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.
The Perodical room.
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.
Ditty bag
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.
How to poo in the woods
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
How to fix your glasses
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:Â put the bottom of the lens in first, then pop the top part in.
Staying warm at night.
Here are some strategies I use for getting through a cold night.
- 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.
- 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. - Eat something.
- 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.
- Exercise is a good way to get warm again. Do some crunches.
- 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. - 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.
- 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.
Twilight zoning.
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.
Night Hiking
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
Logistics for an international adventure.
- Find a cheap ticket. I found my cheap tickets in the very tiny adds in the travel section of the Sunday paper.
Buy a travel guide for the country that you will be going to. Read it before you leave, paying particular attention to the “visas required” section, and pack it. I recommend Moon travel guides. - Pack- Go light-under 20lbs. Make sure it will fit in the overhead so you don’t have to check anything. Clothes motto: wear one, wash one. (only 2 sets of clothes) There is often a very stingy weight limit for carry on, so it’s good idea to carry a very lightweight day pack to split your load up.
- Go. Keep your self open to new adventures. Remember, whatever doesn’t kill you will make for a good story.
Monkey Beach
Once, in Malaysia, I camped on a deserted beach called Monkey Beach. At dusk about 50 monkeys came out and played in the sand. I had a bag of peanuts; they all surrounded me and I fed them. Just as it was getting dark, six men with guns and machetes showed up. I spent a very stressful evening with them. One of them loaned me his machete to sleep with, because he said there were tigers in the area. In the morning, I hiked out and rented a room, exhausted from the stress of the night before.
Note: For good travel guides that list interesting places like this, that you won’t find in other travel books. Go to http://www.moon.com/ . They have the best travel guides, in my opinion, far better then Lonely Planet guides.
Non-Refrigerated eggs
On the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail), I once used the partial fuel canisters left in the hiker box to cook up some hard-boiled eggs to bring with me on the next section. I carried a bigger pot in those day, I filled it with hard-boiled eggs and then doled them out to myself along the way.
I don’t have a refrigerator at the cabin that I’m now living at but I find that the eggs last at least a month with out refrigeration. When researching refrigerating eggs on the internet, I learned that refrigeration of eggs is a North American thing and that in other countries they are stored on the shelf.
When in Java, I lived with a family that had a little open air store; they had a bowl of eggs sitting on the counter for sale. I was concerned about this bowl of eggs, day after day just sitting there, un-refrigerated in the hot Java weather. They told me that they had soaked them in hot salt water for a while to preserve them. I ate one. It tasted like a perfect hard-boiled egg that hadn’t been cooked too long. They said that if they didn’t sell in 2 weeks that they would bury them for a while and then try to sell them again.
Laen has this to say about it:
For an explanation of why this is, read: Science of Cooking : “Is it okay to leave eggs un-refrigerated?�.
It seems the reasoning is this:
* 1 in 20,000 eggs is infected with salmonella.
* Leaving an egg unfrigerated allows salmonella to multiply.
* Salmonella can be dangerous.
But then, you can also kill salmonella by cooking the egg enough.
So, you’re taking a teeny tiny risk by not refrigerating, but you can counter that risk by cooking the eggs enough to kill the bacteria.
In a moment of clumsy inattention
Things are warming up here. It got up to 40 F (4.4 C)today, which is sort of sad because the snow is no longer fluffy. Everything is drippy. My porch looked wet this morning, when I went out to start the generator, but it was icy and I slipped and fell hard; my back hitting the corner of the step. I left my slippers lay where they had flown, hobbled back inside, took some ibuprofen and went back to bed. I forget to live carefully, sometimes. Sometimes, I live as carelessly as someone can, who lives in the city and who has health insurance.
On the trail I try to live carefully; the consequences of an injury could be great. I find that I hike more carefully and balanced by myself then when hiking with others. Ray Jardine, in the Pacific Crest Trail handbook, recommends not hiking alone through the Sierras, so, I started hiking with two other hikers in Kennedy Meadows. The partnership didn’t last long; I didn’t like hiking at someone else’s pace. I did enjoy the camaraderie and having someone to camp with at night. I started hiking at my own pace and meeting up with them, now and then and camped with them for a few nights.
We were all hiking together when we came to a swollen stream of glacial melt. The first guy walked across and he pointed at a log as the best way to cross. I didn’t think about it, I just crossed there. The log rolled and trapped my foot under it. I was trapped in a gushing stream of glacial melt up to my ribcage, I was thinking that I may die there. One of the guys was able to lift the log off my foot and I scrambled out. The other guy said, “See, that is why we should all hike together�.
That was a joyous moment when that log was lifted off my foot and I was happy and grateful that he had been there, but the lesson is not that you shouldn’t hike alone but that sometimes logs roll and also that you need to find your own way and not let others lead you.
We all parted ways soon after and I was happily walking at my own pace again, aware and edgy like a creature in the wilderness should be.
Waiting at the mailbox for a movie that didn’t come.
Delicious monotony
Five years ago, I sold my house and all my stuff and bought a water access only cabin in coastal BC. I didn’t have a boat so I would pay a water taxi to drop me off and would tell him to come back and get me in a month or sometimes two.
It would be easy to live off the land up there as there are lots of berries, mushrooms, edible plants and seafood to eat. The cabin came with a row boat and a crab trap. I bought a cheap fishing pole and some hooks and lures. There were muscles lying on the beach in front of my cabin. A ways up the inlet there were oysters and seaweed beds. It was a veritable Garden of Eden. However, I almost always ate the food I had brought with me instead of living off the land as
I had dreamed of.
I decided to only bring up a very monotonous yet nutritional diet, thinking that I would tire of the monotony and go out and forage for food. However the two meals that I would make for myself proved to be so delicious and satisfying that I was always happy to eat them. They were:
Super oats.
Oatmeal, raisins, almonds, cinnamon, soy protein powder. (Even better with brown sugar) Cook the oatmeal and raisins with extra water so that when you add the soy protein powder it isn’t too dry.
Garlic fried rice.
Sauté a half to a whole head of garlic along with a lot of dried red peppers in oil, add cooked brown rice( let the rice sit for a bit uncovered so it dries out some) , add an egg to it all and stir it around until the egg is cooked. (Even better when sprinkled with seasoned gourmet rice vinegar.)