Category: Hiking with ropes
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Basal outdoor skills
A few days ago I was exploring some of the exceptional, hidden limestone cliffs we have locally, and following some mountain goat tracks up a scree slope led to option soloing up broken gullies and sticky slabs. While liebacking off crisp solution pockets and smearing floppy shoes up sharp corrugations my mind went backwards. To…
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Distance learning
There has been a lot of discussion lately concerning the new, or newly rediscovered, hikers and bikers and outdoorspeople the pandemic has brought out of rooms amongst the trees. It is logical, and I see it as an extension of the last decades trend of increased outdoor participation in profile, if not as a percentage…
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Evolution of the Tamarisk: features
Or; as few things as possible.Backpack features don’t make up the majority of a packs weight, but they do make up the overwhelming majority of the weight which is easily negotiable. There is only so much weight to be shed with material (before you sacrifice durability), only so much with suspension or frame elements (before…
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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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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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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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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…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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