The Gear I Use the Least Costs the Most – and It’s All My Fault

Is your best gear mothballed in a wardrobe patiently awaiting an adventure that ‘deserves it’? Jess realised her good intentions were wasting her gear’s best years and making them worthless.

I own a $450 rain jacket that’s spent more time hanging in my wardrobe than keeping me dry.

This isn’t because it’s a bad rain jacket. It is, objectively, a very good rain jacket. It has fancy fabrics. Zips in places I didn’t know needed zips. It knows more about surviving storms than I know about surviving Tuesdays.

But if it starts raining while I’m on my morning walk, daily commute, or making the 400m dash from the shops to the car?

I get wet.

Like a medieval peasant.

I have the technology to prevent this. I’ve paid hundreds of dollars specifically to not experience being cold and wet. Yet somehow my brain has decided that this jacket is reserved for important rain. Expedition rain. Big-mountain rain. ‘I am standing on a windswept ridge questioning my life choices’ rain.

The North Face Dryzzle on an adventure I actually deemed worthy

Not ‘I need to walk 400 metres to the supermarket’ rain.

And I know I’m not alone.

The outdoor industry has convinced us that buying the right gear is the gateway to adventure. And to some extent, it’s true. Good gear makes hard things easier. A reliable tent, a warm sleeping bag, and waterproof layers turn miserable nights outdoors into magic ones.

But somewhere along the way, many of us started treating our gear less like tools and more like museum pieces. We buy the best. But then we protect it from being used. Which, when you think about it, is completely ridiculous.

Good gear unlocks more stoked-out moments like this!

My Museum of Unused Adventure Equipment

Growing up, my mum had the plates.

You know the ones.

They lived behind glass doors in a cabinet. The beautiful, special plates. Plates that existed exclusively for an imaginary future dinner party attended by people important enough to deserve nice plates.

Normal dinners happened on the everyday plates while the fancy plates watched on, perpetually unused. I spent years wondering: what exactly is the threshold for a ‘special enough’ meal?

Royal visit? Use the plates.

Winning the lottery? Use the plates.

A Tuesday night when someone cooked a particularly good lasagne? Absolutely not. The lasagne had not earned the plates.

Somehow, many years later, I’ve recreated my mum’s glass cabinet except mine is filled with hiking gear. It’s more of a series of messy tubs than a proper display, but you get it.

The fancy tent.

The premium hiking poles.

The beautiful enamel mug I bought as a souvenir after an incredible trip.

They’re my adventure plates waiting for the perfect expedition to be planned. The problem is, adventure has a funny habit of arriving disguised as an ordinary weekend, and they’re never the ones that get packed.

Why does my cheapest gear end up here while my best gear stays at home?

The $900 Tent That Rarely Leaves My Shed

I have beautiful tents from Big Agnes, Gossamer Gear, and Southern Cross.

They were expensive, but they’re high quality, durable, and reliable.

My Big Agnes Copper Spur on the Jatbula Trail, an adventure worthy of the best, apparently

But you want to know which tent I use the most? Yep, the cheap ‘crappy’ one. My 2P Naturehike that has been treated like garbage and refuses to die. It has holes. Actual holes that I’ve never even bothered to fix, so I just get wet every trip.

It’s been rained on, blown around, thrown into bags, and loaned to friends. Basically treated exactly how outdoor equipment should be treated. And honestly? I love it.

For some reason, my Naturehike tent came with me to the Faroe Islands (yes the pole is about to break through the fly)

Whenever friends ask to borrow gear, they always do something interesting. They ask for the cheapest, oldest, most battered option. They don’t want the $900 shelter that I’ve carefully packed, cleaned, dried, and emotionally protected. Nobody wants to be responsible for destroying someone else’s precious gear.

But the dodgy Naturehike?

Everyone’s happy. If they accidentally snap a pole, rip the fly, or put a new hole in it, nobody’s going to be upset. They know I don’t care, so they don’t care. The stress disappears. The tent becomes what a tent is supposed to be: a thing that exists to be used.

The Naturehike has also been to Tassie because I’m not scared to lend it out

My Hiking Poles Are Basically Wall Art

Then there are my Gossamer Gear carbon hiking poles. These things are gorgeous. They’re absurdly light.

They feel like they were designed by someone who looked at a normal hiking pole and thought, ‘Yes, but what if we made this feel like holding a cloud?’

Displaying my pristine hiking pole like a prized samurai sword

They’re also terrifying.

Every time I take them outside, I imagine the exact moment they will snap.

A little stumble.

A weird angle.

A rock that looks friendly but secretly has a personal vendetta against carbon fibre.

So they stay home.

I’d complain that I’ve purchased hiking poles that are too beautiful to actually hike with. But I didn’t even pay for the poles – I’m just scared for the day I break them and might have to replace them.

At this point maybe I should just concede defeat and wall mount them. Put a small spotlight above them: ‘Here lie the world’s lightest hiking poles. They never achieved their true potential, but they look great here’. Dumb.

I took this random heavy rental pole to a Mongolian summit instead, figure that out

The Psychology of Saving the Good Stuff

Turns out there’s a reason we do this. Psychologists call it loss aversion: the pain of losing something often feels worse than the pleasure of using it. Using expensive gear creates a tiny bit of fear.

What if it breaks?

What if it gets stolen?

What if I scratch it?

The weird result is that we sometimes protect our possessions so carefully that we reduce their actual value.

A $900 tent that shelters you through a hundred storms is cheap. A $100 tent that lives permanently in the back of your cupboard is expensive.

Expensive isn’t the enemy. Unused gear is. And my ugly mismatched gear wins every time.

I can very safely say I’ve got my money’s worth and made countless memories in this Kathmandu jacket

The Gear We Actually Love

The funny thing is, the equipment that develops the most meaning is rarely the pristine stuff.

It’s the battered mug with the chipped edge. The tent that’s survived storms. The backpack with the mysterious stain you can no longer explain. The jacket that smells permanently like a campfire.

Adventure gear becomes valuable through use. It’s the scratches and repairs that turn objects into stories. Nobody gathers around camp saying, ‘Remember that time my tent stayed in perfect condition and nothing bad happened?’.

Nobody cares.

The best gear is the gear that collects evidence. Evidence that you went somewhere.

Evidence that the weather was terrible. Evidence that you made questionable decisions and survived them.

Real value comes from use, wear, and memories – not package-perfect condition

We need to stop protecting our gear from adventure.

The outdoor industry loves telling us that the right purchase unlocks the outdoors. As a casual team member at Anaconda, this exact sentence came out of my mouth last week… and the week before that.

But maybe the opposite is true.

Maybe the most important thing we can buy is something we’re willing to abuse.

The gear we trust is rarely the gear we admire from a distance. It’s actually the stuff we grab without thinking. It’s the stuff covered in mud that we lend to friends and don’t worry about. The whole point of outdoor gear isn’t for it to remain perfect… it’s to help us stay safe and tread new ground – and it should absolutely break before we do.

My Mum’s special plates were protected from chips, cracks, and scratches. But they were also protected from being plates.

And that’s what we’re doing with our expensive outdoor gear. We’re protecting our tents from camping and our rain jackets from rain. It’s absurd.

Your sleeping bag isn’t a special plate. Nobody is coming over to inspect whether it still looks new. Take it outside. Let it smell like smoke. Let it get a little dirty. Let it become the piece of gear you’d actually be sad to lose. That’s when it really becomes worth what you paid for it.

No ‘mum’s plates’ mentality here, but I’ll rinse her old fleece until it falls apart