Category: Bikes and biking
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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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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…
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A decade in the outdoors
7 things that happened in the past decade; equipment, trends, and the ways the two intersect to create human experience. The Alpacka booty The technological advancement of the decade is, for outdoor adventure, without question the packraft. 10 years ago the state of the art was the above. Today, boat shapes make that level of…
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Top 5 backpacks of the past 10 years
The close of a decade approaches which, if you’re not stocking it with thinly context’d affiliate links, isn’t so bad an arbitrary cause to re-examine what has happened in the past 10 years. Lists focus the mind, and the fingers. The best of these use material goods as a vehicle to examine culture, and since…
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The vexatious Airshed
Windshirts are complicated, because their job is a difficult one, and an important one. Patagonia’s Airshed, a pullover shirt made from the outer fabric of the Nano Air series, has been around for a few years. The lack of a hood, concerns over durability, and the expense put me off for a while, but Max’s…
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Shit that works: MSR tent stakes
Back in July I seized on a weather window and probable lack of snow and did a big alpine traverse in the Bob. Early summer in the alpine, especially in the limestone reaches of the Bob that hold water in mysterious places, generally mean bugs. So when set my camp the first night, in a…
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Shit that works: Rab Pulse hoody
The newish variations of ~100 gram/meter poly baselayers might be my most loved innovation in gear out of the last five years. As someone whose larger challenge with thermoregulation almost always has to do with managing sweat, and rather rarely with outright heat generation (or more exactly, lack of it), the way these thin fabrics…
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Shit that works: the Rocketbox
Our Yakima Rocketbox turns 20 this year. Over that time, few other items have been as consistently useful when it comes to outdoor adventure. The US is set up for cars, with the overwhelming majority of prospective destinations not lending themselves to non-private motorized transportation. If in places like Alaska the wilderness can make hard…
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Introducing North Fork Packraft straps
The astute will have noticed months ago that I’m in the process of launching a pack company, North Fork. I’m pleased to report that it is going very well indeed, in spite of no overt public evidence of progress. Two years ago I sketched out a detailed idea of the two packs I wanted to…
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Astral Brewer 2.0; the hiking review
Shoe weight matters. Read all this stuff if you haven’t recently, the most singular point being that the guy with the lightest shoes was the only one who made it all 1000k. When I was just getting into serious backpacking, about a decade ago, I got the idea that one ought to have a footwear…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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