Building a Trip Gear List That Actually Fits the Trip

A gear list that's identical for a two-hour trip with two people and an eight-hour trip with eight isn't really doing its job. The site's own Caving Gear Checklist Generator is built to scale with the actual inputs — trip type, duration, and party size — and this article walks through exactly how, running the real gearChecklist() function rather than describing it in the abstract, including one detail about how it scales that's more honest than it might first look.

Worked example: a five-hour horizontal trip, party of four

Run a horizontal trip, 5 hours, 4 people, through the generator, and it returns five categories. Essentials (per person) is a fixed nine-item list — helmet, primary light, backup light, oversuit, boots, gloves, whistle, first-aid kit, and a trip plan left with someone outside — the same nine items regardless of trip length or group size, because every individual caver needs all nine of them on essentially any trip. Lighting scales to the party: "4 primary headlamps (1 per person)," "4 backup lights (1 per person)," and "2 spare battery sets (group spares, 1 set per 2 people)" — that last figure is Math.ceil(4 / 2), the tool's ratio for group-shared spare batteries. Food & Water scales to duration: "3 x 500ml water per person" and "2 snack/meal per person," which are Math.ceil(5 / 2) and Math.ceil(5 / 3) respectively. Group Safety adds "1 first-aid kit(s) (1 per 6 people)" — Math.ceil(4 / 6), still just one kit at this party size — plus a fixed emergency shelter and spare cordage. Horizontal trips add a final, short category: knee pads, and optional elbow pads for tight crawls. Total: 19 items across the five categories.

Why lighting and safety scale by ratio, not one-for-one

Notice that spare batteries and first-aid kits don't scale one-for-one with party size the way primary and backup lights do — and that's a deliberate, sensible modelling choice rather than an oversight. A primary and a backup light are personal safety items; everyone genuinely needs their own, so those scale directly, 1:1, with party size. Spare batteries and first-aid kits, by contrast, are shared group resources: one spare battery set can reasonably cover two people's contingency needs without either going without, and a single first-aid kit is normally sufficient for a party of up to six rather than needing one per person. The ratios encode a real judgment about which gear is personal and which is shared, and it's worth understanding that distinction rather than just reading the numbers — the logic behind carrying enough spare light capacity specifically, worked with real runtime hours rather than just "how many sets," gets its own detailed treatment in this site's companion article on headlamp runtime.

Same trip, wet instead of horizontal

Change only the trip type to "wet," keeping the same 5-hour, 4-person trip, and the first four categories — Essentials, Lighting, Food & Water, Group Safety — come back completely unchanged, exactly as before. Only the trip-specific final category changes: instead of knee pads, a wet trip adds a wetsuit or drysuit layer under the oversuit, neoprene socks, waterproof containers for spare batteries and food, and an extra dry bag for a full spare clothing layer — four items instead of horizontal's two, bringing the total to 21. Run the same trip as "vertical" instead, and the trip-specific category swaps again, this time to SRT rope gear — harness, descender, two ascenders, cowstails, rope protectors, and a party-scaled rescue/haul kit — six items, for a total of 23. The generator names this gear so a checklist for a rope trip is actually complete; it doesn't explain how any of it is rigged or used, which, as covered in this site's dedicated article on the subject, is learned from a club and an instructor, never from a gear list.

Why the trip plan itself is on the personal essentials list

One entry in the fixed nine-item Essentials category is worth calling out specifically, because it's easy to skim past next to helmets and boots: "Trip plan left with someone outside the cave." It's on the checklist as a piece of essential gear because, in every meaningful sense, it functions like one — it's the thing that turns a group running late into a group with a rescue already being organised, rather than into a slow, uncertain drift toward someone eventually noticing. The full logic behind that item, including what a callout process actually does with the information you leave, is covered in more depth in this site's article on planning a first trip; the checklist generator's job is simply to make sure it's never the one thing that gets forgotten while everyone focuses on the more visibly physical items.

