Ted Baird

Ted Baird's ten items match his brother Jim's line for line, because the paired format let each duo select gear as a unit, and that makes his list most interesting for what a shared kit has to give up. There is almost no redundancy in it. One axe, one saw, one pot, one tarp between two grown men means every tool is load bearing, and a broken or lost item costs the team its only copy. The bet embedded in this list is that two sets of hands make each single tool productive enough to justify the risk.

What the list buys with those savings is scale. The Lynx 3 foot crosscut is a genuine two person timber tool, the 12x12 tarp covers a camp built for double occupancy, and the fishing stack, 12 by 4 gill net plus mixed monofilament and 30 pound braid, is sized to feed two appetites from the same water. The Toaks 2 liter titanium pot with a bail handle hangs straight over a fire, a small detail that matters twice as much when every meal is shared.