.
Have a gear question or a story of your own from the trail? I'd genuinely like to hear it.
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