Category: Gear

Audiobooks

I listen to audiobooks while hiking solo, and have been fortunate enough to do a long hike each year since 2012– that is a lot of audio. I record links to each completed audiobook in my online hiking journals, first as a note to myself, and second a recommendation to anyone reading or crawling this blog, a shout-out to the work of authors and readers that I have enjoyed.

My preference is to avoid audiobooks with DRM Digital Rights Management, and unfortunately a monopoly controlling contemporary audiobooks insists on DRM as a condition for authors to be published with them. Luckily for me, LibriVox was started in 2005, a group of volunteer readers who record and distribute audiobooks of public domain books. In my youth I tended to read mostly science fiction, and missed out on many classics of literature, and LibriVox has allowed me to remedy that situation in some small part.

(Please be aware that book copyright duration differs according to country, and USA rules are different from everyone else. Nowadays I look forward to seeing what new books slip out of copyright January 1 of each year, for possible use on my next hike.)

Below are all the audiobooks completed on my long hikes to date, sometimes with short notes. Perhaps this might help other travelers on their audiobook journey. More notes below the list…

AT 2012

(no audiobooks on this trip, just podcasts)

CDT 2013

CDT 2014

CDT 2015

CDT 2016

GET 2017

PCT 2018

NNML 2019

AZT 2020

MRT 2021

HDT 2022

CT 2023

GXL 2024

GET 2024

More Notes

When hiking, I only listen to audiobooks in one ear, at moderate volume, and take care to be aware of sounds around me. If I am in serious bear country, audiobooks can wait.

For USA copyright rules, in 2025 works published in 1929 or before move into the public domain. Due to a quirk in copyright law, many early science fiction whose copyright was not renewed by the publisher became public domain early, so I have recently been enjoying Golden Age SF.

I make a note of particularly good readers, and often seek out other books they have read. Some of my favorite LibriVox readers: Kara Shallenberg, Karen Savage, and the prolific Phil Chenevert. For the Girl Genius Agatha H series, Angela Dawe is excellent. For Cory Doctorow books, Wil Wheaton is super, though the author is also quite good. I avoid AI readers, for now. No narrators with uptalk, please.

On early hikes I also listened to contemporary audiobooks by Podiobooks.com, a site for mostly free downloads by self-published authors. Sadly that site has been absorbed by another website with a different business model, and links may not work.

During the lonely months between long hikes I keep up morale by searching for more audiobooks on LibriVox and elsewhere, and currently have more than 100 books downloaded for future hikes.

CT2023 Gear

Well I didn’t have to pack
I had it all right on my back
Now I’m five hundred miles away from home

“500 Miles”, Rosanne Cash, The List

I deny being a gearhead, and seem to be falling further behind the major backpacking equipment trends each year. One example: most thru-hikers on the CT have moved to hoodie sunshirts– I really should look into these for next year. Several of my equipment list items are the exact same pieces from my 2012 Gear List.

Here are some changes from my most recent published gear list:

Continue reading “CT2023 Gear”

Trail Phone Trends

I was recently forced to upgrade my cell phone after a hardware failure, and started worrying about the market trend of phones growing larger and heavier each year. My phone counts as part of my backpacking base weight (as defined as pack weight minus food and water), since it normally resides in a holder on my pack strap. How long until cell phone weights start seriously impacting base weight, which I try to keep under 10lbs for ultralight hiking?

Tl;dr Summary: Not to worry. My trail smartphones have not gotten unreasonably heavier in 10 years.

Details for Gear Geeks:

This year I celebrate my 10th consecutive year of doing a long backpacking trips each summer. A bulging lithium-polymer battery forced an unplanned cell phone upgrade.

For ultralight gear, I prefer small lightweight phones, but cell phone manufacturers seem to be introducing ever-larger screens and higher-capacity, heavier batteries. It is sometimes difficult to find low-weight new models that can handle the latest, more secure operating system versions. With 10 years of data about my cell phone choices (from past posts about gear lists, as well as a few unpublished gear spreadsheets) let us look at trends and make predictions.

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