Geno, my gear wasn't such high-dollar as that when I started out! My first boots were Nam-era jungle boots, too, army surplus. They blistered the hell out of my feet, so after a couple years of suffering I persuaded my mom to buy me my first pair of Kastingers when I was 15, my first year "on staff" at the Rocky Mountain YMCA.
My first couple of packs were el cheapo models, but again when I was 15 I bought the Skyline and never looked back. I had to replace the aluminum frame 3 years later when I started working for a guide outfit out of Banff and the loads got heavier... the load that broke the old frame weighed 110 pounds on the scale in the stables. Damned if I could hump that much weight at 9000 feet today!
I bought the down bag as a survival measure. I used J.C.Higgins polyfil bags and froze my ass off at nights for a couple years (on the Continental Divide, it gets down into the low 30's or even colder almost every night). I remember it cost over a hundred bucks, which ate up almost my entire pay I got for the summer of 1969. The Galibier's I bought in '71 from the youth hostel shop in Calgary, again I paid almost a whole summer's salary for them but I couldn't have done the job without them. You can't carry loads like that over rock trails and passes without heavy mountain boots, never mind putting on crampons and climbing snow-capped peaks. I still have those boots, too, and they still fit. I wore them last time I climbed Mt. Sarrail in 1996, which was my last summit and probably always will be. I'm getting too old to put up with that kind of agony "for fun" any more.
And yes, my passes looked like that.
