I’m a big fan of fancy hats. I discovered the joy of a well-made and stylish hat a couple years ago with the Duluth Oil Cloth Packer Hat. After that hat died, I tried others. My current favorites are the Tilley T3 and the (locally made) Filson Tin Cloth Packer. But as great as those hats are, sometimes it’s nice to get back to basics.
If all you want to do is keep the sun off, it’s hard to beat the boonie hat. It’s lightweight, cheap, and compresses down to fit into a pocket.
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My favorite food to toss in the dehydrator are bananas. The sugars caramelize as the slices heat up. I’ll leave them in for 7-8 hours if I want them to dehydrate fully, so that the final product is like a chip. But my preference is to leave them in for only 6-7 hours, so that they’re still a bit chewy, like candy. Starburst doesn’t have anything on these!
On our recent trip, Kevin mentioned how much he liked the dehydrated strawberries that he recently had. I thought I’d give them a shot.
I cut them up in 1/4″ slices, which is the same as I do for bananas, but they turned out too thin after coming out of the dehydrator. Mary Bell’s Complete Dehydrator Cookbook claims that strawberries are 90% water, whereas bananas are only 76%. So in retrospect it makes sense that the strawberry slices would shrink down a bit more.
No matter. They’re still tasty! But the bananas remain my favorite.
This past week, Kevin arrived in Seattle for the last leg of his America trip. I couldn’t let him come all the way from Scotland without seeing a few mountains, so we had planned a four day trip into the Glacier Peak Wilderness. Avagdu‘s schedule had recently opened up, allowing him to come up from California to join us. I had planned a loop of about 47 miles around the ridges just southwest of Glacier Peak.
We arrived at the North Fork Sauk River trailhead late in the morning and, after quickly adjusting gear, hit the trail at 11:30 AM.
The trail paralleled the north fork of the Sauk and led into forests of old-growth cedar, with forest floor covered in Skunk Cabbage and Devil’s Club.
We quickly reached the junction with the Pilot Ridge trail, which heads south, cuts over the river, and begins to climb the ridge. Originally I had thought we would have to ford the river at this point, but there were a few logs laying across that allowed us to easily avoid getting wet.
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Those chain cleaning tools sold at most outdoors stores tend to pretty useless in my experience. They run around $30, but end up being cheap and ineffective pieces of plastic. I’ve given up on them in favor of cleaning my chain manually via a method discovered on Sheldon Brown’s chain maintenance page (any man with a beard like that must be infallible).
All that’s needed is a chain tool, a bottle, some sort of degrease-ing dish soap, and water.
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