[Philmont]: Meal Stripping - better ways to spend your efforts reducing weight

This topic strikes me as one of these nit-pickie issues the techies like to hammer on.

Our experience was that there was not many ways would could reduce the weight of the typical food pack. And, the "mooses" had a fondness for adding even more stuff from the swap boxes "just in case" they got hungry. My only comment would be that I can't think of the time they weren't hungry.

I would suggest, that if reducing weight is your issue, spend your time on their base weight. We set a limit of 25 pounds. When we climbed on the train to head west, no pack weighted more than 25 pounds. This process, started early, can be a great learning experience for the scouts.

For the adult leaders, espically those of us who are a bit "long in the tooth" and "have a bit more to love" than the rest, we can reduce our "base weight" by walkng 2-4 miles every other day. 10 pounds off the belly does not have to be taken from the pack.

These two things will do much more to reduce the loads carried than pulling the saltines out of the little cardboard box to save a few ounces.

Bill Keller
wkeller@troop47.com

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Received on Thu Jan 13 09:07:32 2005