Tonight I'm pawing through piles of pictures of past trips. My last post was very recent. This one is a few years old. I took this up on Raven Ridge, in Dolly Sods in West Virginia.

My main camping and hiking buddy and I are very often gear twins. One of us will buy something, and if it turns out to be decent then more often or not the other of us will wind up with the same thing. At the moment we have the same main pack: An Osprey Atmos 65, in green. (We've also got the exact same models of sleeping bag, water filter, chairs, duplicates of several knives, and insofar as I'm aware at least two pairs of identical hats.)

But we have rather different approaches to life. Somehow, despite the superficial similarity of our setups, I can always tell which pack is mine and which pack is his.

Just, somehow.