Category: Skiing
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Seek Outside Divide 4500 by the numbers
This is generation two of Seek Outside’s backpacking/all purpose pack, the Divide. Specs on this one are ~4500 cubic inches. 35 inches of unrolled height along the back panel, 32 inches of effective height (shown in first photo, below) with two rolls of the roll top. Top circumference is 40.5 inches, bottom is 36. The…
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Shills and ambassadors
Seek Outside BT2. Didn’t pay for the mid, and Seek Outside fast-tracked a prototype nest so we didn’t get munched by sandflies last winter. Such treatment is both a privilege and a burden. Getting free stuff is awesome. And not primarily because you don’t have to buy it yourself, though as someone who went down a not…
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Oversnow travel tools overview and update
This is a brief revisitation and update of an article I wrote for BackpackingLight three years ago. We’re having a proper winter here in NW Montana, and having Little Bear has significantly changed when and how we go outside, so discussing recent changes in the tools for oversnow travel seems relevant. It’s worth emphasizing that…
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The Best Snowshoe binding yet
Snowshoes have two reasons to exist: miles which cannot be skied due to terrain, circumstances, or lack of skill; and trips where the snow miles are exceeded by non-snow miles, as snowshoes should not require anything other than ideal hiking shoes. Because this second reason accounts for the overwhelming majority of my snowshoe use, I…
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610 pack, the evolution
My best, conservative, estimate is that since 2009 I’ve built roughly 30 backpacks, and owned a further ~20, which were either purchased retail or given to me for review or prototyping. This is a large number, especially considering that at the moment we only (!) have eleven packs in house, a mere two of which…
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Forest Service cabins of Montana
You should know about the forest service cabins in Montana. Retired patrol cabins, ranger stations, fire lookouts, and private residences which have gone into public hands, they’re one of the great secrets of public lands recreation in North America. Why am I writing about these cabins now? Because the Forest Services takes reservations a half…
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Little Bear gets indoctrination
And then we saw the moose. Clouds had rolled in between 2am, when I went out to piss off the porch, and a little after 9am, when we left the cabin. In the middle of the night the milky way had stretched from behind my shoulder out to down near my toes, my urine had…
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Tips for winter
The essential guidelines I put down four years ago are still a good foundation, but with the snow beginning to pile up it’s a good time to mention some specifics which have proven constant from then to now. The most useful tip for being outside in the cold is to HTFU (harden the fuck up). …
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The 2015 pack fleet
I’ve been doing the pack thing for a while now. After owning and especially building so many none of them can retain nostalgia for long, with any and every little detail subject to scrutiny, revision, and destruction. That said, the novelty of cutting and sewing has also waned significantly in the last year, and it’s…
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The 610 pack, diaper version
I’ve made this pack, or one to fulfill the same role, 6 or 8 times now. Most for my own use, a few for friends. It continually evolves. The most recent version got axed because the back panel taper got too funky and resulted in a subtle narrowing pinch point in the middle of the…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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