Fly Fish SC

Putting your Backpack on a Diet

The lightweight and ultralight backpacking philosophy continues to gain popularity as more and more items are designed for backpacking with these ideals in mind.

I wanted to see if I could modify my old Kelty Moraine backpack, which I believe is a discontinued model, to reduce its weight. This pack weighed in at approximately 3.5 lbs in its as ordered state. I’m not sure what the official weight of the backpack was supposed to be, and I used an analog type scale as opposed to a digital. That being said, all my findings are approximate.

The pack itself is a 3000 cu. in. backpack designed primarily for weekend trips and is hydration compatible. I had added a few extra straps for securing various items, so I removed those first to return it to its as delivered weight prior to putting it on the scale for this experiment.

Kelty Moraine backpack in its as delivered condition

Removing The Various Parts

I removed anything I could come up with, like the aluminum stays and the back panel padding. A complete list of items removed is listed below.

• 2 aluminum stays
• 1 foam back panel
• 2 velcro style flaps that held the aluminum stays in place
• 7 zipper pulls – each zipper pull had an additional cord type pull attached. The metal zipper pull was left intact.
• The lower 2 exterior straps which were designed to hold skis. I left the upper 2 straps for compression purposes.
• 1 ice axe loop
• 3 other internal straps that either had a buckle or clip that did not appear vital.

How The Backpacked Weighed In After Modification

With a total of 18 pieces removed, the backpack weighed in at about 2.8 to 2.9 lbs. That’s a savings of about 0.6 to 0.7 lbs or 9.6 to 11.2 oz. That translates to nearly a 20% decrease in backpack weight. Not bad for just playing around. If it were used for overnighters only, maybe 2 nights at the most, you could probably remove the 2 side pockets as well as 2 additional side mesh pockets and shed a few more ounces.

This picture shows the Moraine with all of the pieces that were removed.

Its probably still not light enough to be considered ultralight, but anyone looking to lighten their load could make these types of modifications to their backpack very easily without spending money on a new backpack. The key is not to cut any vital seams when removing things from the pack. I’m not sure you could use this same idea on tents or sleeping bags, but you can save some money and weight with mods to your pack at least. There are certainly several lightweight and ultralight sleep systems out there, so modifying your tent really isn’t necessary, but it can be fun to see what you can do with your own gear.

All this being said, Kelty makes a very nice durable backpack as is, and this experiment in no way implies that they are not top quality. The Moraine is simply what I had on hand to use to make this weight shedding attempt. Now where did I put that tent?