That's essentially the advice here, get started instead of getting stuck researching and preparing.
I think preparing your mindset for setbacks and being open minded to learning from them is more practical than being overly prepared. Since you are new, you won't be able to account for all possible misery. Chalk off the easy preparation first then get out the door.
That's independent of the mindset your talking about. A bit of preparation can go a long way. You'll always learn, but you don't have to experience the worst of experiences to do so.
Thats why people tell you not to hike in jeans, you don't need 'special' pants, just 'not jeans (or any other pants made from similar wet-trapping materials)'.
That said, definitely some situations I'd have preferred not to have jeans
So if you were really that concerned, you’d be wearing hiking pants everywhere, even when not hiking.
It doesn't even have to be that cold to die of hypothermia. Just cold enough that your body can't maintain above 82°F. If immobile, like due to injury, that can happen at 50°F. Quite possible in the mountains, esp with windchill.
Sure, there are a lot of ifs in that scenario. But it does happen. And it is usually easy enough to buy polypro pants.
Your example actually makes his point almost exactly. The 7 day thru hike is akin to when hiring a data engineering team and investing super heavily makes sense, the day hike is when you’re chatting with users and figuring out the domain. The “wrong” tools are less consequential at the start and when the stakes are lower.
They are roughly equal in absolute terms, say 0.000001% and 0.00001%, but not in relative terms (10x). These are made-up numbers, but I think they convey the idea behind the numbers accurately.
The reason for the wide disparity is not really about the situation. Our ancestors spent every day of their lives walking miles on rough unpaved trails in the wilderness. It's about experience. Most people, even fairly avid hikers, simply don't spent anywhere near as much time hiking as they spend doing other things.
Inexperience radically increases risk. Clear evidence for this is that every single high stakes profession places an extreme emphasis on training and practice.
If you're doing an activity that you aren't an expert at, it behooves you to increase your level of caution to compensate. If that activity happens to take place in a setting where consequences are more dire (in the wilderness, far from access to healthcare), then increase your level of caution to compensate for that too.
> So if you were really that concerned, you’d be wearing hiking pants everywhere, even when not hiking.
I mean, they do appear to be a Seattleite, so that wouldn't exactly be unusual around here...
I had a pair. I wish I knew how to identify them because searching for athleisure jeans is turning up traditional jeans as well, including slim fit which would be worse. Maybe non-denim jeans.
Edit: I think the brand was Prana. Maybe they were denim, but "performance denim". Is all denim unwieldly in extreme situations? My jeans like this felt different, to where I might like them significantly more or significantly less based on what sort of pants I felt like wearing on a given day. They seemed a lot more like pants and less like jeans. https://www.prana.com/men/bottoms/denim.html?srsltid=AfmBOoq...
It is, however, possible to coat the fibres with something to make them not do this, perhaps that's what the 'performance denim' did.
Basically, if you have a chance to be stuck far from indoors with soaked clothes, you want them to be made of a material that doesn't hold water as cotton and wool do, it's fairly easy to find nylon, acrylic or polyester pants.
Want to start going to the gym? Do it in jeans until they're too uncomfortable, then buy something that helps you keep the momentum going.
How about running? Yep, jeans.
Swimming? Maybe not honestly.
Climbing/bouldering? Yep, although you might be looking for an alternative quickly.
That said, appropriate gym wear is readily available at Wal-Mart. T-shirts, sweats, cotton athletic shorts. Ladies are going to want a sports bra, and may wish for leggings which my wife picks up for $5 a pair at Old Navy all the time.
I hiked in jeans or shorts until I was about 50. Today, I wear hiking pants instead of jeans for everyday life. The benefits are noticeable. They last a lot longer, don't take stains as easily (bike chain gunk), and being quick drying means I don't have to worry as much about getting wet when I'm out.
Don't go on a long dangerous hike as the first thing you ever do outdoors.
I have had it happen before on a day trip in a very humid climate and it was awful. That doesn't mean I don't ever wear jeans.
> if you sweat, because it wicks
> moisture and breathes.
