by Chris Shamati

Created on: October 05, 2009   Last Updated: October 06, 2009

Hiking and backpacking in the wilderness can be a fun way to explore nature and a chance to get away from the craziness of technology and the modern world of today. In order to plan for a trip away it is important that you bring along some essential gear.

First and foremost is something that you should bring whenever you venture into the outdoors, the 10 essentials. I'm not going to go into in depth as this link describes it in greater depth.

http://www.helium.com/items/1605796-10-essentials-fo r-backpacking

After making sure that you have your ten essentials the next order of business is to determine the length of your trip. Is it a one day hike in hike out, or is it a long week long ordeal in which you need to pack everything in? Based on what you are doing the items that you need to bring will vary. For the purpose of this article though, I will assume that this is a 4 day 3 night trip.

1) The Tent. Choosing a tent can be a difficult choice. First you have to determine if you will be sharing it with another person, then you have to see if you are going to divide the weight and finally you have to look at what type of conditions you will be sleeping in. For the most part a 3 season tent works for the majority of campers/ backpackers. A 3 season tent is light and offers quick and easy set up and take down, intended for moderate terrains a 3 season tent works well everywhere except the snow and ice. A 4 season tent is more specialized and is designed to withstand cold weather. As a result 4 season tents are heavier, feature thicker walls, and are more complex it set up and take down. Most outdoor stores offer a great selection of 3 season tents, a good weight to look for, for a 2 person 3 season tent is about 4lbs. If it's a rugged 4 season tent that you're after Cabelas (a great wilderness company) offers some of the best selections of 4 season tents online.

2) The Pack. So you've chosen your tent. Excellent. Now its time to choose the pack that's going to lug that tent up and down those mountain ranges. Backpacking packs come in two styles, internal and external frames. Internal frames hug closer to the body and offer greater mobility. A external frame pack doesn't hug to the body as close but offers more cubic space. Now it used to be that internal frame packs used to lack pockets on the outside while external held them in abundance, nowadays more and more internal frames are in fact offering pockets on the outside. In my opinion the one main difference between

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