Base weight, and cutting weight without losing the trip
Base weight is the number the hiking world argues about, and most of the argument is noise. The useful part is small: four items decide almost all of it, and cutting the wrong one costs you a night rather than a kilogram.
What base weight actually is
Base weight is everything in and on your pack, including the pack itself, minus the things you consume: food, water and fuel. Nothing else is excluded. The tent is in it. So are the sleeping bag, the pad, the stove, the spare socks, the book, the stuff sacks and the first aid kit.
It is defined that way for a reason. Consumables scale with the length of the trip and with how far apart the water is, so including them makes two trips impossible to compare. Base weight is the part of the load that is a property of your kit rather than your route, which makes it the only number that says anything about your choices.
- Base weight: the pack and everything in it, minus food, water and fuel.
- Consumables: food, water at 1 kg per litre, and fuel. This is what changes day to day.
- Total pack weight: base plus consumables. This is what you actually lift on day one.
- Skin-out weight: total pack weight plus everything you are wearing and carrying in your hands.
Why the number is argued over
The arguing happens at the boundary. Worn weight is conventionally left out, so the same jacket counts for nothing if you wear it out of the tent and several hundred grams if you pack it. Trekking poles in your hands are free. A camera round your neck is free. That is a real hole, and it is why quoted base weights on forums and product pages are not always comparing the same thing.
The thresholds people quote are conventions rather than standards: a base weight under about 4.5 kg is usually called ultralight and under about 9 kg lightweight, and no body anywhere defines either. Treat them as vocabulary, not targets. The number that matters is yours, measured the same way every time, so that a change to your kit shows up honestly.
Where the weight actually is
The big four are the argument. Everything else on your list is grams; these are kilograms. The spans below are the real ones from the 313 items in this catalogue, and they are wide enough that four product choices decide the character of your load before a single item of clothing is packed.
| Item | Lightest here | Median | Heaviest here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Backpack | 500 g | 1,400 g | 3,000 g |
| Tent | 540 g | 1,740 g | 4,200 g |
| Sleeping bag | 400 g | 1,000 g | 2,900 g |
| Sleeping pad | 60 g | 550 g | 1,100 g |
| All four together | 1,500 g | 4,690 g | 11,200 g |
Nine point seven kilograms of swing, in four decisions. That is the honest argument for caring about weight, and a far better one than any number of grams saved on cutlery. It is also why weight is the axis the gear browser sorts on in every pool: within a slot, it is what separates otherwise similar products. It does not follow that you should buy the left-hand column — read the next section before you do anything with this table.
What the swing does not tell you
The 1,500 g corner of this catalogue is not a lighter version of the 11,200 g corner. It is a different trip. The 400 g bag sits at the warm end of a pool whose ISO 23537 comfort ratings run from +15 °C down to −28 °C. The 60 g pad is closed-cell foam, near the bottom of an ASTM F3340 R-value range that reaches 8.5. The 540 g tent is a minimal shelter, in a pool whose flysheets run from 1,200 mm to 5,000 mm of hydrostatic head. Put those three together and you have an excellent June kit and a genuinely dangerous February one.
So a good part of that 9.7 kg is not excess. It is warmth, waterproofing and the ability to sleep through weather. Weight cut in the wrong place is not a lighter pack, it is a shorter season. Cold from underneath is the classic way this goes wrong because it is the one people do not see coming — sleeping pad R-values explains why the pad matters more than its weight suggests, and sleeping bag temperature ratings explains what a comfort rating does and does not promise. Neither number is a survival guarantee.
There is a second limit, and it is in the pack. Manufacturers state a comfortable maximum load, and across the 80 packs here it runs from 10 kg to 30 kg. That figure tracks the frame and the hip belt, so the lightest packs sit at the low end: a 500 g frameless pack is not a 3,000 g expedition pack that somebody made lighter. Cut pack weight past what the load needs and the weight does not disappear, it moves onto your shoulders. Packing a backpack covers what that feels like and how to delay it.
