Every year as July burns away and August blazes in, as the low country begins to burnish to gold and brown, it is time to go to the mountains. And so, my husband, Rob, and I are gathering our gear and mulling over maps, set to carry on the tradition of an annual backpacking pilgrimage into the Wind Rivers that my parents started in the 1970s.

The trips are too hard and too far for young children, and so my brother and I didn’t join them until we were ten or so. But the cycle of preparation has been part of my life since I was born, the weeks of planning routes and dehydrating food and winnowing down clothing and cookware leading up to the trip. And this process has me thinking — one of the things I love about backpacking is the minimalism and utility it demands. 

Sometimes (frequently), I wish I could graft the simplicity of backpacking onto my daily life. But I’ve never really figured out the balance. We do need to return calls and emails and maintain our homes, and, in polite society, we should probably own more than two pairs of underwear and wash our clothes before the “truly filthy” stage. So, what hacks or tidbits of wisdom do translate beyond the backcountry? 

Maybe this: the simplicity of backpacking is earned through necessity.  When you carry everything you need on your back, you are forced to make some hard choices about what to take and what to leave. It is not as if I don’t make decisions about what to wear or what to eat or what cookware to take — it is that I make those choices once, in advance, and very deliberately. Therefore, if I want to incorporate some of the minimalism of backpacking into my daily life, I also need to incorporate the precision and foresight required of such an undertaking. This is of course easier said than done, but it is a practice I believe I’ll try. But before I clean out my closet or start making intentional meal plans at the beginning of each week, you’ll have to excuse me — I have to get to the mountains, where I’ll be extremely busy not being busy.