Personally I think walkers should be considering their pack weights relative to their body weight, rather than straight pack weight. A 20kg pack may be easy for a 6' 80kg person to carry, but could cause a lot of grief to someone weighing 50kg. With this in mind here are my criteria:
- 25% or less of body weight is ideal.
- 33% of body weight is a maximum for normal walking, and can be considered the limit of comfort for off track work.
- 33%-50% can be carried on vehicle tracks and good walking tracks if required.
- Over 50% sucks in general, and is what I consider to be stupidly heavy.
Having carried packs with weights in all four of the above ranges, a lighter pack is definitely more enjoyable. That said, there is a certain satisfaction in carting a ridiculously heavy load to the disbelief of others
but I asked because when I was a kid I was in scouts and often was camping and bushwalking. There was no such thing as lightweight, this is what you had to take and you took it. I remember my pack was simple, not with all the bells and whistles of todays with a rudimentary harness, if that's what you called it and you just wore it. Tents were nothing like todays and weight of a tent was easily 4kg or over. You took billy pots hung somewhere outside of the pac and therm-a-rest mats, what were they. Now that said I guess we only camped cold a few time, remember cracking ice jumping in water in the Blue Mountains, never moved so fast in all my life to find a camp fire but that was way back in the 70's early 80's.
