Absolutely perfect weather, lovely forests, beaver dams and scenery. And of course, in brilliant company. The weather was sunny most of the day and the temperature peaked around 24°C / 75°F , with little to no wind throughout the day. We did 11km/7miles around the trails and had a really lovely time even though it was hot as hell for a cold loving Finn like me.

As a chronic overpacker I opted for the 40 liter Haglöfs Matrix and somewhat packed it full, once again.

The Matrix 40 is a nice pack, a smaller aluminium framed toploading ruck to be more accurate. At 40 liters the pack is quite spacious, but in the end is much smaller than you’d expect. You can easily pull off overnight hikes with this with more extensive camping gear. I opted for the Matrix 40, so I could carry all the essentials for the warm day ahead of us. Most importantly water, which I carried 4 liters, of which 1 liter for cooking in the Nalgene. Everything else I packed was either chosen on the basis of necessity and worst case scenario in mind.

The Trangia cooking kit is brilliant, though somewhat obsolete and cumbersome nowadays thanks to modern field meals being able to cook in their bags. So we could’ve managed with a smaller kit to boil our water like a Jetboil or a Primus kit.

Since it was only a day hike, I could’ve managed the day with much smaller arsenal of kit, like eliminating most of the more “survival” oriented items and my Arc’teryx Beta AR, though the weight reduction would’ve been quite marginal in the end. But as said many times before by other people; I’d rather carry it, rather than regret not carrying, in case I had needed something.

Configeer #013