The Girl Behind the Backpack

Obviously anybody who wants to can read my blog, but people that decide to subscribe to blogs usually find that the content of each post resonates with them in some way. 

I believe that an ideal reader for this blog will be people who are just like me: young, adventurous people who love the outdoors. If you like to travel solo, or you’re a woman, this will be a great place to get relevant travel and backpacking advice. If you are an environmentalist, naturalist, and/or ethno/botanist, you might enjoy my blog because I am all of those things and it comes through in my work.

Don’t worry if you don’t fit the profile though, there might still be something for you here. Read to find out!

I feel that no good blog is without an About Me section, so here goes:

My name is Kirsten (sounds like Kurstin in American English), but in non-English speaking countries I sometimes go by Cristina because its easier for others to say. I’m 25 years old as of March 2023. My pronouns are she/her/hers. 

I’m the middle child with two gorgeous, amazing sisters who are impressive role models for me. Our parents still live (albeit separately) near our childhood home. 

I’ve always been the oddball that took a book everywhere I went, including PE class, and nowadays you’ll never find me with less than a dozen books downloaded on my kindle app on my phone.

I graduated in 2021 from the University of California in Santa Barbara with a BA degree in Environmental Studies and a minor in Spanish. I spent the 2019 calendar year studying abroad in an immersion program in Santiago, Chile, where I took Agronomy and Forestry Engineering classes in Spanish. My other interests while at school lay more in hands-on working with plants, ethnobotany, environmental education, and the Spanish language. 

Having graduated into the early COVID-19 era, I proceeded to wander around the country seeking noble pursuits such as circling the country by car twice, attempting the Pacific Crest Trail twice (once northbound and once southbound), and living and working a colorful variety of jobs in no less than four states.

My love of backpacking and traveling stems from a very early introduction to the outdoors.

Long before I was born, my parents fell in love with a property in the Diablo mountain range east of San Jose; it was 160 acres of arid, undeveloped California ranch land about 45 mins from town in either direction on the highway.

For years, that piece of land had a beautifully landscaped weekend home at the end of a long dirt driveway, two decrepit trampolines and the remnants of a playground from when we were kids, hiking trails, and decorative dry stack rock walls–all built by the blood, sweat and tears of my father and mother (with some key help from contractors and us kids :P). It was the site of their wedding and reception under the great Grandfather Oak, and the location of many enjoyable Christmas’ and Thanksgivings and Labor Day barbecues. (Unfortunately, we became well acquainted with several of the wild fires endemic to our state, and in the fall of 2020, we lost our home.)

This place was the origin of my love for the wide outdoors.

I don’t know when we started calling it the Ranch but it’s stuck through all these years and it never fails to get questions such as “How many animals do you have?” “Are there horses?” Sadly, no there were not, but not for lack of begging from us girls.

There I learned more about the natural world than I could possibly recount; every day that I talk with people who have less of an outdoor background, I realize just how much knowledge I take for granted. The most shocking realization of my college career was that your average student can’t tell you which trees in a park are oaks!

When we were little, my dad told us the names of the plants and animals he knew, or had us look new ones up in one of his many nature books. We learned that you can: eat Miner’s Lettuce, put Bay leaves in pasta sauce and get a really bad rash from Poison Oak. We would see deer, boar, fox and bobcats; gopher snakes, rattlesnakes and garter snakes; alligator lizards and blue-bellied lizards; California Newts, tree frogs, Western Pond Turtles and toads; Ana’s Hummingbirds, Scrub Jays, vultures and red tailed hawks.

Our rule growing up was if we could catch it, we could keep it as a pet for two weeks and then we had to release it. No cats or dogs for my sister and I. Instead we had a cycle of newts, tarantulas, lizards, snakes, mice and turtles. I still think that the coolest thing I’ve ever seen was our gopher snake eating a live mouse. Of course, I feel obligated to say that that gopher snake somehow escaped its terrarium and we only realized it when we saw that the other mouse we gave it had gone uneaten for a week. We decided to name that mouse Snowball and keep it until it died because PetCo said it would only live a couple weeks; it proceeded to thrive for THREE MORE YEARS, and when it finally died we buried it in the backyard.

At the Ranch, Dad taught us how to plant and irrigate native flora, start fires to warm the house, sleep under the stars, check for ticks and rattle snakes, hike cross country, swim in freezing ponds and determine the cardinal directions by the sun.

What I didn’t learn about the outdoors at the Ranch, I learned from backpacking as a teen.

Dad got us started backpacking super early, even before we were big enough to carry our own packs. In those early days we hiked out to the High Sierra Camps in Yosemite with mom along for the ride. Kaitlyn and I would only carry day packs with our clothes in them, while dad carried all the important, heavy gear. It was a super easy set up: hike a few miles through gorgeous backcountry, pull into camp where they had private tent cabins with bunks and several course meals prepared for the weary travelers, and then chill and meet some new people until we packed up and headed to the next camp.

