Everything This Ultralight Backpacker Took on a 2,160-Mile Hike

I got me here some water.

This is like the best camera interview of all time.

I have everything I need.

You guys don't need to help me at all.

[dramatic music]

This is me hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Haha! Here we go!

Mile zero.

Oh, this is gonna be such an adventure!

I am Joe McConaughy,

and my trail name is Stringbean.

I hold the speed record for the Appalachian Trail

in the self-supported style.

I ran 2,160 miles

in 45 days, 12 hours, and 15 minutes.

So I was averaging just under 50 miles a day.

I ran the whole trail with this pack right here.

This is everything I carried on the Appalachian Trail.

[dramatic music]

[upbeat music]

This is a Pa'lante Joey Pack.

It's about 24 liters.

It was a pack prototype.

Lightweight backpacking was really catapulted in the 2000s,

where the whole sort of concept with ultralight backpacking

is to streamline everything

to make things as efficient

but also usable for what you're doing.

So something like this is great.

I'm trying to go three to five days

with about 25,

maybe up to 30 pounds of weight.

This backpack uses Gridstop,

which is a modern backpacking fabric.

It's a very thin, lightweight material.

It's water resistant, very abrasion resistant.

I wore this for the entire time of the AT.

You can see a little bit of damage down here.

So most backpacks have a frame,

which is either an internal or an external frame.

This is neither.

This does not have any kind of internal support.

So the lack of a frame

and these running style vest straps

make it a great option for a lightweight, fast packing bag.

My goal when doing the AT was never have

to take my pack off ever.

So, I had a great day

when this thing was on my back the entire time.

Currently, my pack weighs about 17 pounds.

So this is about two days worth of food,

maybe a day and a half worth of food.

[upbeat music]

These front pockets here,

these store about 600, 700 milliliter water bottles.

I have this filter on the water,

Sawyer filter,

so I don't have to actually stop.

It's honestly, you feel kind of like James Bond.

Like I literally would go up to a stream,

I'd be running,

and then I'd be like, That looks good,

fill it within a few seconds,

and then be back kind of fully hydrated

and ready to roll.

And I particularly like this Sawyer filter.

This is basically a microfiber filter

that filters things to 0.1 micron.

I like to use a mechanical filter

as opposed to a chemical filter

just because of its durability.

I like Dasani because they are lightweight.

The plastic is pretty thin.

Another common water bottle people use

is a smart water bottle.

Fresh stream mountain water is a delight,

particularly on very hot, humid days.

[upbeat music]

I also have small pockets up front.

I would usually put something small,

compact, easy to snack on.

These can store about 500 to 800 calories.

It's usually how much I'd put in them.

I'm gonna whip out a salami stick right now.

I would eat a salami stick while running.

Let's dive into my bag here.

I have a variety of snacks

that sort of comprise my holistic diet

that I have on trail.

Protein is probably the hardest thing to get on trail.

Bars, I found, is kinda the best way to do that.

I also have Pop-Tarts.

That was one of the snacks

that I would like save for special moments.

I am fine eating a lot of nuts.

I averaged about a pound of trail mix a day,

which is about 3000 calories,

on the ATs.

I had 13 resupply boxes,

where we had each box for each location.

We had a certain number of calories.

The most important thing for me on this

in terms of diet

is making sure I got enough calories.

I lost about 15 pounds on the AT.

So I packed, generally, 7 to 7,500 calories per day

when in reality, I was eating closer

to 9 or maybe 10,000 calories per day.

[upbeat music]

Every day, when I came into camp,

I take my bag,

and I wanted to see everything that I had

so I give it a good old shake.

And sometimes, things fall out.

There's my GoPro.

So my goal each day was to go as far as possible.

Usually, sunset was a pretty good time

to start wrapping things up.

I would try to find a spot

that was just convenient enough to sleep in,

where I could basically throw out all my stuff,

have a flat spot of ground to sleep on.

Ideally, I was close to water

so I could give myself a hiker shower,

which was basically splashing my crevices

with a little bit of water from a stream or something.

[water sloshing]

This is a Thermarest Z-pad.

It's a closed cell foam pad,

which means the foam itself

is providing the protection underneath you.

This is what I would sleep on every night.

I actually have, if you can see here,

I cut it and sort of modified it

so that it will fit to the contours of my backpack.

