Category: Packrafting
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Shit that works week; again
We’re back! In the season of flash sales and emails, where impulse purchases push companies into the black and fill our closets with things that aren’t strictly necessary, it behooves us to step back and take a break. As I wrote three years ago: “A lot of gear upgrading is malarkey, born of boredom or…
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Getting what you paid
This is how an obsession starts, refinement of a tool whose elegance is only matched by its ubiquity, and the unessentialness of special details. The appeal of knives is easy to grasp, and so too is the dizzying extent to which in the internet age they’ve been fetishized into almost nonexistence. Nothing speaks to the…
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4 days with slime
I don’t expect anyone to believe me. The butte spilled at a right angle, diving from flatness into finger ridges then flowing into mud that twisted leisurely out to the lake, several miles away. Careful belly crawling that put half my face over the edge told me that the sheep had in fact bedded, and…
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DIY spraydeck and the perfect backcountry packraft
I’ve written a lot, indeed too much, about the ideal backcountry packraft, and the extent to which the market has continued to drift further towards putting backcountry and sidecountry whitewater front and center. The new boats are amazing, and will in the next five years help reinvent remote whitewater paddling. But that isn’t my primary…
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Patagonia Nano Air Light Hoody: the fleece killer
Back when I reviewed outdoor gear professionally, which is to say I regularly got stuff for free and was paid for writing about it, and is not to say that ever amounted to a sustainable living, trips like this were as rare as they were lusted after. Outings where conditions were so bad, so consistently…
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My fav
Do you have a favorite place on earth? Me too. As Ed wrote, there are many such places. Especially in early autumn I’ll take a certain corner of the North Fork that nicely bestrides the seasons; deep creek bottoms still firmly shadowed in spring, clear pools whose depths breath winter, and larch stands marching with…
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The best packs of the last five years
On several occasions and in several places I’ve written that one only needs three packs: a daypack, a 40ish liter light framed pack (for light backpacking and heavy day things), and a big load hauler. At no time in the last five years have there been fewer than 10 packs in our household, even if…
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The miracle of 2017
Summer has emphatically arrived in Montana, with a solid week of highs in the 90s and little wind or thunderstorms to break things up, but enough lightning strikes in the broader neighborhood to get one worrying that August might justify its seed with a burly crop of fires. It was in brief an ideal time…
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Floating with the bear; what we’ve learned
Our Double Duck has been one of the essential kid purchases. That one boat can fit all of us, gear for 4+ days, and be under six pounds is remarkable (it’s lighter and packs smaller than the modern Yukon Yak). That said, it has acute limitations which heavier, bigger volume multi-person boats would not; namely…
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Cairn Carto maps
Disclaimer: M knows that the 4th or 5th fastest way to my heart is via a free and nifty-looking trucker hat. A while ago the folks at Cairn Cartographics asked me to take a look at their new Glacier/Waterton map before it went to print. In exchange they gave me a few free maps and…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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