Once we were big enough to carry a bigger share of the weight, dad decided it was time to take us ‘real’ backpacking. He is a traditional backpacker, so our packs were never light, and as we got older he would give us more weight. I don’t think Kaitlyn or I ever had more than 45 pounds, but he always had something absurd like 60 or 70 pounds.

Every summer for years we did a backpacking trip in Yosemite National Park, or somewhere nearby in the Sierra. We learned how to set up a tent, use a compass, read a topographic map, pack a backpack, filter water, cook-camp food and be respectful hikers. I steadily fell more in love with backpacking, while Kaitlyn became disheartened by it.

Freshman year of college, I took the Leadership Training Course through UCSB Adventure Programs to learn how to lead other people backpacking. I was pretty disappointed when there was only one backpacking trip in the whole 3 month class, but my knowledge of how to exist in outdoors increased exponentially. Now I know first aid, radio etiquette, Leave No Trace principles, risk management, emergency survival skills, and a dozen other things that I never knew I should know before going outside.

The summer of 2018 was the first and only trip I was ever paid to lead. My colleague (and now friend!) and I lead 6 or so adults from the Santa Barbara community to the Cottonwood Lakes in the Eastern Sierra for several nights. It was a very rewarding trip to use all of my hard earned skills and gear to show other people how amazing the outdoors are. That was the trip I truly realized I never wanted to backpack traditionally again, because the 52 pound pack was just too much for my poor body.

Me and my Ultralight backpacking partner at Echo Lake, Desolation Wilderness, 2017. Photo creds: my dad

My journey to Ultralight didn’t begin until fairly recently.

Until spring of 2017, I had never even heard of Ultralight backpacking. I was trying to get more into the outdoor community on campus and went on a random hike with three people into some dunes an hour north of campus. Two of the guys I had met for the first time during that Leadership Training Course and they were bigger backpackers than I was.

One of them started talking about this crazy 12 day, 170 mile thru-hike called the Tahoe Rim Trail (TRT) that he had on his bucket list and was thinking about doing that summer but didn’t think he would find a partner to go with him in time.

Then and there I told him that I was totally down! Although I did make it clear that I had never done anything on that scale before; neither had he so it was a perfect match.

For the next several months we talked about how we wanted to do the trip and we basically decided I was going to do it his way as much as possible: Lightweight (as close as we could get to Ultralight at the time).

Let me tell you, that was an eye opening experience for me.

When the time came to fully pack our bags, I had never felt anything lighter! According to my Lighterpack, which may or may not be accurate, I had a baseweight of 17.94lbs. Changed my life. We ended up doing the longest hiking day (with a pack) of our lives that trip: 26.5 miles; yes, that IS longer than a marathon; and yes, we did almost die. But what a rush!

We used a tarp instead of a tent, which is all well and good and amazingly lightweight, but does nothing to protect from the hordes of mosquitoes in wetlands during the summer. We even went so far as to bring only one spoon and shared it and the cooking pot during dinners by passing the pot to the other person while we chewed.

To have it out in the open, I did have one VERY heavy luxury item: my nearly 4 pound DSLR camera plus gear, my beautiful baby, the Canon Rebel t5i. I admitted very early on in the trip that it is an unnecessary weight and I could have been helping with more group gear instead of being selfish.

To sum up that trip, it was amazing and I know have a new really good friend and adventure partner that I tell anyone and everyone about when I have a chance because he changed my life for the better.

After the TRT, we did the 30+ mile Skyline to the Sea Trail in one night (be proud: I didn’t bring my camera even though it broke my heart </3) ; I did an 80 mile loop in Tierra del Fuego, Chile (it’s very hard to find lightweight gear and food, so our packs were pretty heavy); we did 105 miles on the Uinta Highline Trail in Utah (with some way finding); and a couple of scattered shorter trails. 

My baseweight when I attempted the Pacific Crest Trail SOBO in 2021 still had a number of pounds to go to be officially ultralight, but at 16-17lbs with winter gear (ice axe, micro spikes, 10 degree quilt, warmer long johns and a mid layer), I felt pretty good about it. 

When I started the Pacific Crest Trail NOBO in 2022, my baseweight was 9.02lbs. I had finally reached the goal of Ultralight. 

You can imagine my disappointment when I almost froze to death multiple times in the desert in spring, with my tiny tarp shelter and quilt, lying  on a half foam sleeping pad and wearing my too-thin baselayers. I had to add some weight in Idyllwild, bringing my pack back to “Lightweight” at 11.36lbs, so that I would be less on the Brink of Survival, and more in the Realm of Enjoyment.

The experience of cutting the weight down to below ten pounds is nothing I can easily describe. It’s hard. And at some point you just starting cutting shit off that only weighs 0.02oz (like tags). People will call you things like “Crazy” and “Unreasonable”. But remember: your pack will be easier to carry than theirs!