A method for weighing and deciding
Lists of things to throw away are useless, because no two people carry the same kit for the same reasons. A method is not useless. This one takes an evening once, then a few minutes after each trip.
Get a scale that reads in grams
A kitchen scale covers every item you own except the loaded pack; a cheap luggage scale handles that. Estimates are worthless: people are consistently wrong about small dense items, and wrong in the direction that flatters them.
Weigh every item once, and write it down
A spreadsheet, a notes file, anything you can sort. One line per item in grams, including the stuff sack it lives in and the pack itself. This is the only tedious step, and you never repeat it — you only edit lines.
Sort heaviest first and look at the top ten
The big four will be near the top, and the top of the list is where any real change lives. Below the tenth line is a rounding error you can spend a whole evening on without changing your day.
After the trip, mark every line
Used daily, used once, never came out of the pack. Do it the evening you unpack, while you still remember. Three trips of this and the pattern stops being a matter of opinion.
Cut in order: unused, duplicated, then the big four
Things that never came out go first and cost nothing. Duplicates go second — two knives, three lighters, a power bank for a phone you did not use. Only then consider replacing a big-four item, and only where the replacement does the same job in the conditions you actually walk in.
Price every swap per 100 g saved
Packs here run €60 to €500, tents €130 to €1,250, bags €35 to €1,150 and pads €30 to €280, so a lighter version of something is rarely a small purchase. Dividing the price difference by the grams saved turns a vague upgrade into a comparable number, and it usually shows one slot to be far better value than the rest. How much to spend goes further into where the money earns its keep.
Re-weigh, then leave it alone for a season
Change a few things and walk on them. Kit decisions made in a room are guesses; the trip is the test, and the marking step is how you read the result.
The cheapest kilograms
The cheapest kilogram to lose is almost always the one you were carrying out of habit rather than out of a decision. It costs nothing, it needs no purchase, and it is sitting in the top ten lines of your list looking like a necessity because it has always been there.
- Water you carried past a stream. One litre is one kilogram exactly, so three litres carried across a valley with a reliable source in it is the easiest kilogram anyone ever puts down. It is also the cut with the worst failure mode, so plan it on the map first: this is a planning decision, not an optimistic one.
- Stuff sacks. A full set is real weight, and most of them exist to organise a pack that would pack better without them. The sleeping bag dry bag stays.
- Clothing packed for a version of the trip that is not happening. One set for sleeping, one insulating layer, one waterproof. The third t-shirt has never saved anybody.
- Duplicated tools, batteries and electronics, and the charger for the device you left at home.
- Packaging: food out of boxes and into bags, a decanted quantity of fuel rather than a full canister, and the paper manual that came with the stove.
Once the habit weight has gone, buying weight out of the big four is the only route left, and it is the expensive one. If that is where you are, start from the slot with the worst grams per euro on your own list rather than from whichever item annoys you most.
Prepared answers that start from a light kit rather than a cheap one:
Questions readers ask
- What base weight should I be aiming for?
- There is no correct figure, and the commonly quoted thresholds — roughly 4.5 kg for ultralight and 9 kg for lightweight — are conventions rather than standards. Aim instead for a base weight that is honest, measured the same way every time, and matched to the coldest night and worst weather on your route.
- Does the pack itself count towards base weight?
- Yes. Base weight excludes only food, water and fuel, so the pack and everything in or strapped to it counts. That matters, because the pack is one of the big four and spans 500 g to 3,000 g in this catalogue.
- Is it worth buying a lighter tent or a lighter sleeping bag first?
- Work it out rather than guessing: weigh both, price the realistic replacement for each, and divide the price by the grams saved. The tent has the widest span here at 540 g to 4,200 g, so it is often the biggest single saving, but the bag is where you have least room to cut without losing warmth.
- Can I just carry less water?
- Only where the map says you can. Water is exactly 1 kg per litre, so it is the most efficient weight to shed, and it is also the one where being wrong has real consequences. Plan refills from the route, carry between sources rather than across them, and keep a margin on hot days and exposed ground.