Gregory Pack

What the hell is wrong with me?  Grown man, 44 years old, posting pictures of sandals and shoes and shit.   Flip flops and string?  Come on.  Stop it.

Ignoring that, Lola and I both received our backpacks yesterday.  My little green and black Osprey--which she named Kermit tonight over veggie burgers, french fries, darts, and a tight six piece brass/double bass/banjo/percussion/piano band at the Bull and Bush Pub in Glendale--was delivered to me by the UPS man in the morning.  After that we put the top down on Roscoe and took the thru-city route to REI, deciding that this was the day the she would pick her pack after a few weeks of trying various models on.  Backpacks can seem great on paper and on the internet and get great reviews for comfort but if they don't fit well on you then they might as well be made of porcupine quills and battering rams.

Step one:  It feels good in the store or it doesn't feel good in the store.

The store guy person fills the pack with sand bags and you walk around the store like an idiot with a small mobile home humping your back...up the stairs, down the stairs, through the shoe department, past the mysterious climbing gear,  past the other customers, some holding Starbuck's cups, some not, some climbing the centrally located Mount Paper Mache next to the tents, GPS receivers,  hydration reservoirs and roof rack accessories and you decide if it feels tolerable.

Here are the packs Lola tried. The REI Crestrail 65:  the issue with this pack is that the shoulder straps dig in too hard and the overall weight of the pack is too heavy;  The Flash 58:  just all wrong;  Osprey Aura 50:  not enough interior volume;  Gregory J63:  getting there, but not quite...hard to put a finger on it;  Deuter Act Lite 45 + 10:  nice, and it comes with a fake pretty flower garnish but the shoulder straps are designed funny and they chafe her arms as they swing when she walks;  North Face Terra 55:  excessive lumbar pressure;  Gregory Sage 55:  This is the one.  It hits the sweet spot.    The pack she has talked about at home but we didn't want to commit to because it seemed like too good of  a deal and so there must be something wrong with it. It's a discontinued model and deeply discounted.  Maybe bad news, but maybe not.

  

Gregory Pack

                                                

I loved and hated from six to eight packs myself before I finally decided on Kermit.  This is nothing strange.  They all seem wrong until one seems a little less wrong and then you notice that the one that seemed a little less wrong is actually the one that is the best for you.  So you buy that one and get used to it.  I can't imagine that anyone really ever feels comfortable with a heavy-ass backpack on.  Only less uncomfortable.  For me it's Kermit.  Kermie, as she calls it.  For Lola, Gregory Pack. 

Step two:  It feels tolerable on the trail or it doesn't feel tolerable on the trail.

We scoured our office library, searching for a decent close-to-home trail hidden in the nature/human struggle books we've collected over the years.  I tend to  make everything much more difficult than it really needs to be but we finally found a good trail in an area that looked fun:  a Jefferson County mountain park called Alderfer/Three Sisters Park.  We worked out a four mile hike (even though on the Colorado trail we will probably average  15 miles a day, on this simple mission we simply wanted to determine if our new packs hurt or not) and got some sleep.

The next morning we filled our packs with artificial weight (Lola's pack had 13# and mine had 15#)...mostly blankets, sleeping bags, dog food and water.  Lola's base pack weight goal (which excludes water and food) on the first day of the Colorado Trail next summer will  be about 13.5#.  The goal for mine is 16.5#...a few pounds heavier because I am man-who-carries-tent-for-two and other shareable items. She's a girl for crissake.  I'm a big soft American asshole guilty of Ease so I'm going to carry what I can and then some as penance.  It only seems fair.

Add another 10# for food and water for each of us on the Trail.  It starts adding up and the packs begin to create a lot of stress on the hips and shoulders where their bulks rest.  We need to get in shape to handle the loads.  Lola is clearly already in shape.  I'll probably never really be "in-shape" so for me it is probably, technically, more of a reducing my out-of-shape status.

So we go hiking on Sunday.

OK.  Long story short, as they say. We start the trail and the packs feel great, like magic fingers on our backs in a cheap motel.  Our weights are light, our journey is short, our dog is mostly well-behaved, but it is a good start.  We finish four miles in relative comfort.  We decide that we can  both live with the packs we have chosen.

Kermit and Gregory Pack.  They should do nicely. 

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My new hiking shoes...Patagonia Drifters.  Unlike backpacks that at best feel not-ungood, these shoes feel at least good.  Combined with Darn Good light hiking socks, they border on very nice.  For $130, they'd better feel nice!  There is the whole waterproof vs non-waterproof issue that never gets satisfactorily resolved, but I went for the non-waterproof and my feet felt great on that meager four mile hike.  Lola, in her popular-among-hiker Merrell Moab waterproofs, said her feet felt pretty shitty.  Had it been raining I imagine the story would have been reversed.