Cotton is the antithesis of wicking - it holds moisture and chills the skin. It would be hard to find a fabric worse at wicking than cotton. It can hold liquid up to 27 times its mass.
Jeans have no practical application outside workwear, they are purely fashion.
https://www.neil.blog/full-speech-transcript/68-bits-of-unso...
I'm seriously considering buying an airbrush. I still have hundreds on unpainted miniatures lying around (mostly from a Reaper Bones kickstarter many years ago), and although I've had a few painting sessions and got some colour on some of them, there's too many of them to put a serious dent in them. But I keep reading how airbrushing can speed up the process while improving the quality. At least for primer and base coat, and once you're good and you get a really expensive airbrush, also for detail.
But even basic beginner airbrushes can cost $100 for just the airbrush, and another $100 or more for the compressor. But there are also airbrush sets with compressor included for just $25. Crap no doubt, but maybe good enough to try some basic priming? Using it might give me a better idea of what I want in an airbrush and tell me whether it's for me, or it might give me a bad experience and turn me off it completely when a more expensive one would have given me a much better experience. If I'm not sure, $25 is an easy decision to make, while $200 is serious commitment. But a bad experience for $25 might also discourage me from the better solution that would have worked for me.
I had a cheapo-crappo airbrush and it was definitely enough for basic priming with some zenithal highlighting. Didn't really use it for much else beyond "wash this area with paint quick" because I am old with poor fine motor control in the hands but I could imagine it would be something you could practice on to get the basics of "pull-back/push-down" triggers.
“I don't need to make an LLC” also pings way too hard here.
But you know what. I wore a helmet at every at bat. Did I really need it for every at bat?? No; But I had it.
There's a long list of dead people who went into the wilderness or hiking under prepared. Just because it didn't happen to you doesn't mean the same outcome for others.. I know this is supposed to be a metaphor for when to buy and upgrade the tools you have. But safety should always come first.
Always wear a helmet when you’ve got a bat in your hand.
No it shouldn’t.
Safety is almost always a trade off of real (or perceived) risk and reward.
If safety came first, you’d never swim, hike, or drive a car.
Unwaxed cotton absorbs water, stays wet, and shrinks when wet to make close contact with skin--three properties that one does not want when its wet and cold.
Water on skin is a really, really good mechanism for heat transfer (both ways)--hence why we sweat in the heat.
Indeed, going "pantsless" for short periods can be less risky if your pants are already soaked-through, it's very humid, there's ice build-up, and there's little to no risk of skin abrasion from terrain traversal.
Everything you do must follow the exact best practices and maximum safety protocols
Someone in this very thread is saying OP could die from wearing jeans hiking
Its honestly ridiculous the exaggeration that goes on in internet hobby forums
And the risk acceptance is arbitrary anyway
You can argue that wearing jeans hiking is taking a risk
Then I can 1-up and ask why don't you wear a full 1-piece high-vis yellow suit and wear a helmet at all times whenever you leave your house?
You could get hit by a car?
Why would you take that risk?
It doesn’t need to be high tech activewear: Running shorts (weather permitting) can do just fine.
The moral: know everything I do and be safe in the way I find acceptable
Although running shorts can also chafe and cut up your undercarriage if you're not careful (source: me, about 6km into a 10km run a decade ago.)
Even the minimalists brag about their (remaining) stuff, which always includes at least one Apple product.
The in-between-alists just smile and nod, knowing that we'll be drowned out.
Another facet of modern life is being able to try everything once, which means having to get the most out of it, with the assurance that it will be great. Heaven forbid figuring out your gear needs on a progression of increasingly ambitious outings, some of which are miserable. This is how we end up with beginners on extreme hiking adventures.
I got a cheap pair of skates from goodwill, well on my way into week 2 now.
Once I know I got the chops down, I'm gonna go buy a nicer pair - but until then, can't beat a pair of $10 skates!
Same goes for snowboarding or anything that has rentals, let the discovery process happen in the least committal way possible.
