Category: Hiking with ropes
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The dad pack
Over the years I’ve made, and used, many very large backpacks; and while being a firm believer in having huge capacity and moderating packing choices rather than enforcing discipline with a crammed pack, have still occasionally found the fleet coming up short. Our family Isle Royale trip two years ago was the best example; with…
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Challenge Ultraweave abrasion testing
Advanced (read: non-nylon) woven fabrics have spent most of the past decade promising to upend standard performance to weight ratios, especially where backpacks are concerned. Standard and hybrid cuben laminates have been a disappointment in this respect, with inadequate durability and poor balance between performance and cost. The hype and rhetoric associated with hybrid cuben…
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Essential skills: Shoe grommets
These are still my favorite shoes ever, but a whole lot of abrasive desert mud the past few months has revealed a serious design flaw; the webbing lace loop over the instep. By a month ago, three of the four had cut through. This is a big deal, as on these relatively floppy shoes that…
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Essential Skills: Garment zipper replacement
Replacing a zipper, generally in a full zip jacket, is one of the most common and thus, most essential serious gear repairs you’ll do. Serious in this case being roughly defined as requiring more than tape or glue to manage. The zipper on my 4 year old Haglofs Pile hoody recently died, providing a good…
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The B&P mentoring program
Donald Trump has shown, more starkly than almost anything else one could imagine, how deeply structural racial bias and discrimination has been and is, and how it remains in many or even most cases the pivot point for social power in the United States. After the past four years we know more about this, which…
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Patagonia Stretch Terre Planing hoody
I’ve written an enormous amount about windshirts over the past decade, their importance in a layering system, and the associated subtleties. To recap; outdoor clothing in general and wind layers in particular have over the past decade explored the range of breathability and overall weather protection in a comprehensive fashion. Specific to windshirts, the frontier…
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Windshirt dry times mini-study
A crucial attribute of windshirts, particularly for backcountry (which is to say, multiday) use is moisture retention and drying speed. If the most common, indeed only criticism of windshirts as a concept is that they can be viewed as redundant relative to a waterproof hardshell, the rejoinder to that criticism is that unlike a hardshell,…
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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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My favorite shoes
This fall I’ve been wearing little other than the Astral TR1 Merge, and for the sort of walking I like to do these days, they are far and away the best pair of shoes I’ve ever had. While they don’t have a tremendous number of miles on them, almost all of those miles have been…
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Astral again
Last summer I bought what ended up being one of my favorites shoes ever; the Astral Brewer. All of the limitations, and virtues, I noted in my review last summer have held true. The lack of a little extra structure in the sides of the forefoot has gotten me pinched on numerous occasions. The lack…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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