Author Archives: henryromer

Black Diamond Mega Light Project – Part 1

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BD ML MORA

Late fall in the Pacific Northwest brings rain and darkness.  It is a good time for projects.  This one modifies a Black Diamond Mega Light sil-nylon pyramid tent to add tie downs, wind guys, insect netting and wet weather features, while still preserving it’s usefulness for winter snow camping.  And of course, doing so with minimal added weight.

So here is the Mega Light, practice pitched on a nice spring day in Mt. Rainier National Park.  The basic tent weighs only 25 oz. and can be pitched hanging from an overhead line or with a center pole.  You can use a pair of ski or trekking poles with a supplied coupling accessory, or the 11.4 oz. carbon fiber sectional pole that comes with the tent.  Tent weight of 2 lbs. 5 oz. for over 50 sq. ft. of interior space and 65 inches of head room is pretty light.

Still some customization can produce  an even more versatile, big four season  tent, in the range of comfort light packing. Continue reading →

Should Fire be a 10th Essential?

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FireYou’re lost. You’re cold.  You’re wet. You’re not going to get out of the woods soon.  What’s your plan?  Of course, you need to build a fire!  Good idea?  Bad idea?

Making an emergency fire has long been one of the pillars of wilderness survival response.  The ability to do this is codified in the Mountaineers 10 Essentials List.  After watching big chunks of the west burn during our exceptionally dry summer, it might be time for a “reboot”. Continue reading →

GPS trials

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Garmin or Android

Oregon 400i – Samsung Galaxy SIII – Oregon 600

A lot our adventures leave developed trails and follow informal boot paths, or sometimes no paths at all. Our terrain is frequently heavily wooded or high relief, so that visual navigation is restricted. We use our GPS’s a lot.

I have always used a handheld Garmin unit.  But lot of my friends have switched to GPS applications on their smart phones.   I wondered if I was missing something.    So this spring I put the smart phone GPS app approach to some real world testing. Continue reading →

Popcorn!

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PopcornI was reading an old back country cookbook recently and came across the concept of making popcorn in the woods.  For some reason, the idea had never occurred to me, but a quick check of the cyber sphere revealed many YouTube posts of the process.  O.K then, I had to try it with my setup.  As you can seem, it works, but more about that later.

Some posts ago I blogged about the “Price of Nothing”.  Look it up in the Archives if you’re interested, but it was about the money spent to save a little weight.  The spirit of this post is the opposite – how little extra weight can you carry to enjoy something new or additional in the outdoors.  Popcorn is classic “comfort light” at just 2.7 oz. for the trip and 1.1 oz. per serving.  Here’s how. Continue reading →

My first unplanned overnight, ever

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Unplanned bivyIt wasn’t an emergency situation.  But the reason we all carry (or should carry) The Ten Essentials is that some days do not go according to plan.  The previous summer we seriously underestimated the length of a long alpine scramble in Mt. Rainier National Park and turned around at 2 in the afternoon with a lot of mountain still above us.  This year we started up from base camp much earlier and had better luck with the obscure route finding challenges.  It was still 3 pm when we got on top.  At 7 pm my partner announced that we were at a good spot to bivy.  We were in open woods by a little stream.  I was still intent on getting down that day, but he was correct.  We found a couple of nice level spots for “camp”.  He often does “day and a half” outings, so he just got out his overnight bivy gear.  I got out my Ten Essentials stash.  For 40 years I had been having this conversation on outings – “What if we had to spend the night?  Would you be O.K. with what you are carrying right now?”  Now I was actually going to find out. Continue reading →

End of season review

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New snow - RainierMt. Rainier is now wearing a new coat of snow and the high country is making the transition to winter.  Days are short, the rain is arriving and it is time to look ahead to ski season.  This is  a good time to reflect on this year’s outings.  What worked well?  What didn’t?