I'm ignoring the point of the article, but I'm currently in a country with a strong hiking culture. Everyone is decked out with every piece of hiking gear imaginable for a short trek up a hill (2 hour round trip?). It's a bit of a status thing. Well... maybe there is a connection to the article. Do we sometimes avoid simple tools in startups because of ego/status concerns?
But a gentler answer is that if you don't know what you need to do the hike, you ask around for best practices and probably end up following some that are overengineered.
The people like you during your hike, in my experience, fall into two groups. Either they've had so much experience that they know exactly what works and what doesn't work for the conditions or they kind of got lucky.
But certain specialized tools (and knowledge of how to use them) like say AI, will make your job much easier.
Another example. We just remodeled our house. Workers with specialized tools and know how were able to get the job done much faster and with a better final product.
At the same time, I shy away from the specific metaphor they chose. Hiking pants are a safety feature. Cotton will get wet and cold and increase the risk of hypothermia if you get lost or stuck. They will waterlog and make it hard to swim if you fall in water.
When it comes to safety items, I err on the side of prepared-ness because you may not get a chance to do it better next time.
There's probably not one sport where I haven't been shown up by someone in jeans or payless shoes.
Peru is a great example because when you are hiking the Inca trail to dead womans pass in all your fancy gear there are quite literally locals in jeans and payless shoes with a mattress on their back jogging past you.
I'm all for safety but the truth is there's a lot of "safety theater" with the pattagucci crowd. Signed: someone who doesn't wear jeans, just gets schooled frequently by those who do.
"Looking to provide its sailors with durable clothing that could be worn wet or dry, the navy began in the 16th century to equip sailors with Genoese-produced denim jeans, and in doing so became one of the driving forces behind the adoption of the clothing" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoese_navy
1) It starts to rain or gets windy and a client was not wearing appropriate clothes and gets very cold in a potentially dangerous situation. 2) A client has worn something extremely uncomfortable and chafes or does not have the freedom of motion to move around properly which ruins the day or slows it down. 3) The client damages their nice clothing and is annoyed.
Enforcing proper clothes for an outdoors trip is a cover-your-ass technique which is necessary when you have been guiding for long enough. I have sent people home because they have not followed the instructions and brought appropriate clothing.
Sure it's just a metaphor but it's extremely triggering for anyone who has been in the guide's situation and makes poor basis for an article on building.
Easy!
https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/washington/the-wonderland...
Having one member of the hike, that may not be the lightest, needing to be carried for miles, or maybe hope you can get an helicopter ride...
Don't hike for a day in jeans!
Specifically to product usability, as much as Jakob Nielsen is an iconoclast in certain circles, his Discount Usability Engineering principles are timeless: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/web-discount-usability/
Wildly disagree, but I suspect when they mention hiking, you get a specific idea or degree of what that means based on the type or terrain you regularly experience. While there are pieces of gear I wouldn't go into certain situations without, what those situations are and what that inventory looks like are pretty variable.
To anyone who'd like to try, jeans are fine, sometimes they're inadequate, sus out the trail and the conditions, don't let a lack of non-jeans prevent you from trying, but also proceed with sensible caution and learn to know your surroundings. DO NOT RELY ON GOOGLE MAPS EVER EVER, get something else or an actual map, and don't expect to have cell service.
If you have no fitness at all, start small (1-3hrs, flat or a few hundred meters of elevation gain), bring at least a liter of water, do it with someone or tell someone where you're going, go early during the summer. I'd advise that the most generally applicable requirement in terms of gear are shoes with grip of some kind (I use relatively inexpensive trailrunners, boots aren't as nimble but can be better depending on variables), then a basic headlamp unless you're in the north in summer, compass maybe, a lighter, and calories, everything else either depends on environment or other variables and you get a sense for it over time. A 20L day pack is helpful, but a regular backpack is just fine as well.
For pants, it's not rare for me to just bring breathable shorts from Lulu and normal Levi's jeans, switching between them as necessary, but sometimes just one or the other, and nearly always in a basic-ass cotton shirt that I just take off because I can't be bothered. The only people who mention my attire are the ones who never do it. Your mileage may vary.
