As The Crow Flies

I feel a sun hat is essential. My sun hat is the Sunday Afternoons Adventure Hat . I have been wearing one, everyday, for 9 years. This is why I think it’s the perfect sun hat:

1. Full sun protection. This hat offers full sun protection yet with the sun cape instead of a brim in back, I can leave my hat on and lean back in a bus or train seat without knocking it off. If you have a high pack, you may find that a hat with a full brim will get knocked off by your pack hitting it in the back, make sure your hat will work with your pack.

2. Chin strap. When the winds kick up if you don’t have a chin strap your hat will blow off your head and off a cliff. I keep the chin strap hidden up in the hat until needed because I don’t like the way a chin strap looks. If your hat doesn’t have a chin strap you can secure it to you with two alligator clips with a string between them; I have seen them for sale at kayaking stores.

3. Packable. Needs to be able to be rolled up or stuffed in a pack. If it’s not packable, it will be a mess before very long.

4. Washable. I probably washed my first one 50 times and would probably still be wearing it, had I not left it in a restaurant one day.

5. Adjustable — important so I can make it bigger when I want to wear my fleece balaclava under it.

6. Floats— important if you kayak or boat.

Versatile. I have worn this hat when I worked on a paving crew, hiking, kayaking, wood cutting, back country skiing, travel, and general living and it has worked well for me.

Remove the label. It comes with the manufactures label on the outside of it; remove it for a much better looking hat. The first Sunday Afternoon Adventure hat I bought came with the name tag sewed on; I removed it with a seam ripper. On the second hat, the tag was sewn into a seam of the hat; I cut the name tag off. Why, does someone go to the trouble of designing a great hat and then screw up the whole effect by putting their name on the outside of it?

Style tip: There is no need to wear this hat with the brim always turned down. When you don’t need maximum sun protection, turn the brim up a bit, for a more dashing style.

Related post: How to keep your hat from blowing away.

Before starting my PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) hike, I was given a Suunto compass/altimeter watch. I didn’t feel like I needed one, but I brought it with me. It turned out to be one of my favorite pieces of gear. Combined with the data book, that would list all the altitudes, I found it easy to figure out where I was. I also had opportunities to use the compass. Periodically, I would set the declination on it. The declination of every section is listed in the guidebook. A watch is also helpful for using “dead reckoning” to figure out where you are, (example: I have been walking 2 hours; I usually walk at 2.5 miles an hour so I must be…)

The compass watches’ batteries are only good for about a year, and I have had terrible luck in changing the batteries. I would recommend going to a jeweler to have it done. That said even still, my Suunto started leaking after about a year. My next one was a High Gear. It stopped working after about a year too; I changed the battery but it still didn’t work.

Yesterday, I ordered this Casio PAW1200 Pathfinder Atomic Solar Triple Sensor watch, which is a solar powered altimeter/compass watch. Because the battery will never need changing, I’m hoping this one will last. It also sets it’s self by an atomic clock. Even if it doesn’t see any light for 5 months it’s supposed to keep working. My Casio data bank was always a good and dependable watch and I’m hoping this one will last as well.
You’ll want to set the declination and altitude. To find out what the declination is for where you are or where you are going, visit: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/geomag/jsp/struts/calcDeclination To find out what the altitude is for where you are, download Google Earth and type in your address. If I come to a place with a elevation sign and it doesn’t jive with my watch I reset the altitude.

For international travel, I used to carry a Casio data bank; it would hold all my important numbers and phone numbers. The calculator was essential for figuring out what things cost in dollars. In addition, it listed the current time in cities around the world. I also liked that the light on it, was bright enough to light my way through a dorm of people sleeping, down some stairs, and into a bathroom that was built with large boulders protruding into it.

Update:  I called Casio and asked how to set the declination on it and the woman said, “the what?” and then read the manual that I had just read 3 times that didn’t say anything about how to check the declination. She said that she thought that you couldn’t do it, I said that that is crazy to sell a compass watch at that price and not even be able to set the declination. Then she said that the watch specialist would call me back but so far, no call.

On the AT, as I got to a shelter, just before dark on a rainy day, someone inside yelled “we’re full“. I said, “I’ll just get some water and hike on then”. I filled up with water, put on my pack, and as I walked past the shelter, with all the beady little eyes of the LED headlamps looking back at me, one of the hikers, a guy that looked to be about 50, started to bark.

