My backpack

I try to make a point of not obsessing over gear. You can waste a lot of time researching the optimal combination of features, durability, price point, style, feng shui, etc, when "good enough" will nearly always work fine at a fraction of the time investment. However, I do have a weakness for certain favorite items - pieces of clothing or equipment with a long history of service that I have a hard time getting rid of even when their time has clearly run out. Usually this is because they have lasted so long that it's hard to remember a time when I didn't have them. Maybe the best example of this is my North Face Terra 40 backpack, which has accompanied me for 12 years on almost every outing, hike, major trip, and phase of my life since college. After enduring more hard use than any piece of gear I've owned, its deteriorating condition can no longer be ignored; the time has come to send it down the ol' dusty trail to Backpack Heaven (a landfill), where it will live forever as part of the geologic record. As a tribute, I thought I'd chronicle its service and show how it handled the duress.

The backpack at its closure of service, adorned with drilling grease and grout stains

I received the Terra 40 as a birthday gift from dad in June 2003, just before heading off to summer field school for my undergraduate geology degree. I loved the color, shape, and fit right away, and my enthusiasm was undampened when another student showed up with an identical new pack. It immediately proved its usefulness at holding a day's worth of water, food, extra layers, and field gear while hiking around the eastern Sierra Nevada, the northern California coastline, and the Okanagan region of BC. It was also great as a daypack for regular hikes around Bellingham, Washington.

Measuring something on a boulder on the California coastline.

It was a phase, alright?

After finishing college, my stupid haircut and I hung around western Washington for most of a year before my application was accepted to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras. For two years I lived in a small adobe house with no electricity or running water, spoke English rarely, and worked with a cooperative of coffee farmers to help them become certified organic and export their product directly to the international market. Boots were the only way to access many areas, and I spent a lot of time hiking to nearby farms and neighboring villages to talk to members of the cooperative, do presentations, gather documentation, and, on Sundays, play soccer. The Terra 40 came along for all of this. During the rainy season when nothing dried out completely, it started growing mold on the deposits of oils and minerals left behind from being repeatedly soaked in sweat. On a few occasions I had to soap it up and scrub out the grime and mold on the slab of rock where I washed my clothing. On weekly trips to town I filled my backpack up with groceries and other supplies and carried them 2 km from the bus stop to my house.

Carrying groceries from the bus stop to my house. This is the only picture of the backpack in Honduras.

Near the end of the walk to my house

The terrain in southern Honduras

I finished Peace Corps service in October 2007, moved to Canada and started graduate school about a year later, and the Terra 40 went back to being a fieldwork pack. During the following two years it saw its most rigorous use, getting stuffed to the gills with field gear, clothing, food, water, and samples over the course of several trips to wilderness areas of southern/central BC and Alaska. On a typical day it was loaded with most or all of the following:

- 3 litres of water

- Lunch

- Rain gear and long johns

- Rock hammer

- 100-foot plastic measuring tape

- Compass and clinometer

- Camera and GPS

- Satellite phone

- Sample bags

- Pencils, markers, notebook, and reference sheets

- First aid kit, flashlight, and pocket knife

In the afternoon, water and food would be traded for rock samples. The pack probably weighed 20+ pounds much of the time and was dragged through brush and slung around on sharp rocky ground in all manner of weather. The big front pouch and brain were very useful for caching small, frequently-used items like the camera, compass, and notebook.

Field job #1: mapping the maximum flooding extent of a tsunami caused by a rockslide into Chehalis Lake, BC

Using a rangefinder at Chehalis Lake

Field job #2: Mapping folds and landslide evidence in the Monashee Mountains near Revelstoke, BC

The Monashees (and Selkirks in the far background), from the top of the peak shown in the previous photo

Field job #3: My own thesis field site near Pemberton, BC

Looking down the Lillooet Valley toward Pemberton

Field job #4: Mapping landslide features in the Alaska Range

Standing on an active (slow) landslide

The Alaska Range on a clear day

In 2011, after finishing graduate school, I was fortunate enough to get a dream job with a geotechnical engineering consulting company in Vancouver. Fieldwork so far has involved helicopter inspection, ground reconnaissance and drilling investigations in far-flung corners of BC, Mexico, and Chile. These jobs are usually done a short distance from a helicopter or truck, so I don't have to load my pack down with an entire days' worth of gear or samples, but I still spend a lot of time bushwhacking in rough terrain. Sitting around at drill sites, the Terra 40 got smeared with grease, drilling fluid, and grout.

Landslide mapping in northern coastal BC

Working with a bear monitor in northern BC

The Terra 40 saw -30 degree C days in northern BC winter....

...and +40 degrees in a Mexican open pit mine

I stuffed a DSLR camera in it and strapped a tripod to the outside for photogrammetry surveys of natural rock slopes...

....and open pit mine slopes.

It got stashed in a helicopter basket and flown around some of the most beautiful terrain in the world.

During grad school and while working, my weekend hikes became less intense but required carrying additional gear for some new family members who joined in. :)

The Chief, near Squamish, BC

Eastern Washington state

Over the course of its travels, several of the small bits on the outside of the backpack eventually failed, but the main pouch remained solid until the end. When looking for a new one, I came to realize that my old pack has some key attributes that I can't live without and yet are very hard to find in a single pack:

- It's large enough to carry a full days' worth of field gear for remote wilderness work
- It's small enough (barely) to carry onto an airplane
- It has a large front pocket and brain for easy access to small pieces of gear, and lots of straps and loops on the outside to clip/tie things to
- It is made much more to be durable than lightweight.

The extra tough material on the bottom proved to be especially important after many years of being tossed down on rough ground. Even so, it was the threadbare state of the bottom of the pack that finally convinced me its days were over. Given all the pack has been through with me I'm pretty sad to part with it, but maybe now that this story is written down I can finally move on. :P Here are some parting photos:

The brain's zipper broke many years ago, and this is how I've closed it up ever since. Works great!

The elastic tighteners on the water bottle pockets never added much support and broke after a short amount of time, but the side straps were there to take over the job.

I loved the waistband pockets for carrying small rock samples, but the zippers froze in place (from rust and lack of use?) after awhile.

The bottom of the pack made it this far, but it was about to start leaking gear....

Hopefully my next pack will see another 12 years of exploring and working in beautiful places!