No, You Don’t Need a Giant Knife to Go Backpacking

They had been the primary hikers we’d seen all day, and so they had been loaded up. The pair—a father and son, they advised us—had been heading up into the hills above Curecanti Nationwide Recreation Space in Colorado for a weekend. I might have believed they had been outfitted for per week: Every of them hefted what will need to have been 80-liter packs, absolutely swollen with gear, with a tent strapped between the toplid and physique of the dad’s pack. And dangling from their belts, every carried a four-inch lengthy Buck knife in a sheath.

Knives have an outsize place within the creativeness of the American open air. They’re arguably the best-known of the basic Ten Necessities, and studying to make use of one was one of many first issues Boy Scouts of my era, even washouts like me, needed to be taught. Survival colleges promise to show college students to outlive with a bushcraft knife and nothing else. On many trails, it’s not unusual to come across individuals with Davy Crockett-style blades strapped to their hips. However whereas massive, fixed-blade knives could also be a potent image of wilderness survival, they’re additionally completely ineffective for hikers.

Don’t get me flawed: There are actually some issues {that a} knife excels at. It might minimize wire for subject repairs, shave tinder, and sharpen a stick to make use of as a stake when certainly one of yours breaks. However all of these duties have one factor in frequent: You are able to do them with a tiny blade. For the previous decade, I’ve carried the identical knife with me on virtually each journey: a Kershaw Chive, a 1.9-inch high-carbon metal pocket knife that weighs in at 1.7 ounces and folds as much as the dimensions of my thumb. Thus far, it’s excelled at every little thing I’ve wanted it to.

Sure, there are issues I’ve by no means tried with that tiny knife. I’ve by no means constructed a lean-to, or lashed it to the tip of a pole to spearfish. I don’t know if I may use it to pores and skin a deer, and I’m sure I couldn’t baton a log with it. (The one time, the truth is, I’ve ever wished I had a much bigger blade: automobile tenting alongside Alberta’s Icefield Parkway, the place I had to determine tips on how to cut up the wooden Parks Canada offered with out one.) However that’s the purpose: throughout many years of screw-ups, pop-up storms, and flawed turns, I’ve by no means wanted to do any of these issues.

In her introductory column for Backpacker in 2023, wilderness survival teacher Jessie Krebs drew a distinction between survival, bushcraft, and ancestral residing abilities. The latter two are about growing the talents essential to stay indefinitely within the backwoods—looking, crafting, and the like. A full-tang bushcraft knife, sufficiently big to work massive items of wooden or cut up kindling, might be very helpful for that. In distinction, she wrote, survival is “a stopgap to maintain somebody alive till they will return house.” Which of these three approaches applies to you informs which abilities it’s best to deal with: Misplaced hikers don’t want to have the ability to make their very own rope, however realizing tips on how to sign for assistance is a should.

It additionally informs what instruments you want, and there’s not a job {that a} large-blade knife excels at {that a} hiker couldn’t accomplish higher with one thing else. When the rain is pounding and the wind is howling, it’s higher to have introduced a shelter than to construct one. Likewise, after I’m misplaced and hungry, I’d slightly discover my meals in my pack than squished flat underneath a deadfall entice, coated in fur and stuffed with squirrel shit. Each information story about an individual who survived by roasting snakes over a fireplace outdoors their stick-and-leaf hut can be a narrative about somebody who screwed up a lot earlier within the planning levels, after they may have left these six further ounces of steel at house and introduced a private locator beacon, or 2,000 extra energy, or perhaps a map.

Sure, it’s completely doable to carry each a giant knife and all different requirements. However too usually, we let the gear we don’t want distract us from the gear we do. For an excessive instance, see the Arizona hiker who hit a desert path in 2018 with two massive knives and half the water he wanted; by the point rescuers picked him up, he was going into kidney failure.

I’ll throw one bone to the oversized-knife crowd: I just like the angle that their instruments suggest. We stay in a world the place our iPhones can contact search and rescue from the deep backcountry on the push of a button. That’s a lifesaving know-how, and unambiguously a very good factor. However the simpler it will get to name within the cavalry, the much less of an incentive trendy hikers might really feel like they need to know tips on how to handle themselves. Self-sufficiency, within the woods or in any other case, won’t ever cease being cool.

However survival is as a lot a matter of ability as it’s of bringing the appropriate instruments, and data doesn’t weigh something. So commerce that massive blade for one thing smaller, and simply ensure you know tips on how to use it.

Mounted Blades for Backpackers

Seeking to combine only a smidge of bushcraft into your backpacking journey? There are many sturdy fixed-blade knives which are small and light-weight sufficient for a weight-conscious backpacker to hold. That includes a 2-inch blade and weighing in at 1.6 ounces with its sheath, the Kershaw Brace is a full-tang, stainless-steel knife that’s a number of grams lighter than the Chive, although much less compact.