Category: Backpacking
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Grand Juan Honaker logistics
This is a logical extension of classic loop we traveled five years ago; down the Honaker trail, packraft the San Juan River to Grand Gulch, and hike that and some association of side canyons back to the mesa top. Riding a bike from any of those trailheads down the highway and Moki dugway to the…
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Essential skills: garment side seams
A wee bit of sewing know-how is handy in the outdoor realm. And not just for fixing stuff, though that is a subject I will get to over the next month, but for the slightly more advanced (conceptually, if not always skills-wise) realm of modifying gear. Today we will confine ourselves to the introductory topic…
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Black Diamond Hilight review
I’ve used the 2 person Hilight quite a bit in the last year, with performance quite as I expected it to be, perhaps one or two things surprising. This makes for something of a dull write up; it is a quality tent, well conceived, with defined limits. There a few things that could be done…
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The next year
I did not much miss travel this past year. Or, to be more precise, I was more than content with staying in Montana (two trips excepted), and ran out of both energy and creativity before I ran out of options. As I think about 2021, my eye keeps coming back to the home state, and…
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Progression 2020
If 2020 was a merciless device which distilled everything already there, into a cold cutting clear hypnotic as overnight ice on an alpine lake, what I learned in the past 12 months was that I did not lack for time. I lack for energy, and for the headspace to use what time I have as…
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Things I loved this year
Add.; Not long after publishing this yesterday evening I received a text, and then an email, stating that extra vaccine doses would be available to direct care workers outside hospitals and clinics, in other words, me. So I woke up in the dark and waited in line at the fairgrounds and got Moderna stuck into…
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Marin San Quentin adventure build
Back in September I bought a new mountain bike. This ended up being of note for a couple reasons, but I should first cover why I bought this bike, and why I almost did not buy a bike at all. While M and I generally feel quite wealthy day to day, this year in particular,…
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The packout
The snow was crunchy, crisp toe snagging crust over three inches of powder, freeze dried into substancelessness by weeks of sunny days, cold nights and wind. But I saw the buck before I heard him. Antlers moving through gaps, left to right, the faint, neat snap of hooves echoing behind. It was the penultimate evening…
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The death of Purple
I’ve cracked three nalgene bottles in the past two decades. The first was a classic 1 liter in milky plastic, before lexan invaded REI and college lecture halls. It was ancient and wrapped in duct tape, and split radially when I dropped it in the Sylvan Lake parking lot, which was sad. I think I…
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Montane Allez Micro Hoodie review
Not necessarily a huge amount to say here: the Allez Micro is a hooded quarter zip baselayer shirt, made from Polartec High Efficiency, a fabric which was one of the very best innovations of the past decade. I reviewed the Patagonia Capilene 4 hoody back in the day, when it was one of the very…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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