Category: Tech
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Patagonia STP Hoody; final thoughts
I’ve been using the Stretch Terre Planing hoody almost daily, and almost exclusively, for 18 months. It has proved to be as ideal a windshirt as I can imagine, without falling into hyperbolic hopes concerning future fabrics. As I detailed in the post last year, my windshirt quest has over the past decade consisted in…
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The DY Special: on the water
It is an easy cliche that gear matters less than will when it comes to executing a given outdoor activity, one whose heart is in the right, but ignores many practical details. We now have eight boats on the premises, but neither the four packrafts nor the whitewater canoe nor the freightor canoe nor the…
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Fashion and the delams
Challenge’s Ultraweave fabrics have seen impressively broad acceptance this winter, with companies as diverse as Pa’lante and Stone Glacier using it, and companies like MLD and Seek Outside moving to make it a core part of their pack line ups. As I found out this past summer, the specs are impressive, and the marketing equally…
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The DY Special, prelude
In early September last year I was cruising Craigslist for random boats, as one does, and saw something scary. I kept coming back over the next week, and eventually told myself that were the thing still for sale when I came back from a hunting trip, I would call about it. There was little doubt…
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Petzl Swift RL review
Montana at the start of winter is, to state the obvious, dark. On December 22nd we have 8 and a half hours of daylight, and by today, over a month later, we only have an hour more. Provided you can tolerate the cold and have enough interests, there is never a shortage of things to…
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Bark River Micro Canadian re-scale
For the past four years my Micro Canadian has always been one of my very favorite objects. It blends practicality and elegance in a way which few other categories of things can. Restlessness, and extreme specialization (river rescue), are the only real reasons I’ve used anything else. To address the former I bought a Bark…
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A daypack
After being so impressed with Ultraweave I naturally wanted to make several/a number of bags out of it. My affinity for burlier pack fabrics goes back to the very beginning, both because I know that many of my favored activities shred lighter pack fabrics, and (more relevantly) because I have an aesthetic preference for things,…
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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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Werner Shuna v. Corryvrecken
This past winter I finally got a new paddle. My almost 10 year old 210cm Shuna is still going strong, with the many chips on the blade edges and loosening of the joints not really making a substantive impact amongst the rapids, but I both wanted something new and shiny, and wanted to have two…
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Finding bargain used gear
Outdoor gear is expensive. Perhaps not by the standards of motorized sports, but certainly compared to jogging or birding or reading books. Since becoming firmly established in Montana a decade ago I have been cursed by the perceived necessity of cultivating and maintaining equipage for a wide range (mountain biking, alpine and nordic skiing, snowshoing,…
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