Category: Backpacking
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Things I’ve broken lately
Last month Little Bear and I went backpacking. In and of itself this was not unusual, though it was the first time just the two of us had walked in to camp under a tarp. It was noteworthy because it was February, and we were in shoes, walking over a inch of crusted snow and…
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Granite
I couldn’t hear him breathing; not over the wind, which pushed eerie harmonics around the chimney pipe, and shoved the towers timber frame into groaning against the bolts that held it to the cables that held it to the granite ground. Nor could I hear him breathing over the flood roaring between my head and…
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Evolution of the Tamarisk; side pockets
Side pockets which are easily accessible on the go and large enough to carry a significant percentage of the days gear (water, food, rain gear, maps, etc) are the defining element of a modern backpacking pack. Belt and shoulder strap pockets can play supporting roles here, but my last three years of testing has heavily…
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Clouds of our own
I can find no direct evidence that Theodore Roosevelt ever said that comparison is the thief of joy, but there is in the modern idiom a truthiness to it. If he did say, or more likely write (he penned around 50 books and over 150,000 letters) that, I like to think he was speaking both…
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Kids and Cabins
The other weekend we went to a cabin. It was off in the foothills down a snowy road, away from our (currently snowless) banana belt valley, along a creek that was high enough to have several feet of snow, and low enough to be forested and hidden from alpine harshness. The cabin was small, one…
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Too, much
If you haven’t read Mark Sundeen’s Car Camping, you should. The book, from 2000, appears to be out of print but readily available, and is worthwhile as both a fable of young adult purposeless and as a snapshot of Moab before the latest flood. Sundeen reappeared recently, with an article in Outside about the Mighty…
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Walk in the yard
Mike and I went for a walk in the backyard, and things did not go to plan. Relative to the past two, record setting winters the snow and cold have evolved differently over the past few months. Above 6500′ snow is about average, or a bit above, for at least a few hours in every…
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Great small game hunts of North America (2019 Hunting in review)
In 2019 I spent fewer days far afield, in the wilderness and on big destination hunts, than any year since I started hunting. Nights in a tent backpacking while hunting were in single digits, which is a drastic reduction. When I’ve written these year in hunting posts in the past my predominant recent conclusion has…
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Evolution of the Tamarisk; load carriage
I am delighted to report that the Tamarisk is finished. If by finished I mean that the prototype I completed a month ago and have been testing exhaustively since requires almost no changes. The patterns can now be set in stone, and the road towards production begin. This may not be a short road: I’m…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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