Glancing thru all the different threads I laughed to myself. Remembering when I was a teen and would get up at the crack of dawn and grab my favorite hand me down .22 rifle, a pocket full of shells and stuff a can of cola in my pocket along with a handful of hard candy and out the door I went. Getting in trouble when I got home because I had missed dinner.
Now decades later I wont even look at the mountains without strapping 20 lbs of gear to my back and filling my pockets with every gadget I can get my hands on! Then thinking to myself "Do I really want to carry the extra weight of the .22 rifle... Funny how priorities change.

As a kid I had a slingshot, a scout knife, and a cheap canteen. Sometimes I would stea...er...borrow one of the dads cheap lighters.

That was it for gear and rarely did I feel I was lacking anything.

No .22? Are you nutso???

Actually, in my case, it was not a can of coke, it was a WWII GI canteen full of water. In the summertime the canteen was filled halfway and frozen the night before...

Slingshots rule! I had a wrist rocket as a kid, actually I still have it. I used to launch rocks for my dog (her name was Blitz) to fetch, she loved it, She would start barking if I paused for even a minute. I actually became pretty good using it, thinking of a folding one for my go bag.

Your mememories got me to thinking, too. I got a .22 single shot bolt action rifle when I was 11 years old but my parents did not want me going into the woods with it alone. Really my outdoors adventures began when I was about 9. Like OBG, I was only armed with a homemade slingshot and a pocketful of personally selected pebbles for shot. My uncle had given me his WWII canteen with the canvas carrier and slung from the original pistol belt. That canteen allowed me to stay all day in the woods and I grew to really love that thing. Back then, and in the area I was from, an old Prince Albert tobacco tin was carried in my back blue jeans pocket. In the can was a piece of bark or shingle with a hand fishing rig wrapped around it, small cork and all. Some strike anywhere kitchen matches and a Barlow knife were also stashed in the tin. I enjoyed finding a pristine, clear fishing hole in the middle of nowhere and trying my luck.

I remember when we visited the family farm as a kid. Grabbing a .22 revolver loaded with ratshot and stuffing it in my back pocket. And then actually hoping to run into one of those rattlesnakes we were supposed to be avoiding! Ratshot to the head would take them out - barely - if you got close enough. Meaning two feet or so past their striking distance, which is what made the whole deal exciting.

These days, I'd be carrying constricting bands, suction cups, anti-venom, whistles and signal mirrors, a cellphone, gps, etc. The local hospital would have been put on alert before I ventured out. I'd replace my UnderArmor with the slightly heavier medieval knight's armor - a weight trade-off I'd now consider appropriate.

Ha! Yeah, back when our parents would let us go off on our own for the weekend at 12-13 years old camping. Stuff some tarps, wool blankets, Boy Scout knives and cans of spaghetti in our rucksacks, grab our BB guns, go off in the woods, build a big fire, and sleep out for a couple of nights. Can you picture that now?

Of course, that's back when you could ride a bicycle without a helmet and had to pay extra for seatbelts in your car.

Kevin B.

Could ride a bike without a helmet? Can you imagine the ridicule that would have been involved with wearing a helmet on a bicycle!?!? You would have been laughed out of town! lol.

My .22 and I used to spend hours and hours at an old abandoned dump on my grandparents property. They had a little over 700 acres and only about 25(ish) acres of it was "improved". Plenty of deer, turkey and even a couple of mountain lions in those parts.

I remember waking up one morning when my grandfather touched off his lever action .357 from the kitchen. No point in going outside to take a deer that year. He was in the middle of fixing breakfast when this nice buck walked up so he just slid the window open and shot from over the kitchen sink.

I remember as a kid getting decked out in fatigues grabbing my swiss army knife, an old WW II messenger bag and a lighter. In the bag was a canteen, U.S. Mess kit w/utensils and whatever surplus C-rats I had gotten the last time I was at the flea market. Sometimes we played war or cowbays and indians. Either way it boiled down to a day of hide and seek, swimming in one of the ponds or just running around like maniacs until dusk........
I miss those days

-Bill Liptak

Yeah,

You must've been reading my mind (sans the .22 though).

I was just thinking about how I would spend all day tromping around the woods with barely anything gear other than my pocket knife and curiosity.

Those fond memories then drift over to the time:

I was so thirsty and with what I know now was probably a dehydration headache and was tempted to drink what ever I could find (I won't go into details as you may be eating your breakfast at this time),

got caught out in a thunderstorm that was the advanced guard of a cold front and I ended up with a very cold, very wet hike back home,

Got lost and just lucked out on finding a logging road back to the highway,

Blundered into a nudist colony and all the girls were so excited to see a "mountain man".... (Oh, wait! That really didn't happen, that was a dream I had when I was 15.... never mind)

Our "20 pounds" of gear is the badge of our wisdom from hard learned experience (at least that's what I'm telling myself and it generally makes me feel better).

Happy trails.....