These lightweight backpacking tips and techniques are options or ideas, not recommendations. I tend towards the extreme side of ultralight backpacking, and if you don’t know yourself or your skills, some of these techniques will get you into trouble.
A good example of this is the “natural mattress” that allows you to leave your sleeping bag behind. With this technique, I’ve slept with no pad, and only a five-ounce sleeping bag liner, on a night when it was near freezing. It took fifteen minutes to collect enough bracken ferns to make a two-foot thick mattress, but it was comfortable and warm.
You can use leaves, pine needles, dead grass or dry bracken ferns. All you do is make a pile big enough to set your tent or bivy sack on. This could damage the enviroment in some areas, so use common sense, and collect only DEAD vegetation. Also, scatter your materials in the morning, so they won’t smother the plants underneath.
An important point here is that you have to know your enviroment, so you know you’ll be able to find proper mattress materials. Otherwise, you could have a very cold night or worse. Also, gloves make...