Your pack can make a hunt easier or spend several days reminding you that you made some questionable decisions at home.
Pack too much, and you carry the consequences up every hill. Pack too little, and the things you decided you could probably live without will almost certainly become extremely important.
Getting it right takes more thought than working through a generic equipment list.
Where you are hunting, how long you will be out, and what conditions you expect should all influence what goes in. Before you next hunt, watch out for these five packing mistakes:
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Bringing Too Many Clothes
Extra clothing feels sensible when you are packing at home.
It feels less sensible when you have carried three shirts and two spare pairs of pants for miles without touching them.
Choose layers that can work together across different temperatures instead.
You will cover more conditions with fewer pieces and save valuable pack space. Bring enough to stay warm and dry, but remember that a hunting trip does not require a fresh outfit for every morning.
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Packing Gear You Have Never Used
Opening morning is a terrible time to discover your new headlamp has confusing controls or doesn’t work at all.
Use important gear before it goes into your pack.
Set up the tent, refill your ammunition, adjust the pack, fire up the stove, and always wear the boots. New equipment may be excellent, but you want to know that before the hunt.
Leave the exciting first-time unboxing experience at home where the instruction manual still lives.
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Treating Your Pack Like One Big Storage Bag
Not everything you bring needs to live in the same place.
A useful way to organize equipment with a tiered approach is to separate gear by importance and how close you need to keep it.
Essential items stay on you, gear needed for a stalk comes with you, and camp equipment stays behind. That way, dropping your main pack does not also mean walking away from everything you might actually need.
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Not Testing the Fully Loaded Pack
Your pack may feel perfectly comfortable when it is empty.
That tells you very little about how it will feel after several hours with everything inside. Load it exactly as you plan to hunt with it, and take it for a decent walk.
The idea is to pay attention to balance, pressure points, and anything that shifts around.
Finding out that your packing setup does not work is useful information. Finding it out many miles from the truck is not.
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Forgetting To Check Your Consumables
Some gear only works while you still have enough of what keeps it running.
Check fuel, batteries, water treatment supplies, food, and anything else that gets used up before you leave.
Do not assume there is enough left because there was some after your last trip. Work out what the hunt requires and pack accordingly.
A perfectly good stove is not overly impressive when the fuel canister you confidently packed has enough left in it to boil approximately half a mug of water.
In Conclusion
Most packing mistakes are obvious eventually.
The trick is discovering them while you are still standing at home. Give yourself time to test your setup, remove what does not deserve the weight, and check the things you are relying on.
Once the hunt begins, there will be plenty of other decisions to make.
Whether you packed four shirts for no apparent reason should not need to be one of them.
