Access trusted expertise and enjoy the backcountry with confidence.

Members of the Backpacking Light community share this common vision: we love to spend as much quality time as possible in the backcountry, whether solo, with friends, our partners, or our families. And we also seek safety, comfort, and performance out there. To do that, each of us develops our own hiking style that includes the right gear, the right skills, and the right practices that allow us to accomplish the trips we want to take with confidence. However, trying to figure out what gear to use, what skills to learn, and who to trust can be incredibly overwhelming – because there is so much information online to sort out.

There are a lot of people on the internet who have enormous conflicts of interest or a lack of expertise when it comes to what they teach people about outdoor gear or skills. They are brand ambassadors, aspiring influencers, or affiliate marketers who get paid by product brands to say good things about their gear and enjoy financial benefits when you buy the gear they recommend. That’s not consumer advocacy – it’s deceitful at best and manipulative and untruthful at its worst. Don’t get suckered into this.

Unfortunately, this is how the outdoor gear industry (and many other consumer product industries) work today. We understand that spending time and energy wading through all of the info available online to learn about gear and skills is a huge barrier to growing into a disciplined consumer and backpacking skills expert. That’s why advocacy, expertise, and generosity are our core values, and why we’ve designed Backpacking Light Membership to provide you with trusted expertise so you can enjoy the backcountry with confidence.

Here’s how it works:

1. Become a member and go through our onboarding video series, which will help you master how to use the Backpacking Light Website Platform so you can get started right away with finding research and information on gear, skills and trip planning.
2. We’ll walk you through how to setup your community profile and use our community features so you can ask questions, get answers, share ideas, and learn to become a helpful and generous member of our community.
3. We’ll give you a tour of our education platform so you can get started on the comprehensive online education we have to offer, so you can learn and master outdoor skills from trusted experts at your own pace.

The mess of information created by people seeking online “fame and fortune” (!) is just getting worse. So become a Backpacking Light Member today and start being more efficient with your time, money and energy as you begin your lifetime journey with us to help you research, learn, plan, and share on the way to you becoming a more confident hiker.

– Ryan Jordan, owner/founder