Lastly, I personally never bring headphones, don't listen to anything, and keep the phone off or in low-power mode with GPS on. I'll check in at a halfway point if it's a long day, but when I'm in nature I'm in nature, and I'd recommend the same. It's empowering to learn to be capable in nature and with nothing but your own thoughts.
Edit: Mentioned by someone else, a guided adventure as an inexperienced outdoors person is not the time to deploy my advice, respect their requirements, they know more than you whether it is or isn't ultimately necessary. My advice applies outside that context, where you're not someone's else's liability. Read my advice as analogous to "you don't need cleats to play soccer, unless you're joining a team, especially as a noob, so get out there and kick a ball around"
I have no words.
... then learn from your experience.
By the way, I have been wearing darn tough socks for years and they are SO MUCH better than socks with cotton. Even soaking wet feet feel warm and dry.
They are merino wool, and they are better than even other "merino wool" socks.
My usual remedy is to wear army BD cargo pants, they're roomy and comfortable (one's less prone to chaffing), they've big deep pockets so things don't get lost as easily and they're rugged and take a lot of rough treatment. Moreover, they're only a fraction of the cost of spoofy/fashionable hiking attire (or at least the ones I use are).
That said, these army BD pants are cotton and like jeans will hold water although for some reason they dry much quicker than jeans even though the fabric weight is similar. To overcome the water/dampness problem I also carry a spare pair of pants made of lightweight synthetic quick-drying fabric. These I roll up cylinder-like and put in a watertight plastic bag at the bottom on my pack (the fabric is so light and flexible they takes up very little space). I also do the same with a spare shirt/T-shirt.
There are many tips I could give those who are thinking of taking up hiking but I'll limit it to one—for safety's sake don't hike alone.
Incidentally, some years ago I bought between 40 and 50 pairs of army pants at a military/disposals auction, some were brand new the others in very good condition (they're of Vietnam vintage). At the time it wasn't my intention to buy them but they were bundled together on a pallet with what I actually wanted, namely 50V telephone exchange type power supplies—and I had to take the lot. Seems, as is so often the Army's wont, pants and power supplies begin with 'P' so 'logic?' dictated they should be auctioned together!
At the time I was a bit pissed off at being landed with dozens of pants that I didn't want to be seen dead in (having been drafted some years earlier and being forced to wear them). Anyway, my reticence eventually faded and I wore them for everything, fixing the car, hiking, etc., etc.
In the end it turned out to be a bargain purchase, a really good deal. I've now just about worn the lot out, perhaps there's a half dozen good pairs left. Now I wish I had more.
Later, during my student days, I started seeing people sail in specialized sailing outfits with extra high pants that cost a couple of hundred bucks. I always thought that was completely unnecessary. I'm not made of sugar! I can take a bit of water, regular clothes are fine, no need for expensive, specialized gear. In fact, I developed a bit of a habit of sailing in seemingly unsuitable gear. Army boots to bare feet. It all works fine for me.
But here's the thing: at scouting, we only sailed for a couple of hours. If it rained all day, you would still be home dry in the evening. And we were young. You can take a lot of discomfort when you're young. But when you're sailing for a couple of days, maybe on larger bodies of water with higher waves, clothes that are guaranteed to keep you dry are really, really nice. And some people really do need flexible shoes with extra grip on deck.
This is a really pleasant video essay about it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sz4YqwH_6D0
You're not a painter because you have the best paintbrushes, but because you paint a lot. The best way to become a painter is to start painting earlier.
"Do it in jeans first" - absolutely. But after going nearly hypothermic in my all cotton stuff in the Presidentials on Mt. Mansfield years ago - nice sunny summer day down below, guess what at the top - I went with the program and got synthetic fleece stuff etc.
It doesn't have to cost a mint. As long as you don't care about style, the thrift stores generally have synthetic t-shirts, fleece jackets and pants. Shell pants and especially decent shell jackets are less common but I've found enough there too to keep me covered.
Shell vs. warm core - layering! Assuming you have a knapsack to put the stuff you're not wearing in, if you have fleece pants and shell pants over them, you now have three options. Four, if the shell pants can unzip into shorts.