Looking at the mountain of gear on our livingroom floor you'd think that the place was invaded by a colony of pack rats. However, the challenge of planning for any multi-week trip lies in achieving a balance between what's necessary (stove, cook kit, dishes, utensils ...) and what you can bring for creature comfort (pillows, chairs, matress ...).

Over the years we've tried various combinations of gear over our two week excursions and have the basics down pretty well. The things we'll need to add for a multi-week trip will be a satellite phone, solar panel, chairs, fourth paddle and an extra fuel bottle.

We'll also be bringing a sewing kit, a beefed up canoe rescue kit (heavy duty caribiners and 200 ft of spectra rope) and an enhanced medical kit.

As we resupply there will be the need to restock some items like fuel, fire starters, matches, soap, clothes detergent, sun screen and that all time essential - TP.

As I alluded to earlier, we also constructed an emergency resupply list for those items that might fail and not be repairable on the trail.

Since we had agreed on an approximate resupply schedule and were going to be phoning in weekly to verify our status it was an easy jump to phone in just before our resupply with our exact location and any special requests for additional gear to be included.

We had prepacked extra barrels with food and had packed small roughneck totes with the gear we knew we'd need to restock. All the containers were labeled with the resupply date so there would be no confusion as to what was to be sent out. This is important since each of the legs of the trip were of different durations and to receive 12 days of supplies on a 17 day leg could leave us in a bad spot.

With all that said ... here's our gear list.... Gear List