Most people don't know what a bivy is.

Bivy is originally comes, short for bivouac sack,

which is something that mountaineers would use.

So a bivy sack is just a lightweight tent

that's really a minimalist style

when you're looking to spend

the majority of your time in camp sleeping

or in your sleeping bag.

This bivy sack goes about the length of my body.

It's almost just like a mummy bag.

A lot of people will ask you if it is claustrophobic

and, in fact, yes, it is claustrophobic.

This is an Enlightened Equipment Quilt.

You can see it's very compressible.

Inside of this sleeping bag, essentially,

is filled with down,

which is what keeps you warm.

It is a quilt simply because it lacks a zipper.

It helps save weight.

When you're actually sleeping

and you put a down fabric on the ground,

you're removing a lot of the warmth properties

of that piece of equipment.

So, it makes sense to have a quilt

that just simply drapes over your body

rather than is zipped and tied entirely to your body.

Down functions through its fluff.

So that's where a quilt is great for.

It just removes some of the excess materials

that don't actually really do much for you

at the end of the day, to keep you warm.

I was extra cozy in my sleeping bag.

No, it's honestly a very comfortable system.

[Joe exhaling]

[Joe panting]

I got the poncho right here.

I would rarely set this up.

It's a poncho tarp,

a multi-functioning piece of equipment.

I would use this

whenever the rain was substantial enough to bother me,

and that would be enough to sort of cover me.

So this is what a southern thunderstorm looks like.

[rain pattering]

This is a DCF

or Dyneema Composite Fiber.

Decently abrasion resistant,

but very tear resistant fabric.

That is a very common ultralight fabric,

specifically for shelters.

[upbeat music]

This is my spot tracker.

A spot tracker is a GPS device.

In order to validate your record,

you need proof.

So every 30 minutes or so, or hour,

this would ping,

and if it could catch a satellite,

then it would ping information to that satellite

and it would be recorded.

Here we are! Halfway!

Let's go, Stringbean!

I used a Black Diamond Storm Headlamp.

I would definitely run at night

even through the Appalachian Trail.

Like I was kind of scared of running at night, to be honest.

It was intimidating.

I had a smartphone.

My phone was really useful

because I wanted to confirm with every resupply location

that they actually got the package

they were supposed to have.

I also needed to charge my GoPro

and I also needed to charge my spot tracker.

I was constantly juggling getting into town

and thinking about how much do I charge my charger,

other electronic devices,

and what is the right amount of charge

to be able to get from point A to point B.

[upbeat music]

My floss,

duct tape,

toothbrush,

toothpaste,

Vaseline, lip therapy,

needle and thread,

I had a backup safety pin,

and Neosporin.

Also, I had my ID and a credit card.

I literally got like a normal toothbrush,

and then I took a hatchet,

and just hatchet it off the end of it

to shorten it and to save a little extra weight.

That's what some people call gram counting

in ultralight backpacking,

where you take all the little things you can do

to minimize weight and remove them.

Another thing I used was some needle and thread.

I researched my pack.

It took me maybe five or six days

of slowly seeing this tear and break apart

before I finally decided it was worth taking

10 minutes, 15 minutes,

and I stitched this shoulder strap back into place.

And lastly, with a needle,

it is used for me to pop blisters.

So that's also why I have this safety pin here.

Pocketknife is great.

And it's nice to have a multi-tool on it.

I mostly just use the knife feature and the scissor feature.

This helped me cut guideline

or cut other twine that I needed.

It also helped me cut my thread.

I also used toilet paper.

The fun stuff, which is pooping in the woods,

is always like a hilarious topic

no matter who you are.

I use toilet paper on the AT.

Your goal is to leave no trace.

That's a basic backpacking principle,

and I certainly followed that while I was out there.

Well, I have gone to like a TP-less system

of using something called the backcountry bidet.

It's basically like washing yourself,

like washing your butt,

but just with the water that you have on hand.

This is the AT guide.

This is something that is sort of a staple and standard

for any thru hiker.

This is really nice because it provides a few select maps

for critical areas, what they offer,

how much they might cost,

and what other amenities are in a certain area.

So before actually going on the trail,

I ripped up all the important papers

out of this that I might need,

from section to section,

I packaged them up,

and put them into different resupply boxes,

so then when I got into town,

I'd have these immediately on hand

to be able to look at

and reference, if needed.

