The gear

The ultra-light hike

Weight, weight, weight.
When you are going away for 2 years, you better pay attention to what you are going to put in your backpack. Because afterwards, you will have to physically deal with it every day.

To determine what we needed, we spent a lot of time drawing inspiration from the gear lists of long-distance hikers. It's a common practice among hikers, especially those who practice "ultra-light" hiking, to publish a nice Excel table detailing all the equipment weighed down to the gram.

We particularly drew inspiration from JM Caminaire, Further Stories, Jérémy Bigé (gold medal of ultra-light with his 5kg bag …) or Samuel Knosp. There is also a specialized site (in french) to push the pursuit of unnecessary grams even further.

By taking inspiration from proven lists, we could determine what was generally considered essential or superfluous, knowing that every hiker has their own interpretation of these two words (for Jérémy, for example, the tent is superfluous ...).

You will have understood, the basic principle of bag design:

Nothing should be missing, but everything should serve a purpose (and preferably twice)

Among the good ideas, we kept:

• Cotton and synthetic materials are banned, merino, merino and more merino (thanks Icebreaker !!)

• No more than 2 underwear, 2 pairs of socks, and 2 t-shirts (and we weren't the most radical !!)

• An umbrella in case of rain. The poncho quickly becomes a sauna, and no one believes in gore-tex. And anti-UV to serve as a parasol if the sun decides to show up (we'll talk more about it in Kazakhstan in August)

• The down jacket serves as a pillow, the neck warmer as a pillowcase

• The hiking poles are great tent structures

With a few exceptions

Based on these main principles, we made several choices so that this project reflects us, sometimes at the expense of our vertebrae:

1. We favored brands close to home. Annecy boasts an exceptional outdoor sector with Outdoor Sport Valley. It matters to us to depart with gear from brands like Lafuma, Icebreaker, Millet or Samaya, whose offices are just 500m from our home.

2. We chose to bring electronic equipment to document our adventure as we wanted. We sometimes curse the weight of the drone or the laptop in our bag, but it allows us to immortalize our steps and share them.

3. A first aid kit without concessions. It's a few extra grams that can prevent us from having to return home sooner than expected …

Because it helped us a lot that others took the time to do it, we also weighed each item in our bag to provide you with this summary. You can also find it here.