Ultralight Natural Camping
Water, Shelter, Excreta Management, Wastewater, Transportation, and Energy Systems
for Backpacking Short or Long Term, in the Wild, or Camping on Your Own Land
Summary: This is the workspace for a book and open source health and safty code for camping as natural recreation and low impact, low cost housing. Please Email us your ideas and comments.
Design
Water
We look for naturally pure spring water or water that has passed through a river bar, for unfiltered drinking. We use creek water for cooking, dishwashing, laundry, etc.
Food
I thought I was into ultralight camping before I had kids...then I experienced backpacking carrying a 25 lb kids. This approach to lightweight food may seem extreme, but it enabled us to do fairly hard core camping with kids that were almost too big to carry.
The key to lightweight backpacking is to take food that has no water in it, and take no more than necessary (we plan on using up a few pounds of fat, which is very concentrated energy, and which we want to get rid of anyway).
We've found that as far as quantities go, it doesn't matter so much what the form is (flour, pasta, rice, beans, nuts, sprouts) if the dry weight is the same. For summer camping the following rations are a bit lean but workable:
Art (165lbs) 1.5 lbs/ day
Lynn (140 lbs) 1 lb/ day
Maya (100 lbs) 0.75 lb day
|
Weight
|
Food
per person
|
Food
per pound of person
|
Food
per person
|
Food
per person
|
Food
per kg of person
|
|
lbs
|
lbs/day
|
oz/day/lb
|
Kg
|
g/day
|
g/day/kg
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Art
|
165
|
1.5
|
0.145
|
75.0
|
680.4
|
9.1
|
Lynn
|
140
|
1
|
0.114
|
63.6
|
453.6
|
7.1
|
Maya
|
100
|
0.75
|
0.120
|
45.5
|
340.2
|
7.5
|
People will eat a lot more if it is cold. Teenage boys eat more, etc.
To sort out the food, we use a postal scale that goes up to 8 or 10 lbs, and can be tared to zero with a big stainless bowl on top. We end up doing things in grams to avoid having to convert ounces to pounds as they add up. It is a lot of work to do the food this way, but it generally works out well. The lbs/ person/ day is a key number.
For example, if the three of us go backpaking for 5 days, we'll need 1.5 + 1 + 0.75 =3.25 lbs/day, times 5 days is 16.25 lbs food.
We'll put the bagged ingredients for each meal in a container on the scale
http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/forums/thread_display.html?forum_thread_id=15646 and there's more here-- http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=orE&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=backpacking+food+weight+per+day
http://www.adventurealan.com/food_general.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight_backpacking
Shelter
Excreta Mangagement
Wastewater
Transportation