Category: Tech
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A decade in the outdoors
7 things that happened in the past decade; equipment, trends, and the ways the two intersect to create human experience. The Alpacka booty The technological advancement of the decade is, for outdoor adventure, without question the packraft. 10 years ago the state of the art was the above. Today, boat shapes make that level of…
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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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Forward the consumer
I have profoundly mixed memories of my first Outdoor Retailer. The barely 1 year old Little Bear had an ear infection come on while we were hiking in Glacier just before, was cranky on the drive down to SLC through the night, and the next night required a hasty visit to first urgent care and…
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Black Diamond Hilight snap judgment
15 years ago I bought the first generation of the Black Diamond Firstlight. It was a remarkable thing for the time, a silnylon floor and ripstop Epic fly which, with the simple design, added up to an almost unprecendentedly low total weight and small packed size. We used it a bunch for 7 years until…
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The vexatious Airshed
Windshirts are complicated, because their job is a difficult one, and an important one. Patagonia’s Airshed, a pullover shirt made from the outer fabric of the Nano Air series, has been around for a few years. The lack of a hood, concerns over durability, and the expense put me off for a while, but Max’s…
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Shit that used to work: Black Diamond Zippo
As I mentioned back in the spring, I love a good used gear sale, and most of all, love unearthing a well used, even thrashed, classic backpack. These provide both design time capsules and occasionally profound insight into how packs hold up over truly extended use. That being said, I was beyond excited to find…
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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…
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Properly hiding ones paddle
A few days ago I read Dan’s account of a trip in the Caribou Mountains of BC. Highly recommended, and guaranteed to fire the imagination. What astonishes me is that both Dan and Will completed the trip, with hours of monstrous, worst-case bushwacking, with their paddles strapped to the outsides of their packs. Dan lost…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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