Looking after kit on a long walk, when there is no shop

The failures on a long walk are boring and predictable, which is good news: they can be prepared for. In rough order of how often they end a day, they are the sleeping mat, the water filter, footwear, the pack hipbelt or a buckle, and the loft of a down bag.

Notice what is not on that list. Tents rarely fail structurally; they get damp and stay damp. Stoves rarely fail; they get blocked. Most kit does not break — it degrades until it stops doing the one thing you needed it for, and the degradation is preventable in a way the breakage is not.

• Adhesive repair patches — The single highest-value item. They fix a sleeping mat, a jacket, a tent, a pack and a dry bag, and they work on a wet surface far better than tape does. A few, cut small, in a pocket.
• A short length of strong tape, wound round something — Round a trekking pole or a lighter rather than carried as a roll. For the temporary version of everything above.
• Cord, and a needle with heavy thread — A broken hipbelt buckle, a torn pack strap and a boot with a failed eyelet are all cord problems. A pack that will not carry weight on your hips is the failure most likely to end a walk.
• Spare parts specific to what you carry — A stove seal, a filter O-ring, a tent pole splint. These are gram-level items that have no substitute on the trail.

• Get the down bag out of the stuff sack immediately — Down loses loft from being compressed and from being damp, and both are cumulative over weeks. Unpacking it as soon as you stop, and giving it whatever air is available, is the single thing that keeps a bag warm through a long walk. Loft lost slowly over three weeks is not obvious until a cold night.
• Dry what you can, whenever you can — Any dry morning is a drying morning. Tent inner, bag, socks, on the outside of the pack for an hour. This is not fussiness — a persistently damp system gets colder every night and eventually stops working.
• Backflush the water filter, every day — Hollow-fibre filters clog with sediment and the flow rate drops steadily. Backflushing daily rather than when it gets slow keeps it working; a filter left to clog often will not recover. And never let one freeze: ice ruptures the fibres invisibly, and the filter will still pass water afterwards while no longer filtering it.
• Get the grit out of your footwear and your socks — Abrasion inside a shoe is what destroys both the shoe and your feet. Emptying them out and rinsing socks when you cross water is maintenance for two things at once.
• Inflate the mat with a pump sack, not your lungs — Breath is warm and wet, and moisture inside a mat degrades the insulation and grows things. This is also why a mat that smells is usually a mat that has been blown up by mouth for a month.

• Washing a waterproof: town job, and it needs doing — Waterproof shells stop beading when the face fabric is dirty rather than when the membrane fails, and a jacket that has wetted out is not breathing. Washing it in a technical cleaner restores most of that; a normal detergent makes it worse, because the residue attracts water.
• Washing a down bag: town job, and rarely on a single walk — It is a slow, careful process that needs a large machine and a long drying cycle, and doing it badly clumps the down permanently. On a long walk this is usually a job for after, not during.
• Finding the leak in a mat: anywhere with water — Inflate hard, submerge in sections, watch for bubbles. Mark it, dry it thoroughly, patch it. Almost every mat leak is a pinhole from grit under the mat, which is an argument for a groundsheet.
• Replacing shoes: plan it, do not react to it — Trail shoes have a mileage in them and the cushioning goes before the upper looks worn. Working out roughly where on the route that falls and posting a pair ahead is normal practice, and it is much cheaper than finding out the hard way.