Today, I put an empty propane tank in my backpack, strapped on my snowshoes and headed down through state land to the little store to get if filled. A full 5 gallon propane tank only weighs 37lbs and the whole trip wasn’t more than 5 miles but the tank didn’t ride very well in my pack; it poked me in the spine the whole way and the snow was deep.

I wear nylon hiking pants and a nylon, long sleeve, button up shirt, when hiking. In my clothes bag I usually carry the following:

Set of “paper” rain gear. Right now, I’m carrying Drop Stoppers the top and bottom together weigh 10.5 ounces (311 grams). I like the jacket because it is long, and has pockets but I don’t like the pants because without a drawstring waist they get pushed down lower and lower by my pack and the cuffs don’t have elastic on them so they drag in the mud. I like Frogg Toggs because they look better, which is nice if you are trying to be seated at a restaurant while your hiking clothes are washing. They are also fuzzy which I like because they make nice pajamas and are comfortable for hanging out in. Frogg Toggs are a little heavier, a little more durable, and better looking. The also cost a lot more and take longer to dry out. The pants have elastic at the cuffs and side zips and a drawstring waist. They weigh 14 ounces for top and bottom combined. I have carried the O2 jacket, which is light and worked well too. To repair a rip in “paper” rain gear use clear packing tape.

Marmot dri-clime windbreaker. A nylon windbreaker with a light micro-fleece liner. It weighs 10 ounces (283 grams). I like this jacket; it works for varying temperatures and is quick drying. This jacket has the manufacturer’s name plastered across the front of it. I took a sharpie and went over it to make it less noticeable. I really don’t like to have names on my clothes so if I find something like it without a name on it; it will be replaced. If you are are on a tight budget this item could be replaced with either a light wind breaker or light fleece top from a discount store like Target or Walmart or a thrift store.

Feathered Friends down vest. It weighs 11 oz (311 grams). When I bought this, 6 years ago, it was the lightest around, now you can get a whole down jacket from Western Mountaineering for the same 11 oz. or the down vest for only 5 oz (141 grams). For budget minded you can probably find a poly filled nylon vest at the discount stores for 10 dollars even less at the thrift store.

Fleece hood/balaclava - This can be worn as a neck warmer, a hat, headband, a hood, or full balaclava. Extremely versatile and it doesn’t fall off when I’m sleeping. If your head and heart are kept warm, the rest of your body will follow. These come in different colors, from different manufacturers, in case you don’t want to look like a Ninja. This winter, Walmart was selling these for 4 dollars.

Fleece glo-mits I have carried glo-mitts for all my hikes. I like glo-mitts because I don’t have to take off my gloves to do things like light my stove and cook dinner. I think it’s the wind block fabric that makes these so slow to dry, but they keep my hands warm even when wet. Not all glo-mitts come with the thumb flap; I find the thumb flap to be essential. Wallmart sells ones like these in the hunting section for something like 4 dollars.
Extra socks- pair of neoprene socks- since I wear sandals when I hike; I wear these when it is cold or snowy. I also often carry an extra pair of hiking socks, as well.

The one ounce hiking rain skirt: Cut the bottom out of at cinch strap garbage bag, put it on and tie around your waist. It will keep you dry and offers great ventilation. Just scrunch up your pant legs to the knee so they don’t wick water and put on your hiking skirt. It’s also nice to have on when you want to sit down and take a break but everything is wet. When in camp, if you hang your food, you can use the hiking skirt as a rain cover for your food bag. Just get the regular garbage bags, not the heavy-duty contractor’s bags: some of them weigh 5 ounces apiece.

This selection of clothing will keep me warm, comfortable, and dry most of the time. Even when it is below zero (-18C) here, when I go out for my walk, just these clothes keep me warm. I have gone much lighter but this is what I find will sustain me through a long hike with varying temperatures comfortably.

About color. After I have been on the trail for a while, I get tired of seeing nothing but brown, green and black. Frogg Toggs used to come in red. I found them cheery to put on. Something colorful is nice to have if you are going to be on the trail for a long time.

