What’s Special About Backpacking Stoves?
Backpacking: An extended form of hiking in which people carry double the amount of gear they need for half the distance they planned to go in twice the time it should take. – anonymous
Since this is a book on backpacking stoves you might wonder if there really is such a thing, and what makes it different from your average Jenn-Air JGS8860BDP Stainless Steel Gas Kitchen Range with pilotless ignition, oven lights, oven door window, warming drawer, and built in “Sabbath Mode”. Or a Colman Model 428-700 3-burner dual fuel stove with 24,500 BTUs total output.
Well, there are some differences, you betcha there.
Like weight. As you might imagine. Surprisingly, neither of the above products has a weight listed by the manufacturer, which tells you a lot up front. This is obviously a case of if-you-have-to-ask-it’s-not-for-you.
Porky backpacking stoves hit a peak of roughly two pounds, but really the upper practical limit is around one pound (454g). Remember, you have to carry it. All the way. Yes, that means you.
And if you are right now thinking “Golly, one pound is really light!” then consider this: the lightest backpacking stove I’ve ever heard of is made from the aluminum cup from the bottom of a tea candle (a.k.a. food warmer candle) and weighs 1/16 ounce, costs nothing if you can scrounge it.
If you can’t scrounge it and have to buy some, then you can get about 10 for a buck, including the candles. (Note: 1/16 ounce is 1.8 grams. One point eight grams worth of anything is...nothing at all. You could set one of these on the palm of your hand and blow it right off with your breath, even immediately after flossing and brushing, when your breath is at its least potent.)
Size: The Jenn-Air range measures 31 inches by 26 inches by 36 inches, or bigger than most backpacks, and bigger than some backpackers. The Coleman mentioned here measures 16 inches by 31 inches by 8 inches closed up. A tea candle cup measures something like 1.5 inches across by about 0.75 inches high (38x19mm), when standing on its tiptoes, and is very cute.
Are we getting the picture?
Backpacking stoves are a lot lighter and smaller than other stoves, even other stoves meant for use in the outdoors. This is because of one very important fact, recently referred to: you have to carry these things. Or, at best, get your sweety to carry them for you. Either way, someone will put in the work.
And when your sweety catches on, you still want to be able to say that you’ve got the lightest thing going, especially if he and/or she (times are changing) disagrees and tries to brain you with it. Words simply cannot express exactly how much I would prefer to be on the receiving end of a carefully-aimed and thrown 1/16 ounce aluminum cup relative to a 210 pound Jenn-Air JGS8860BDP. Or even the comparatively petite 20-pound Coleman.
Grunt and snort. That’s what you do on the trail, even with a five-pound pack, polite company be damned. You want the smallest and lightest stove that will do the job for you. Smallest because size equals weight. More stuff, and bigger stuff, means you need more space to put it all. Providing more space means a bigger, heavier pack. If your stove is small enough to carry in your shirt pocket, you’ve just saved yourself a lot of grief right there. Your grunts and snorts will become more refined and may occur at longer intervals than you are accustomed to. It will mean that you are evolving toward becoming a more perfect being, which is what this whole subject is about.
Generally, backpacking stoves are going to be between one-half inch and 10 inches high, between one inch and eight inches in diameter. They will weigh no more than a pound and use a single burner. (Height: 13 - 250mm. Diameter: 25 - 200mm. Weight: 0 - 454 g.)
They will more likely be made from relatively sexy materials like brass, aluminum or titanium than from iron or steel. They will be expertly constructed by highly-trained gnomes, and will carry a full load of love. Rather than being a thrown-together collection of crude, artlessly-hammered 19th-century materials they’ll be delicately fashioned from very thin, high-strength and exceedingly clever substances. They will be compactly built, and generally will fold up so you can carry them inside a cooking pot, and they might even have adjustments for use with different-sized pots or on rough ground.
The more intricate stoves, especially the liquid-fuel models, will be field-strippable and have compact cleaning and repair kits that can be used on the trail. Some of the simplest, smallest, cheapest and lightest stoves, though, are those you can make yourself, and need no maintenance whatsoever.
Backpacking stoves are generally easy to use, maybe a little more complicated than a gas range, but less so than a camp stove. It’s becoming more common for backpacking stoves to have built-in spark lighters, so you don’t even need matches anymore. Some stoves don’t have built-in fuel tanks, but simply connect to an external fuel bottle. Voila! No need to fill them! Some have adjustable feet to deal with rough surfaces. Most don’t, though, have built-in wind screens, but these are easy to make.
Fuel is probably the biggest difference between backpacking stoves and other stoves. The names for fuels vary across the world, but let’s stick with our monolingual American tradition and just use our versions of these names. Among liquid fuels there is kerosene, white gas (a.k.a. Coleman Fuel), and alcohol, either grain alcohol (ethanol) or wood alcohol (methanol).
Compressed gas fuels are butane, isobutane, or some blend such as isobutane/propane or butane/propane. The stuff that runs through your gas range (usually called “the stove”) at home is methane with some smelly substances known as mercaptans added so you can tell if you have a gas leak without lighting a match first. Commercial heaters and big bunkhouse stoves or farmhouse ranges might use propane, which needs to be confined in heavy steel tanks.
There are also solid fuel tablets, paraffin candles, pine cones, twigs, charcoal, and fuel pellets which we’ll get to a little later. It’s unlikely, but you may see someone using these fuels while backpacking but extremely few five-star restaurants are known to use them.
Exercises
- If you’ve decided to take up ultralight backpacking, then learn to grunt and snort convincingly, as though you still hurt a lot, even though you now feel really great and have regained your sense of humor.
- If you’ve decided to take up ultralight backpacking, then learn to project a smug expression of moral superiority. If you can’t (or won’t) do this, then we’ll hunt you down like a dog, haul you off, and leave you tied naked to a tree in the deepy deep deepest dark woods. All alone. Until you agree to become just like us.
- Just kidding.
- Extra credit: Burn a fart this week. Write about it in your diary, or better yet, someone else’s diary. Extra special extra credit for writing it up in someone else’s blog. Yeehaa!