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The hiking gear you carry depends mostly on how far you walk and where your next drink comes from. On a day loop with a tap back at the car park, a water bottle in a side pocket covers it. Further out, the rest of the hiking equipment here starts to earn its weight.
Once you are drinking from streams and springs, a water filter bottle treats the water on its way to your mouth. Some use a hollow fibre membrane you press the water through, one has four filter stages with a cartridge that lifts out, and sizes run from 500 ml to 1000 ml. For a group camp, the gravity filters hang from a tree or a pole and need no pump or batteries, from a 3 L reservoir up to a 10 L bag.
Poles give you two more points of contact on steep descents and loose rock. The folding trekking poles are aluminium alloy in five sections and fold to 30 cm on a steel inner cable, so they go on the side of a pack when the track flattens out. They come singly or as a pair, in two height bands, 150-170 cm and 170-190 cm. For winter tracks in the high country, the crampons and chain spikes pull over your boots, with 7 to 26 points depending on the pair.
The GPS watches do more than log a walk. Depending on the model you get GPS with BeiDou, a barometer that shows a pressure drop before the weather turns, and on some watches a track back function that retraces the route you walked in on. Several come in camouflage or army green. A compass is the other half of navigation and never needs charging, so it is worth carrying one even with a watch on your wrist.
Pick your bottles by season. In summer, a plain bottle or a filter bottle keeps you going between water points. On a frosty morning at the lookout, a hot drink from a thermos or insulated flask goes down well, and it sits in the pack without taking much room.