My clothes bag makes a nice pillow. If I’m wearing most of my clothes to bed, I augment my clothes bag with the stuff sacks from my sleeping bag and tent, plastic bag pack liner and anything else I can find to make a pillow.

Most mornings I wake up when my cabin drops to 36 degrees F (2 C) but this morning I slept in till it was 26 F (-3 C). To start my fire I crumble up some newspaper, throw some wood and bark on it, give it a squirt of lamp oil and light it. This morning the lamp oil was frozen but the fire started just fine without it. The basin of water I use to wash my hands was even iced over.

Here is what I look for when shopping for a pair of hiking pants:
Pockets. A zippered pocket for holding money and ID is nice to have. Big pockets are important to me. I need them to hold guidebook pages, maps, and snacks. If the back pockets are high, you can’t access them while you are hiking. The all time best backpacking pockets I had were on a pair of Mountain Hardwear pants. These deep, back pockets could hold tons of stuff, yet when I sat on them; it didn’t bother me or the stuff in my pocket. I also never lost anything out of them. I could easily access them while hiking without removing my pack. They gave the pants nice clean lines instead of the bulky thigh enhancing pockets most hiking pants have. I think they may have changed that design on their pants but I have seen it on others.

Quick drying. My hiking pants are always nylon.

Draw string cuff, so that I can easily and securely keep my pants scrunched up at my knees. Velcro doesn’t work, it will get all muddy and won’t stick and then the pant legs drag in the mud and wick moisture up to the rest of the pants making them all wet. Mountain Hardwear had or maybe still has a good hidden drawstring system.

A nylon web belt is good, as I often lose weight on the trail. Mountain Hardwear’s belts always eventually came out and I could never get them back in the holes. I like a belt with a long enough tail that I never need to unbuckle the belt to take off my pants.

Chamois crotch. Mountain hardware use to line the crotch of its pants with chamois. Very nice feature.

Light color. I like light brown/tan. Dark pants can get very hot in the sun. Some light colored hiking pants are so thin that they turn translucent when wet; very bad feature if you ever hike without underwear.

Tip: To create a cone of death around me, at least as far as bugs are concerned, last summer, before I went hiking I soaked my clothes in Sawyer soak system. It lasts for six washings and gives you the same protection as the “bug off” clothes.

Once, a long time ago, in Nevada, I got up in the morning and went out to eat breakfast. The time sign on the bank said it was 8:30 am but when I got to the restaurant, three miles later, it was 1:30pm and they were no longer serving breakfast.

I used to skip school and hang out at the downtown library. On the top floor was the periodical room filled with old magazines and microfilm and microfiche of old newspapers. I spent hours panning over newspapers and magazines from the year I was born, thinking there was some clue to who I was, hidden in them.

My son recently sent me Eighty Years of the New Yorker magazine on DVD and 50+ years of MAD magazine on DVD. It’s sort of like being back in the periodical room but now I never have to leave or make up any excuses.

For a ditty bag, I carry a mosquito head net. It’s light,(.65 ounce or 18 grams), it’s easy to find what I want without dumping everything out, and it doubles as a head net when needed. In my ditty bag, I carry:
Water treatment
First aid kit
Knife
Sun block
Dental floss with needle inside.
Toothbrush (child’s size stored in plastic sandwich bag)
Toothpaste (optional, but I always miss it when I don’t bring it.) trail size.
Camp suds ½ ounce(15ml) bottle
Brush
Menstrual cup.

Go a fair distance from the trail, a campsite, or a water source. Dig a hole. I have found the little plastic orange shovel is useless for digging a hole. When the digging is good, my foot, a stick, or a rock will work just as well and when the digging is hard, the shovel is worthless. When the digging is hard, I look for natural holes like uprooted trees, or turn over rocks that have sunk into the earth.

For toilet paper, I use a stick or rock big enough to keep my hands away from any chance of fecal contamination. There is speculation that it isn’t the water that makes hikers sick but there own feces.

For when I feel a need for toilet paper, I carry a few paper towels in a ziplock sandwich bag. When I’m in a situation were a stick won’t do, paper towels work much better than toilet paper, travel better, and can be wetted for a more thorough cleaning.

