Gear

Nothing here is a recommendation. It is a list of what survived a couple of seasons of use and what quietly stopped coming along.

Stays in the pack

• A 28-litre pack. Big enough for a winter day, small enough that it cannot be overfilled.
• Two litres of water, in two bottles. One bladder means one failure point, and bladders fail at the least convenient moment.
• A paper map. Not out of romanticism — phone batteries die in the cold within a couple of hours.
• A foam sit pad. The single best weight-to-comfort ratio of anything listed here.

Stopped coming

• Trekking poles. Useful on the descent, an annoyance for the other six hours.
• A stove. Boiling water on a day walk turned out to be a hobby of its own, not a need.
• The heavier camera. Photographs taken with it were not better; there were simply fewer of them.

On boots

Every argument about footwear is really an argument about ground. On dry ridges anything with a stiff sole works. On wet limestone the tread pattern matters more than the brand, and on scree what matters is ankle height and nothing else. Buy for the ground you actually walk on, which is probably not the ground in the advertisement.