I’m Ben Zaporozan, and I have been working in Higher Education publishing at Pearson Education Canada in Toronto for the past thirteen years. You can see my professional learning path on LinkedIn, where you will find an interest in innovation, digital content development, authoring tool evaluation, end-to-end uses and abuses of learning applications, and if you look deeper you’ll find a nod to volunteering at a foodbank and not-for-profit housing. My main areas of interest are with adaptive learning technologies, learning analytics, serious games, and how we might use data to improve content and knowledge retention. I’ve been paperless in the workplace since 2014, so there is little of interest in a formerly regularly-used bag (HP Probook laptop, power cord, Samsung Galaxy S8 phone). I’ve been working at home since March 2020 and have no use for that bag. Had it not been company property, I would have given it away ages ago.

The bags that are important to me are the ones that help me to leave the creation and consumption of web-based things far behind me, at least for a short while. I spend nearly all of my vacation time canoeing and hiking in the backwoods of Ontario. In more normal times, I might enjoy 25-30 nights a year in the woods. The large bag in focus today is the Gossamer Gear Gorilla 50L lightweight backpack, a mere 865g, followed by a series of smaller, no-less important sacs that I carry on long-distance solo hikes. Ignore the books about ancient Greek art and archaeology in the background!

Everything shown and everything hidden is a necessary item on a solo backpacking trip. I’ve spent the past 15 years honing down the number, bulk, and weight of items so that I can hike, eat, and sleep comfortably, confidently, and safely.

Navigation & Foot Care:

1. Map and compass.
2. Asics trail runners, keep it light.
3. First Aid Kit, extra Moleskin for blister prevention.

Kitchen & Tools:

1. White Ursack for food storage, weaved with Kevlar fiber to prevent small and large critters from stealing precious calories, easy to see hanging in a tree when it’s dark.
2. Collapsible silicone cup for hot drinks.
3. Alpine Start micro-ground coffee. It’s important!
4. Long titanium spoon. Who needs a fork?
5. Plant-based food, all vegan, 3500-4000 calories per day. Normally all organic and freshly dehydrated at home, but Happy Yak Moroccan Feast with lentils, couscous, raisins, apricots, and roasted almonds is shown.
6. Water bottle, Nalgene, 1L.
7. Sawyer Squeeze waster filter with 3 water bags (they break).
8. MSR Windburner canister stove with 1L pot, Snowpeak fuel and small lighter inside.
9. Leatherman Juice S2 multitool with knife, pliers, and scissors for cutting medical tape.
10. Luci light collapsible, waterproof, floating, solar-powered wonder.

Shelter & Sleeping:

1. Hammock, Warbonnet Blackbird XLC with bug net.
2. Tarp, made from ultralight Dyneema Composite Fiber.
3. MSR Groundhog tent pegs, 4 small, 2 very small
4. Top quilt (like a sleeping bag, but less fabric).

Clothes:

1. Very small blue bag. You’re already wearing clothes.
2. 1 pair of socks and underwear, 1 long-sleeve shirt, no extra pants
3. Patagonia nano puff hoodie
4. Outdoor Research rain jacket with venting

Comfort Item:

1. Helinox Chair One. At nearly 900g it is heavy and inessential, but it’s nicer than sitting on a thin foam pad without back support on a wet surface at the end of a long day.

There could be a phone and small battery charger for shorter trips, but space and weight are precious things and the devices do not always make the cut. That means no pictures, no podcasts, and no Kindle ebooks. Save them for return drive home! Or, maybe this is part of the lie that we surround ourselves with when we create our own mythology.

Text Technologies:

Language and communication and literacies are abundant in the research and selection process for these items. When in need of new hiking shoes, lightweight tent pegs, or a canister stove that can boil a litre of water quickly in the rain and wind, I start with a search on the Outdoor Gear Lab web site. I know that I can trust this site for reliable information because it consistently applies a scientific approach to gear reviews, offering both quantitative and qualitative written elements and accompanied by images for all phases of the research. Credibility of the authors is vetted by the reviewing community. Years of hands-on experience with competitive products is a requirement, while all data measured and analyzed must be tracked and reported accurately and in a consistent and web-accessible format to support the use of assistive technologies. For interest, I entered some text from the site into a Readable Test Tool for accessibility, and the test result was that the average reading grade level is grade 10, easily understood by 15-16 year olds.

When I narrow down a choice to one or two good options, I like to find video reviews on YouTube and comments/photos on the Hammock Forums web site to take advantage of crowdsourced How-To information. What do others claim about a tool’s use, durability, waterproofness, or applicability for sleeping in a hammock versus a tent? This is an important one, since I left the ground for the trees in a reverse evolutionary move many years ago. Twenty-five years ago, this pack would have been heavy, bright orange with a back-breaking aluminum frame, filled with a two-person tent, bulky and heavy sleeping bag, bulky and uncomfortable sleeping pad, a large knife, foods with inefficient caloric density, heavy hiking boots, bulky jacket. Packability and weight are key decision-making factors for those of us who count the weight on our backs in grams. Every reduction in size and weight has a high cost associated with the main items, pack, sleep system, jackets. It can take years of research, trial and error, failures, a digital scale, food dehydrator, spreadsheet for tracking measurements, and close attention to personal finances to get the system dialed in.

How do I imagine an archaeologist aiming to understand this period when viewing the contents of the bag? One the one hand it looks like someone travelling light, maybe trying to get away from something quickly, but on the other hand there are no tools or weapons or camouflage clothing to suggest anything like a government-avoiding prepper with a bug-out bag suggested by similar find sites of the period. Compared to the heavy, organic, rotten fabrics of early hiking pioneers, this bag and everything in it is made from synthetic, durable, ageless materials. The textiles were developed in an era with advanced technologies and when sustainability was balanced with the use of recycled materials, as is the case with the Patagonia jacket made from recycled water bottles. With so few items considered comforts, I wonder if the study would be able to uncover the fact that every item was carefully crafted to make living in nature a joyful experience.