First published in 2007 by
Collins
An imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First edition 2007
Copyright © 1998, 2005 by Rick Curtis and Princeton University
Illustrations copyright © 1998, 2005 by Ron Hildebrand and Rick Curtis
All rights reserved.
Originally published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint excerpts from Mountain Safety, Research Inc.’s instructions for the Whisperlite stove and for artwork illustrating the Whisperlite stove; Arc’teryx for providing a backpack for the cover art; the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics for permission to use the Leave No Trace logo; MapTech, Inc. for U.S.G.S. quadrangle maps generated from MapTech Terrain Navigator Pro; Sierra Club Books for excerpts from Weathering the Wilderness, by William E. Reifsnyder; artwork showing the SAM splint from the Seaburg Company; the MapTools UTM grid artwork from John Carnes at MapTools.com; The Physician and Sports Medicine Journal for excerpts from the article “Self-reduction of Anterior Shoulder Dislocation” by Dr. Elizabeth Joy (November 2000); Prentice Hall for an illustration of the Situational Leadership Model from Management of Organizational Behavior by Paul Hersey, Kenneth Blanchard, and Dewey Johnson.
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A catalogue in publishing record for this book is available from the British Library
Source ISBN: 9780007247639
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007598113
Version: 2014-07-09
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 3 Cooking and Nutrition
CHAPTER 4 Hygiene and Water Purification
CHAPTER 5 Leave No Trace Hiking and Camping
CHAPTER 8 Safety and Emergency Procedures
CHAPTER 9 First Aid and Emergency Care
Back in 1996, when I was writing the first edition of this book, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. Since then the Internet has revolutionized the way we search for information and interact with one another. Backpacking and outdoor sports are no exception to this, from finding hiking trails to searching for gear reviews. Backpacking and outdoor recreation, like everything else, have become “information-driven.” Your knowledge base is a key part of maximizing your enjoyment, your safety, and your stewardship of the natural world.
Since the first edition, backpacking itself has changed. Advances in gear design now mean that a seven-day trip no longer means a seventy-pound pack. We’ve expanded our comfort range in all sorts of seasons and learned how to hike thousands of miles with less than twenty pounds of gear in our packs. We can use GPS receivers to pinpoint our exact location and tell us how to hike to our next campsite. At the same time, backpackers face new challenges today. The growth of outdoor recreational sports has put millions of more people on the land. Leave No Trace practices and wilderness conservation have become increasingly important to safeguard the wild lands we all love.
With all our advances in technology, there still exists a set of core skills that people need to travel in the outdoors. We seem to forget that the earliest “backpackers,” in the United States and Canada, from native peoples to wildnerness explorers like Lewis and Clark, didn’t have Gore-Tex, polypropylene ultralight tents, and a gas stove. They survived the harshest conditions with wool, leather, canvas, and yes, even cotton, through their deep knowledge of how to