Welcome to episode 137 of the first 40 miles.

If you're new to backpacking or if you're hopelessly in love with someone who wants you to love backpacking,

then this podcast is for you. We'll talk about the

essentials, how to lighten your load, and how to make the most of your time on the

trail. I'm your host Heather Legler, and'm Josh Legler and this is the first 40 miles

Today on the first 40 miles how do you find people to hike with? We'll play a fun game today to see if we can answer that question.

Then we'll review a 3 liter water storage reservoir that has a unique blasting feature.

On today's backpack hack of the week, have you ever made up constellation names just to impress

your hiking mates?

Not only is that hilarious, but it's also avoidable, and we'll show you

how.

Then a little trail wisdom from a man who wished to live deliberately.

All this, and that's about it.

Today on the first 40 miles.

We get questions similar to this one pretty often on our Facebook page and sometimes on Twitter.

This was from Diana a couple months ago and she said like to go

to go hiking and now it's just her

and she'd like to go hiking but she'd like to do it with others

and was wondering how do I find people that I can meet up with to go on hikes. And I don't know that we have the perfect

answer for that and certainly we haven't really experienced that challenge personally because we have these four kids that we take with us a lot,

and we have our backpacking buddies on our annual trip, you know, a good half a dozen of these

guys that we go out on backpacking trips with.

...