Weighing Everything for John Muir Trail

Over the past few month or so, my buddies and I have had quite an email flurry going about what to bring for our speedy eight day through-hike of the John Muir Trail. In order for us to efficiently make it through each 25+ mile day til the end, outside of our own training, it comes down to carry weight. A standard backpacker’s rule of thumb is to not carry more than 25% of your body weight on your back. That’s 35-40 pounds for most of us (I’m towards the lower end of the range). But that’s for a more leisurely backpacking adventure. We’ve got to cover ground at a pretty good pace so we’re aiming for around 20%, fully loaded with 4 days worth of food (we will resupply half way). This may prove to be a tough challenge for me as a lot of gear isn’t proportionally lighter. To keep my base pack weight as low as possible, I’ve been doing all sorts of research to see where I can shave weight. Of course in order to weigh my stuff, I need a scale. It could be suffice to jump on a bathroom scale with my pack and subtract my body weight. The problem is determining the stuff I own or thinking about bringing may just be too heavy. Each item needs to be weighed if I’m truly going to determine where I can be saving weight and making my pack as light as possible. Thus, I’ve broken down and purchased a scale specifically to weigh everything individually. To do this, I wanted a digital scale that would be accurate to 1 gram. I found a lot of scales out there that were not only accurate but surprisingly cheap.

Today after much research I decided I couldn’t weight (pun intend) any longer to get this critical part my JMT planning going and bought the MyWeigh KD-7000 scale, a known standard for quality midsize scales used by professionals and hobbyists alike. While I almost settled on a much cheaper scale, it was on sale at Amazon.com for under $40 (MSRP $99) and I could justify the extra cost as I will also find use for it in the kitchen, for shipping, and among other things weighing my bike parts – all for which the KD-7000 is aptly designed. It is accurate to 1 gram and has a capacity to 7000 grams (15 lbs). If you want a fancier one, the KD 8000 is the newer version which has baker’s math/percentage features with a higher weight capacity of 8000 grams.

I expect my scale to arrive sometime next week. Look for a follow up on the scale and the weigh in fun!

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