Ridgeline

walking notes and route cards

Things I stopped carrying

Base weight, 2020
11.4 kg
Base weight, 2026
7.2 kg
Cost of change
Mostly nothing

Not an ultralight manifesto. Just a list of things that never earned their place.

Gone, no regrets

The camp chair. 900 g to sit slightly more comfortably for forty minutes a day. A folded sleeping mat against a rock does the same job.

The second pair of trousers. Wet trousers dry on your legs while walking, which is unpleasant for twenty minutes and irrelevant thereafter.

The big first-aid kit. Replaced by tape, painkillers, blister plasters and the honest admission that anything worse than that is an evacuation, not a treatment.

The book. I never once read it. Six trips, six books, zero pages.

Kept, despite the weight

A proper stove rather than a tablet burner: hot food matters more to my mood than 300 g matters to my knees. A full-size sit pad. And a spare pair of dry socks, which is the only luxury on this list that I would defend in an argument.

The one thing I added: a paper map, after a phone died at exactly the moment a phone should not die. It weighs 40 g and I have used it twice in four years.