It is thought of as a good practice to pack out any paper that you use.  Some people have burnt it and caused huge forest fires. (there is a sign on the PCT that says, “this forest fire started by a PCT thru-hiker burning his toilet paper” )

If there is any chance of fecal contamination to my hands, I bring out my wash kit and wash them.

If I have used the hole from an uprooted tree, there is lots of loose soil to bury my poo in. If I have used the hole from a rock, I rake what surface duff and dead leaves I can find over the poo and put the rock back on top of all of it. From reading the The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, I know that this is not the way that poo composts best. It needs to be kept moist and covered loosely with plant material so that it can get very hot and kill the bad stuff. It is, however, the way things are done on the trail because we don’t want to encounter other peoples poo.

Related posts: Hiker bidet, Peeing in the woods

If you have a pair of glasses with the little fish line holding the lenses in on the bottom and every time you step on them the lens pops out, here is the secret to putting the lens back in:  put the bottom of the lens in first, then pop the top part in.

Here are some strategies I use for getting through a cold night.

1. Cover my head. I always bring a fleece hood/balaclava. It can be worn many different ways and it doesn’t fall off my head at night.
2. Hot water bottle. I carry a canister stove. I reach out of my tent, turn it on and have a hot water bottle ready in under 2 minutes. When I carried a bigger pot, I carried the bigger liter size Nalgene bottle. Placed between my legs, it would keep me warm all night. Now with the smaller pot, I carry the smaller 1/2 liter bottle and it will only keep me warm for about 3 hours. Of course, I’m careful to screw the lid on tight. I have slept with a Nalgene bottle in my sleeping bag for hundreds of nights and have never had one fail me. Sometimes the soft milk white bottles get a little soft and a bit distorted but they always pop back out later.
3. Eat something.
4. Zip up. I usually don’t zip my bag up; I just stick my feet in it and throw it over me. However, if it gets really cold I zip it up and stick my head in the hood.
5. Exercise is a good way to get warm again. Do some crunches.
   
6. Use a vapor barrier, a vapor barrier works like a sauna. It keeps a warm moist layer of air around you. I used to carry a bag that had cold spots and if it dropped to near freezing, I would be cold. I sometimes carried a hot sac vapor barrier as a pack liner, then, and when I would climb in it, it would offer up instant warmth. If you aren’t really cold, a vapor barrier will make you sweat a lot and soak your clothes. A garbage bag pack liner could be used the same way, although it will only cover some of you. You might want to try sleeping in your rain gear, if it’s dry, and using that as a vapor barrier. I have heard of people sticking their feet into their pack.
7. Empty your bladder.  Outward Bound told me that your body has to use a lot of energy keeping your urine warm.  I don’t know it its true.  However, it might be so… I do it.  I do think  when you are really cold and you don’t want to get out of your bag to pee, that it’s always a good idea to brave the cold for a bit and do it, because you are just that much more comfortable and moving around  could help warm you up, and for those reasons I will probably keep doing it.
8. An effective way of dealing with discomfort, for me, is to remember the Buddhist phrase: “The path is easy for those with no preferences.” I realize that it’s my attachment to comfort that is making me suffer; I give it up and go to sleep.

You remember that Twilight Zone where the man just wants to be left alone so he can read all day. Then one day while he is hiding out and reading in the bank vault, all the people are destroyed.  He comes out and says, ” Yes! No one to bother me and nothing to do all day but read!”, and then he accidentally steps on his reading glasses, and yells. “NOOOO!”  ?    Some of the details are different, but basically, that’s what happened to me today.

When the days are scorching and the nights are cool, I find it a good strategy to hike at night, especially when there is a long way between water sources. At first, I tried walking all night long and found that to be torture. Half way through the night, I started to hallucinate, and by 5:30 am, I threw my pack down on the trail, flopped over it and went to sleep. What I found worked best was to hike until about midnight, sleep until about 4am, hike until 10:30 am, and then sleep again and start hiking about 3:30pm.

I like to carry a little Photon Light, in addition to my LED headlamp, just in case something happens to my headlamp and I need to make camp. It’s also good for a light if I need to change the batteries, in the dark.

Tip: If you lose the trail, try shining your flashlight low, right over the surface of the ground. This way you can often pick up the footprints of the hiker who went before you. If I still can’t find the trail, I just go to sleep and find it when it gets daylight

Related post: Backpacking Lights