Disclaimer:
We figure you're cool, and nonetheless offer this legal disclaimer: We make every effort to ensure that the information on this website is accurate. However, Backpacking by Bus and Dave and Leslie and Lost Intelligencer and everyone they've ever met or ever will meet are not liable for any inaccuracies, and visitors (that's you) should treat all information on an 'As-Is' basis without any representation or warranty.
Backpacking by Bus copyright 1999-2022 Dave McBee
A grudging member of the Get Lost Magazine / LostIntelligencer consortium
Dave's reBUTTal regarding Bus Pants:
I've actually gotten on buses wearing
- pants in which I've slept for four or five nights;
- pants that are so encrusted with salt that they look tie-dyed in white;
- pants that make the eyes of ev'ybody else on the bus widen visibly even before they actually make eye contact with them;
- pants which have rested upon, or rolled upon, or otherwise wallowed in, things which were doubtlessly parts of animals;
- pants in which I've been sick (these I usually try rinsing out in a stream somewhere);
- pants which I'd been wearing while I was being chased around a tree by a bull elk in heat who thought I might have been looking at his cows;
- pants that I was wearing as I was being checked out rather energetically at four in the morning by not one, but two, cougars (that was the same morning the bull elk was trying to impale me - I shoulda' just thrown those pants out);
- pants with seal brain matter on them
So I don't need Bus Pants: My pants are the very reason you need Bus Pants.
Enhanced Disclaimer (Extended Version):
(ps. Please Don't Ask Me How I Know These Things. Thank you.)
This shit can get you killed; it is inherently dangerous. The reader and/or user of any information received from this site assumes all risk to his or her own damned self. Risks of injury and/or death may include but are not limited to:
Getting smacked by a logging truck, or by debris falling from same, while walking along roads either public or private; being eaten, either by woodsy creatures, or by cannibals lurking along aforementioned roads (I, personally, would prefer the former over the latter, as the former tend not to make a ritual of it, but just get on with it, being ones not prone to wasting meat); being severely shredded by a rabid raccoon;
Worse yet, a normally rational bear might decide that the bag of gorp that you’re nibbling on in your tent in the middle of the night is a much more attractive meal that you (oh, the insult of it all!) and rip through the walls of said tent to snatch said gorp, having torn you three ways to Sunday in the process, only to leave you, sans gorp, to slowly bleed out;
You might suffer a horrible, vaudevillian rope accident while trying, in the middle of the night, to add a bag of gorp to your already hanging food bag;
Having a large tree fall across your tent in a windstorm (if you’re lucky you’ll be asleep, but if the wind’s that bad you probably won’t be); see also: “being Maytagged”;
Being Maytagged (why keep you in suspense?), as in, when your tent is torn loose from its moorings with you in it, and you, shrouded and entrapped within both sleeping bag and nylon cocoon what until recently been tent, tumbling blindly and helplessly across mountain top (and this is why I never camp on a mountain top), into rocks, into the now easily-offended bear, or over cliff;
Cliffs (on that subject): falling over edges thereof, or being at the bottom of one when any fragment of varying dimensions comes a’callin’;
Rocks (on that topic): for reasons known only to them, and physics, they, having resided peacefully and seemingly motionlessly for weeks, or millennia, will suddenly and arbitrarily decide to change position, with all due principles of mass and velocity and such, and if you happen to be occupying any point between the initial point or points, and the new point or points—even if you’re standing in the middle of a trail, minding your own business—said rocks can inflict sudden and incontrovertible damage ranging from “road rash” to having a limb torn off to being squashed like a bug. Nothing personal.
You might get lost. Starve. You might pick the wrong berry. Or the right mushroom. You might contract an incurable, debilitating intestinal parasite;
You might step on a hornet nest and get stung multiple times (I had a friend who got fifty); east of the Cascade Crest, there are rattlesnakes;
You might get so freaked out by the possibilities that you might simply die of fright the first time a ground squirrel bares its teeth at you. But, hey, do you want to live forever?