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Neat meaning for Suluk46 Steve. Killarney has a special spot in my heart too.
I'd been backpacking before, but it was Killarney where I first tried to go lightweight. A friend and myself decided to hike the La Cloche Silhouette trail in 5 days (83km) which sounded like crazy talk to the traditional hiker than I was at the time. I decided to swap my 75 liter North Face pack (7 lbs) for a GoLite LiteSpeed pack (~ 2.5lbs) and we ditched the full 6 lbs tent and just brought the fly to use as a make-shift tarp in the event of rain. Looking back on it now, my baseweight was still probably 15-20 lbs but it was down a whole lot from before. One night we slept on Silver peak, which was actually a rough night because it was really cold and windy and we found a geocache under a boulder at the peak which has a log book. The log book had an entry from earlier that day where someone wrote they saw a bear up on the peak....so we didn't sleep so great as it was one of my first nights not in a tent and supposedly a bear was wandering around that very area.
The funny thing is that by day 3 we had passed quite a few hikers and we're feeling pretty cocky about our 'lightweight' ways, when we heard some hikers catching up to us. We dismissed it as impossible, but several minutes later we were passed by two guys who were hiking the entire 83kms in one 24 hour day. That took us down a notch.
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