Expo Personal Gear List

First time on Expo: What should I take? Read on... No apologies are made for the simplistic approach, and no responsibility is accepted for errors or omissions ;-) Make sure you have at least the Essentials; consider taking the Extras for a more pleasant time, but don't fret if you can't get them. The Excessive sections are for the gearists...

Lightweight stuff is good so as it makes carrying all your caving and camping gear to top camp significantly less epic/tedious. Two of everything (pit, karrimat, utensils, clothes) reduces the amount of stuff you have to keep carrying up and down the mountain.

Gear-tape - labelling

It is almost essential (for caving generally, but particularly for Expo) to settle on a particular combination of colours of electrical insulation tape, and label absolutely everything you own with the stuff. To see which combinations are available, have a look those already used at recent gear tape colours.

Tape everything, not just your caving gear; while one karabiner looks much like another, it's equally true that one karrimat looks much like another. And especially your phone, phone cable, charger, charger-cable, laptop, mouse, mug/plate/cutlery - essentially anything you want to be reasonably sure to get back.

Clothes

Expo can be hot, cold, wet or dry, or (more usually) all of these in rapid succession and combination! It can be really dank and cold (cold fog or snowing!) in the bivi.

Camping equipment

Caving equipment

Phone

This is quite a bit more involved that you might wish. We blame the weird way that phone companies fail to manage GPS data properly.

Miscellaneous

Original by Earl Merson (1999); edited and updated David Loeffler (2003), Edvin, Duncan, OllyM (2008) and Wookey (2014) and Philip (2018)