Comfort light delivered for me this season.  Good, light weight equipment continues to open opportunities.  My wife and I are backpacking again, without me as the mule.  I am able to do grab and go trips to support climbs requiring a base camp.  Bake a load of Logan bread.  Take a quick shopping trip and I am off.  With less gear, packing is quicker.  In the past even overnight trips seemed to have packing drama. Continue reading →

Route finding

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RoutefindingAs readers will have noticed, it has been a while since I made my last post.  There are several reasons.  I finished most of the topics I originally outlined to cover lighter weight backpacking.  I haven’t had any recent suggestions of additional items to include.  And I have been out peakbagging, as suggested by my last post, Fast and Light.

A lot of trips I am doing now have some element of off-trail travel.  Sometimes it goes better than others. On these trips I will have a destination, typically a peak, a topo map of the area with the suggested off-trail route superimposed on it, and the same suggested route loaded on my GPS with its topo background map.  That’s quite a lot of information.  But still I am impressed by the number of route finding decisions I make continuously trying to get from here to there.

I know generally where I want to go, following a compass or GPS heading.  I now have to find a way to get there, which may involve several steps of decreasing scale, right down to the level of where my foot goes next.  In our big timber, 50 yards is a good range over which to survey the next piece of route. But within that distance there may several obstacles to avoid, such as a fallen 4-6 ft. log, a rock nose or gully.  Even closer in, you need to avoid holes, slippery sticks or stands of dense small trees.  At the same time taking care not to wander off your general track. This requires a lot of concentration.  Chatting with a hiking partner often leads off track quickly.

Some recent trips provide examples of route finding challenges. Continue reading →

Fast and light

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P1070977Well, maybe not that fast. But once you have slashed the weight of your multi-day gear, you can carry less for day trips as well.  With both Washington’s Cascades and Olympics in day trip range, I have many wilderness outings available.  But it is wilderness and in a day you can get just as far away from trail head as you might on a short backpack.  The 10 Essentials still apply.

Last summer one of the authors of a new epub “Guide to 100 peaks at Mount Rainer National Park (not including the big one)” introduced me the wonderful world of all the other places in the park.  While some of these 100 peaks are well known favorites, many don’t get visited often.  The guide takes you to parts of the park that lie in between the popular entrances.  Some of the peaks are hikes.  A few are technical climbs, but most are what get called “alpine scrambles”, like Barrier Peak shown in the photo.  The route may be a boot track or simply cross country.  Early season, there may be snow, and sometimes rock scrambling happens.  A 3,000 ft. elevation gain is typical, so lightweight gear is good.  I have gotten seriously hooked on these peaks.  Barrier was number 41 for me.

Continue reading →

Please don’t feed the bears

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Black bearKeeping critters out of your food will make both you and the critters happier.  It’s not just bears that shouldn’t be fed, but mice, racoons, birds, squirrels, fox and possibly even mountain goats.  It’s been over 40 years since I lost anything to bears and I intend to keep it that way.

I see bears a lot when hiking in both Olympic and Rainier National Parks.  The encounters are typically non-threatening and we go our separate ways, but it is pretty clear that they are around.  I have actually had more problems with mice than bears.  Mice have chewed holes in a tent zipper and a “rodent proof” food bag.  So I try to keep a clean camp and carefully hang my food or store it in a bear canister. Continue reading →

Clean water

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Clean waterWe really did drink right out of streams, decades ago.  When the general practice of purifying drinking water started, we used iodine tablets or boiling.  The arrival of pumped filters was revolutionary.   Now many more choices of water purification are available, at much lighter trail weights.

As I focused on reducing my load, I switched from a pumped filter to Aqua Mira.  This is a two part chlorine dioxide water purification system.  You add the prescribed number of drops from vial A and vial B to a mixing cup.  You wait 5 minutes for the mixture to turn yellow and then add it to your water.  In 30 minutes the water is safe to drink, unless the water is really cold.  It is effective and low cost.  Two full bottles, with mixing cup weigh 3 oz. and cost under $15.  It will last for a season or more – 30 gallons.  You can save even more weight by buying two very small dropper bottles to carry instead the full sized ones.  I used this system for a season, but didn’t like the counting of drops, especially when treating 3 quart batches and then sitting around for 5 minutes for the mixture to activate.

I found an equivalent product in tablet form, now sold as MSR Aquatabs.  One very small tablet will purify up to 2 quarts of clean water.  Continue reading →