Thru-hiking's changed a lot

since I did in 2017.

There are apps, so there's something called FarOut.

It's a popular thru-hiking app,

and they have all of this data, essentially,

in a similar organized fashion,

all into your phone.

[upbeat music]

Let me show you some of my worn gear.

[upbeat music]

So I wanted to have different shoes

throughout the entire trail

that I could swap between

based on the different challenges that I would experience.

So I brought a few shoes to compare

since I don't have those original shoes

from years ago,

that are pretty similar models.

So the first shoe we have is the Brooks Divide.

This was closer to the Mazama.

I wore the Mazamas on areas like Pennsylvania,

which is also known, lovingly, as Rocksylvania.

Trail shoes are designed

to have a little bit more protection.

You're going over roots and rocks and technical terrain.

You need your foot to be able to adjust

'cause you're gonna land on things unexpectedly.

It also has lugs that provide extra traction and extra grip.

I'm wearing Injinji toe socks.

So they have little finger puppets for my toes.

These are compression socks or calf panties,

as one of my good friends refers to them.

As in what this does is help promote blood flow

and also protects your skin.

So this hat is just a lightweight running cap.

Protects you from the sun.

So this was, you know, something I wore every day.

This is a Smartwool shirt.

Wool is one of kind of the best fabrics you can use

as a backpacker.

Comfortable, lightweight.

I also have a Smartwool long sleeve,

which what I would use to supplement

in slightly colder temperatures.

To be fair, I use polyester most of the time I go running,

but wool does a better job at keeping the smell off.

The shorts I wore,

which these are also Smartwool shorts.

They have a Merino wool underwear liner.

So that was one of the things on the AT

that I had to deal with too, with some extreme chafing.

Shorts, almost always had

sort of an underwear liner to them.

And more recently, you've seen a lot of shorts

that have more of a tights liner to them.

To me, like having a liner is kind of non-negotiable.

I had gloves,

which these are just nice fingerless gloves.

The one I used on the AT,

I actually just bought garden gloves

from a dollar store down in Georgia.

I cut off the fingertips.

But they did a pretty good job.

So these are Black Diamond Carbon-Z Trekking Poles.

They're called Z-Poles because they fold up,

they're compact,

they're very lightweight.

I was using them pretty much the entire time.

I would either have them out in front of me

and just use them sort of as standard hiking poles,

or whenever I was running,

I'd kind of throw them up,

grasp them by the middle,

and just run with them by my side.

They're also great when you come across wildlife.

So I'd tack on them,

and it makes a good kind of jarring noise.

So this is pretty similar to the watch that I had on the AT,

which was a Timex Ironman.

A very simple start-go type watch.

Money mattered, but also,

the charging factor of a smartwatch is really tough.

So I've since upgraded to a smartwatch.

This is a Coros Vertix 2,

and this is the watch that I use

on all of my long expeditioning-type trips.

It is pretty primo with battery life,

and to me, that's the big sell.

So this will get you a hundred plus hours.

It can tell you the elevation gain and loss.

It can tell you the grade of the trail that you're going on.

So, technology is crazy compared to when I did the AT,

and that was in 2017.

When I was in the Whites,

this was one of the lowest points on my trip.

It looks skinny.

I dropped about 3,000 feet of vertical gain

and about three miles off in the wrong direction.

I'm almost too big.

[Joe grunts]

A watch like this would tell you that

you've just dropped a crap ton of elevation

when in reality,

the trail was supposed to follow a ridge line,

and I maybe was supposed to lose 300 or 400 feet.

I realized that if I really wanted to get the record,

I was basically gonna have to go

through the night on the very last day

and put over a hundred miles in one consecutive push

without sleeping.

Right about a hundred miles out.

And [exhales] I'm gonna pump myself up.

[dramatic music]

Who-hoo!

I feel very fortunate to have done the Appalachian Trail

when I was 26.

And I sort of carried that ideology on as an athlete.

So things that I really love

are long, multi-day races and efforts.

I've done the Long Trail,

the Arizona Trail,

and the John Muir Trail.

On top of that, I also still love pushing the envelope

with backpacking and fast packing.

So I work as a backpacking guide.

Twice a year, I'll go out and basically connect

high mountain traverses and routes with clients.

So this is everything I carried in the Appalachian Trail.

[dramatic music]