Category: Tech
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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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Marin San Quentin tire clearance
It is not really possible to have too much tire clearance on a mountain bike. Clearance adds versatility, with tires being the fastest and most drastic way to alter the performance of your bike, and especially in the mud, excessive clearance has little downside. The one significant downside, the demand clearance places on chainstay length…
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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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Black Diamond Hilight review
I’ve used the 2 person Hilight quite a bit in the last year, with performance quite as I expected it to be, perhaps one or two things surprising. This makes for something of a dull write up; it is a quality tent, well conceived, with defined limits. There a few things that could be done…
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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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Montane Allez Micro Hoodie review
Not necessarily a huge amount to say here: the Allez Micro is a hooded quarter zip baselayer shirt, made from Polartec High Efficiency, a fabric which was one of the very best innovations of the past decade. I reviewed the Patagonia Capilene 4 hoody back in the day, when it was one of the very…
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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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Good shoes
There is an emerging consensus is that 23% of the land on earth (excluding Antarctica) remains “unmodified by the direct effect of human activities.” In a similar vein, the mass of humans on earth is, currently, “an order of magnitude higher than the mass of all wild mammals combined. ” Thus it seems in retrospect…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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