Field Note 004 — Own a System, Not a Collection

There is a difference between owning camping gear and having a camp.

It's remarkably easy to accumulate gear. Walk through any outdoor store, spend enough time on the Youtubes, or make the mistake of searching for camping equipment online and suddenly everything seems like something you need. A new stove. Another knife. A better chair. A titanium version of the thing you already own. Before long you've got a garage full of perfectly good equipment and somehow still spend two hours looking for shit every time you want to leave.

I've certainly accumulated my share over the years.

What I've eventually learned, though, is that individual pieces of gear matter a whole lot less than the system they become part of.

Own a system, not a collection.

That idea has become one of the foundations of Weekend Route, but it wasn't something I sat down and invented one afternoon. It came from years of getting outside, trying things, changing things, buying things that worked, buying things that didn't, and slowly figuring out what actually deserved to come along.

A piece of gear earns its place through use, not the name stamped on the side of it.

I own expensive gear that I love. I own cheap gear that has absolutely no business surviving as long as it has. I've bought things expecting them to be fantastic only to discover that they didn't work for me at all, and I've bought inexpensive things on a whim that somehow became permanent residents of my kit.

Price doesn't determine usefulness. Neither does a brand name.

Use is earned and found.

Something can be incredibly well made and still be completely wrong for the way you camp. Someone else's perfect setup may drive you absolutely insane. That's okay. There isn't some sacred list of equipment that transforms a pile of camping gear into the Correct Outdoor System™.

You have to find your own niche.

For me, that means being able to travel relatively light while remaining comfortable and prepared. I don't want to spend half a day loading a vehicle every time the lady and I decide to disappear for a weekend. I also don't want to arrive somewhere and discover that the one stupid little thing I need is sitting at home.

So much of my gear lives ready.

Boxes have jobs. Backpacks have jobs. Certain equipment stays strapped together or stored with the things it's normally used with. Instead of starting every trip with an empty vehicle and a garage full of decisions, I can grab the appropriate pieces of an already functioning system and go.

That doesn't mean there needs to be one system, either.

A weekend truck-camping trip doesn't require the same equipment as a hike. A day on the water isn't a three-night camp. Sometimes you're cooking beside the vehicle; sometimes everything you need has to ride on your back.

Having multiple setups isn't necessarily needless duplication. Modularity is useful.

Think of the pieces as building blocks. A core system handles the things you almost always need, while smaller systems can be added or removed depending on what you're actually doing. Camp kitchen. Sleep system. Day pack. Water gear. Whatever makes sense for you.

The important part is that those pieces already know how to work together.

And you're probably going to get some of it wrong.

Good.

Try something.

Let it fail.

I've purchased gear I thought would become indispensable that eventually got left home. I've changed the way things are packed because the original arrangement made sense sitting in the garage and absolutely sucked once I was actually outside. I've replaced things. Removed things. Added them back. Sometimes the only way to discover whether something belongs in your system is to actually use the damn thing.

Failure is information.

That's one of the reasons I don't particularly like the idea that spending more money automatically solves the problem. Expensive doesn't always mean good, and cheap doesn't always mean bad. More importantly, good doesn't necessarily mean good for you.

The best piece of gear is the one that reliably does the job you need it to do.

That's it.

If a twenty-dollar piece of equipment has survived years of abuse and you know exactly what to expect from it, replacing it with the two-hundred-dollar version because the internet says it's better may accomplish nothing except making you two hundred dollars poorer.

Likewise, sometimes spending the money gets you exactly what your system was missing.

The point isn't cheap gear.

The point isn't expensive gear.

The point is useful gear.

Over time, a good system should almost become boring. You stop wondering where things are. You stop rebuilding your camp from scratch every Friday afternoon. You know which box to grab. You know what's in the backpack. You know which pieces work together, what needs replenishing when you get home, and what can stay behind for this particular trip.

The equipment slowly stops demanding your attention.

And that's when you've got it right.

Because despite spending an awful lot of time talking about equipment here at Weekend Route, the gear isn't actually the point.

The campsite is.

The trail is.

The lake is.

It's that moment when someone says, “Want to get out of here this weekend?” and instead of immediately thinking about the seventeen things you need to find, charge, pack, buy, and strap to the truck, you can simply say:

Yeah.

When you've built systems around what actually works for you, you spend less time thinking about your gear and more time using it.

That's the whole damn idea.

Buy less. Go more.

— Dane Justus
Founder, Weekend Route

Building a system of your own? Explore the [Weekend Route Camp Organization collection →]