While hiking up the Tuckerman Ravine Trail en route to a winter climb of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington some time ago, I noticed cans of food and other supplies scattered every so often along the snow-covered path.

Beans, a canned ham, spaghetti and meatballs — a veritable smorgasbord of unwieldy, impractical camping provender — had either fallen from someone’s pack or, more likely, been jettisoned.

The answer to this mystery came in a mile or so: Half a dozen college-age guys were struggling to drag a toboggan loaded with enough gear to tackle an Everest expedition.

As our group passed them, I observed they hadn’t yet sacrificed a case of beer.

I think about that crew whenever I pack for an outing — whether a short day hike or a long excursion on land or water. In most cases, a simple rule of thumb prevails: Less is more.

Start with basics: food, clothing, shelter; calculate how long you expect to be away and what kind of conditions to expect; and then try to pack the bare minimum. It can be a tricky balance between comfort and survival.

When we prepared to load for a nearly month-long expedition to Mount Aconcagua on the Chile-Argentina border, the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, our team filled a garage-size room in Santiago with hundreds of pounds of gear, knowing that mules would carry everything as far as base camp. After that, it all went on our backs.

At just under 20,000 feet, I cursed myself for having brought way too much and basically ran out of steam, though, in truth, the weight of my pack was only one of several reasons I bailed before making it to the 22,841-foot summit. Brutal, relentless blizzards certainly were a factor.

Some climbers manage to persevere regardless of what they carried. Around 17,000 feet, I crossed paths with an Australian named Jon Muir (no relation to celebrated outdoorsman John Muir) who had scaled all of the highest summits on each of the seven continents. Strapped to his backpack was a stuffed teddy bear that he photographed on each peak.

Last year, when three friends and I kayaked about 125 miles around remote Lac Manicouagan in central Quebec — so isolated that we saw no other humans the entire voyage — we wound up with a huge surplus of food, mainly because the trip took only about half as long as we predicted. I still have a can of leftover powdered sports drink on top of the refrigerator at home.

As guilty as I’ve been over the years of packing way too much stuff, I’ve never been so ridiculously self-destructive as members of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage.

In his book “True North,” author Bruce Henderson describes what explorers found 13 years later on King William Island next the frozen remains of Franklin’s crew: “… loads of up to two thousand pounds per sledge pulled by British seamen — filled with much useless cargo of their officers. The contents included monogrammed silver plates, blue delftware china, brass curtain rods, the ornaments of ceremonial military dress such as sword belts and gold lace, the silver prize medals of officers, won at university of mathematics and medicine, and even a mahogany writing desk.”

So I guess I can be forgiven for packing spare mittens and leftover Gatorade.