Ode to my backpack

O.K. - so this is not going to be a true "ode" because I'm not really great at writing poems, I just thought the title sounded catchy. But now that I've caught you, I am seriously going to write a blog about my dear old backpack. Yup - that's right - my backpack. A good ol' heavy-weight canvas Mountainsmith that my parents bought for me back in 1996 (?) when I was an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire (UNH).

On my honeymoon in Banff National Park

At the time I was a sophomore in college and I was living it up in a rockin' "mini-dorm" with a bunch of like-minded college kids. The UNH mini-dorms were a cluster of six small dorms tucked away from most of the campus; each dorm had a particular theme to the building and the students living in that particular dorm usually fit the "theme" quite well because you had to request the dorm in order to end up in it. For example, there was an "arts" dorm, an "academic awareness" dorm, and the jock dorm. Woodruff, the environmental awareness dorm (otherwise known as, ehmmm, "Woodpuff") was a classic example of the mini-dorm lifestyle. And then there was Hall House, my beloved home for an academic year. Hall Housers were members of the "outdoor awareness" dorm which basically meant that we were a bunch of kids that wanted to spend as much time as possible outside. We organized trips together to neat places like Baxter State Park or Acadia National Park and we played, played, played outside. Somewhere in the midst of this fun we actually took classes and studied but talking about studying isn't half as fun as talking about what you did in college when you were not studying.

Enter my new backpack..... the first trip I took this backpack on was a Hall House trip to Fraconia Notch in the middle of winter. Hall House had rented the New Hampshire Outing Club cabin for the weekend and a bunch of us wanted to get there on Friday evening after our classes finished. Remember this is in the middle of winter in New Hampshire! This meant it was dark out by the time we arrived at the snowy trailhead to the cabin and parked our cars. We shouldered our packs under the bright moonlight and trudged uphill in the snow for a while (I have no clue how long we hiked - maybe two miles?) until we arrived at the cabin. A fire was roaring inside and the laughter of our dear college friends could be heard long before we were stomping snow off our hiking boots inside the cabin. I have a photograph of me with my backpack on this first hike, but it is in an album buried in my old closet at my parents house in New York.

The Mountainsmith and 20-yr old Julie near the Snowy Mountains in Australia

Fast-forward to 1997/1998 and meet my backpack in a new light! I switched from backpacking up mountains to backpacking around a country. The first time I ever traveled alone for an extended period of time was when I spent my entire junior year studying abroad in Australia at James Cook University. Thanks to the opposite seasons in the southern hemisphere, I ended up going through the spring semester in Australia first, which gave me three summer months off for traveling (I wasn't about to go back to the USA during the Oz summer) before I started the fall semester at JCU. So I filled my dear backpack with far too much crap and set off on a round-the-continent trip thanks to my parents (ahhhh the life of a twenty-year-old). I found this old photo of me and my backpack outside of a youth hostel in Thredbo, New South Wales. This photo was taken at the tail end of the three-month trip, just before I met up with my parents for a visit that included time in Sydney, Townsville, and Cairns.

Wineglass Bay, Tasmania

My time in Australia was transformative - I learned how to happily travel alone, to appreciate different cultures, and to live with very little attached to my back. Travel turns into an addiction and for those of you that know me well, the addiction continues. I love my life in WA and my job, but Jay and I equally love living out of small bags, traveling in countries where we don't know the language, and learning from people and places that are vastly different from America. In many ways, I feel the most like myself when I have a bag on my back and nothing else but an unknown road ahead for a plan. I owe these beliefs and obsession to my parents (for supporting me when I was a young and curious dork) and to my backpack (for showing me how great it is to have so little).

Jay with a smaller backpack on a trek in Nepal

My backpack and I went through a bit of a separation during the year I had the Our World-Underwater Scholarship and the years I lived in Alaska, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Diving and sea kayaking took over my interests and when I traveled abroad it tended to involve even smaller bags as I had learned that less was more when on the road. When Jay and I left our fantastic jobs on the east coast to travel around the world for 13 months, we brought smaller bags that could fit on buses with us and in the overhead compartment of planes. Those smaller bags were all we brought for that entire trip - talk about freedom! This entire time the Mountainsmith hung out in a closet - perhaps dreaming of Fraconia Notch or hot days in Western Australia? And then Jay and I moved to Washington....

Mount St. Helens

Moving to a place like this - where backpacking can easily compete with sea kayaking and diving - merited the resurrection of the Mountainsmith!

Canada!

The funny thing about the resurrection of the Mountainsmith is that the first trip I took it on was in Canada instead of Washington! Jay and I headed to Banff and Jasper National Park for our honeymoon where we split time between car camping, backpacking, and a small condo in Canmore (a small town just outside Banff). During this 2009 trip I started to notice how my beloved Mountainsmith was actually quite heavy and kind-of uncomfortable..... other folks had all these fancy lightweight bags and seemed to just breeze along the trail. I mostly ignored them, my bag was functional and I am not the kind of person who runs out and buys new gear the minute it is on the market.

Several years later, I was still trudging along in the Mountainsmith....wondering why my shoulders were always sore and struggling to get the weight on my hips with the fit of this good ol' gal. I sucked it up and hiked on. And then Jay decided to upgrade from his old 1990's L.L. Bean backpack to a new lightweight, fancy REI bag that shimmered. He flew along the trail as if there was nothing but a feather on his back (I'm exaggerating a bit here but I can't help it). After watching him with slight envy for over a year, we decided it was finally time to say a fond farewell to the Mountainsmith and get a backpack that was designed for me.

My new Deuter on its first trip....in Canada!

Now the Mountainsmith is back in a closet again.... I should bring it to a thrift shop or sell it to a subsistence hunter (no annoying trophy hunter deserves my backpack). But I might need to deal with the thought of saying goodbye a bit longer. I owe a lot of fun to that bag, after all, we have been around the world together and grown-up together. I have had a great life so far and my backpack has been with me for much of the way! So three cheers to the heavy, canvas bag and happy trails to the new Deuter.... I hope to learn much about myself through you.