SheriffJoe;
Good afternoon to you sir, I hope the day's been treating you well and life in general is going where you need it to be.
Honestly since this is the backpacking section, I'll admit that my backpack hunts are usually hours from the pickup anymore in the BC mountains and not typically measured in days if life goes according to plan.
When we used to go backpack camping, I started carrying a Coglan's Sierra Saw, but looking at the new ones now I'm not sure they're still a Japanese made steel in them or not thus can't say about the quality. We had occasion to find a small tomahawk of some use then too, after trying to do some batoning with a big knife and not being entirely satisfied.
I began to make my own tomahawks then, reshaping roofing and drywall hatchets into something lighter and more useful - for the intended purpose I had in mind.
This photo shows a few of them with a Swedish Frost hatchet with longer handle on the left and a Mann Hunter's Pride hatchet on the right. I'll note the Mann weighs in at 1lb 3.8oz.
The one second from the left was my go to pack and hunting tomahawk until this past summer when it went to a new home that didn't have a tomahawk for backpack use.
That gave me an excuse to try to grind out a new design that had been running around in my head for a bit, so now the top one gets to sit in the day pack when I'm wandering around on the mountains behind the house.
The top one is 13oz on the nose, including a sheath and the bottom one is an even 1lb without a sheath. It has a heavier fiddleback maple handle while the top one is hickory.
The top one did open up one each whitetail and mulie buck ribcage for me this fall and it did work just fine for that.
Lastly, I'll note that in getting back into fooling with axes in general this summer, I found that some Swedish cutting axes were hollow ground from the factory - Hultafors Bruks from the '60's? That caused me to go down the rabbit hole of trying hollow grinds on a couple axes I'm working on, one is like an Arvika axe style head, but until I knock down a couple Ponderosas in the yard I'll not be able to test it on greener wood.
The other that I hollow ground was the light carry tomahawk and while it's still early in testing, it surely does a quick job on small poplar and pine trees that have fallen across the old skidder roads we use to get to the trail heads.
Besides the cutting, I prefer a tomahawk for pounding tent or guy rope pegs, but for sure one has to understand that it's nearly an additional pound in the pack and depending upon the distance, elevation change and terrain, it may not be worth it to carry.
Hopefully that was useful for you or someone out there this afternoon sir. All the best to you this fall and good luck on your remaining hunts.
Dwayne