A checklist is not a rigging spec, especially for the vertical category

It's worth being explicit about the vertical/SRT category specifically, since it's the one most likely to be mistaken for more than it is. Six named items — harness, descender, ascenders, cowstails, rope protectors, a rescue kit — tell you what a competent vertical caver's kit bag generally contains for a trip involving rope. They say nothing about how any of it is inspected, fitted, rigged, or used on an actual pitch, and they're not meant to. A checklist answers "what's in the bag"; the far more consequential questions — is this specific harness still within its service life, is this rope rigged correctly for this specific pitch, is this particular caver actually trained to use this gear — are answered by inspection habits and hands-on training covered in this site's dedicated article on single rope technique, never by a packing list.

Adjusting the list for what the tool can't know

A generated list is a strong, sensible baseline, but it's built from general trip-type, duration, and party-size logic, not from knowledge of your specific cave, the current season, or your specific group's known needs. A system with a documented bad-air history calls for a gas meter the generic list doesn't know to add. A trip into a decorated or ecologically sensitive passage might call for specific decontamination gear a local club has asked visitors to carry. A member of the group with a known medical need might carry something entirely personal to them that no generator could anticipate. Treating the generated list as the first ninety percent of packing, with a final pass for your specific trip's actual particulars, gets more out of the tool than expecting it to be complete on its own.

Packing the list, not just generating it

A generated list tells you what to bring; how it actually goes into the bag is a separate, practical skill worth a short word here. Caving packs are generally loaded with a rough priority order in mind: things you genuinely won't need until an emergency — the spare dry layer, the emergency shelter — go in first, at the bottom, since they're the least likely to need mid-trip access. Food, water, and spare batteries, needed periodically through the trip, sit more accessibly in the middle. Anything you might need at a moment's notice — a whistle, a small first-aid kit, a backup light — stays somewhere genuinely quick to reach, often in a pocket rather than buried in the main pack at all, since fumbling through a full bag in a tight, awkward passage to find an emergency item defeats much of the point of carrying it. None of this is complicated, but it's the difference between a checklist that's merely complete and a pack that's actually usable underground.

The honestly surprising part: total item count barely moves with duration or party size

Here's the detail worth being upfront about rather than glossing over: run that same horizontal trip at 2 hours instead of 5, or with a party of 10 instead of 4, and the total item count stays exactly 19. Duration and party size change the quantities written inside several items — how many water bottles, how many spare battery sets, how many first-aid kits — but they don't add or remove any category or list entry itself. Trip type is the only input that changes the total item count, because it's the only input that adds or removes an entire category. That's not a limitation hiding in the tool; it's an accurate reflection of how a packing list actually works: the structure of what you need is set by what kind of trip it is, while duration and headcount scale how much of each thing, not how many different things.

Framed that way, "19 items" and "23 items" for the same 5-hour, 4-person trip in different disciplines is telling you something real and worth internalising: a vertical trip isn't a horizontal trip with more water bottles, it's a horizontal trip's entire baseline plus a genuinely separate category of specialised equipment on top.

Using this for your own trip

Plug your own trip's actual type, duration, and party size into the Caving Gear Checklist Generator and you'll get the same kind of breakdown worked through above, scaled to your numbers rather than the examples here. It's a genuinely useful starting checklist — deterministic, consistent, and scaled sensibly by real inputs — but it's still a starting point, not a complete word on a specific cave system's quirks; a qualified leader or your local club will know particulars — a known hazard, a permit requirement, a gear convention specific to that system — that a generic tool can't. For a fuller view of how gear needs sit alongside lighting margin and layering across a range of trip lengths, the Trip Planning Reference puts several of these figures side by side.

The takeaway

A gear list generator that's worth trusting should be able to show its work, and this one does: nine fixed essentials, lighting and safety items scaled by real ratios, food and water scaled by duration, and a trip-type-specific category that's the only thing actually changing the total count. Understanding which parts of the list move, and why, makes it easier to trust the parts that don't, and easier to spot the handful of trip-specific additions a generator was never going to know to make on its own.