The Cast Iron Skillet They Made Me Carry
The story of how a church backpacking trip and a piece of cookware I never asked for turned into a philosophy I've carried ever since.
There's a specific kind of betrayal that only happens when you're a teenager who saved up for decent gear, showed up ready, and watched an adult look at your perfectly good aluminum cookware and hand you a cast iron skillet in its place.
No explanation. Just: here, carry this instead.
I was maybe 110 pounds. The skillet probably weighed ten of them.
This was a church backpacking trip, which meant I didn't have much say in the matter. Back then, if you wanted to get into the backcountry and you were a farm kid in rural Mississippi with limited transportation and limited options, you went where someone else was willing to take you. That was the deal.
My friend and I had planned. We'd saved up — Pizza Hut wages, farm work, whatever came our way — and put together what we thought was a solid kit. Aluminum cookware. A little propane stove that packed into a coffee can. Pre-mixed instant coffee and creamer in a single container, because efficiency mattered when you were seventeen and thought you had figured something out.
They took all of that away from us at the trailhead and handed us granola that tasted like it was assembled from materials found in a barn, and a cast iron skillet for reasons I still don't understand forty years later.
We ate three cans of corn that week. We'd smuggled them in ziplocks — poured them out of the cans to save weight, which in retrospect was the most sophisticated gear decision we made that entire trip.
I lost twelve pounds in seven days. I only weighed 110 to begin with.
What That Trip Actually Taught Me
The surface lesson is obvious: carry your own gear, choose it yourself, trust your own judgment.
But the real lesson was subtler. It was about the gap between what someone tells you you need and what you actually need — and how that gap gets papered over constantly in the outdoor industry, just like it was papered over by whatever adult decided a cast iron skillet was appropriate backcountry cookware.
The vendors make it sound seamless. The gear guides make it sound obvious. The influencers make it look effortless.
It's not.
The first time you sleep in a wet sleeping bag because you didn't check whether your campsite was level, you understand something no gear review can teach you. The first time you tilt a frying pan in a monsoon to keep one square inch of fire alive under your chicken, you understand improvisation in a way that doesn't come from reading about it.
What I'd Carry Today
The propane-stove-in-a-coffee-can setup we had back then was actually not far off from what modern ultralight hikers use — except that the best options today are dramatically better. A JetBoil Flash boils water in about 100 seconds, packs down to roughly the size of a water bottle, and weighs under a pound with the fuel canister. It's the technological descendant of our coffee can setup, done properly.
For a cook system that's even lighter and more versatile, the MSR PocketRocket Deluxe runs around $55 and weighs almost nothing. Pair it with a titanium pot — Snow Peak makes excellent ones — and you've got a complete cook system under 8 ounces.
The cast iron skillet weighed approximately the same as a small child.
The Philosophy That Stuck
I've carried the lesson from that trip through everything since — Navy service, twenty-plus years in enterprise IT, building businesses from scratch. The principle is always the same:
Know what you're carrying and why. Never let someone else make that call for you.
It seems obvious when you say it out loud. Most good principles do. The trick is applying it consistently — which means doing the research, making your own assessment, and being willing to push back when someone hands you a cast iron skillet and calls it standard equipment.
That's what this site is built on. Not expertise handed down from above. Just hard-won experience from figuring it out myself, with the gear I could afford, in the places I could get to.
Starting with three cans of corn smuggled in ziplocks.
Have a gear question or a story of your own from the trail? I'd genuinely like to hear it.