Month: May 2010

About 3 years ago I bought a Celestial Jacket from Outdoor Research. It’s a very lightweight hardshell made out a 15 denier Gore-Tex Paclite material. When I first got it, I was surprised at how thin it was — paper thin — and had many doubts about the jacket’s durability. But I found myself pleasantly surprised: in the 3 years that I’ve had it, the jacket sustained only one small rip in the lower back area. This was easily patched.

About a month ago, the jacket failed at another point. The hood has an adjustable shock cord going through it behind the brim that helps to frame the face. This channel that the shock cord goes through (made of a lightweight nylon material, not Paclite) ripped out. I had heard of OR’s Infinite Guarantee, which claims that any product can be returned or exchanged “forever”, but had never before used it. I figured there would probably be some sort of catch or fine print, but thought it worth the try.

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When I purchased my Trail Designs Ti-Tri Titanium Stove System, I bought it with a 900mL pot from Titanium Goat. I like the pot, but it has one shortcoming: there are no measuring marks on it. I’m not comfortable just pouring a little water into a pot and saying “Well, that looks like 2 cups.” I prefer a slightly higher level of accuracy.

Originally I addressed this by scoring the handle of my spork to mark 1, 2, and 3 cups measured in the pot — an idea which I think originally came to me from somewhere on the BackpackingLight Forums. This method works ok — though making the marks deep enough to be visible on the titanium was a bit tough with my knife — but I’ve never felt that it is very accurate. It will tell me if I have roughly 1 cup of water in the pot, but I could really be anywhere between 3/4 of a cup to 1 1/4 cups. That’s the difference between nice, fluffy couscous and overly soggy (or dry and undercooked) couscous, you know.

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Here’s an idea I stole from the excellent BFE Labs: hacking a Rite in the Rain notebook to include a retention strap. The original idea at BFE was just a strap to keep the notebook closed and contain loose leafs that were shoved inside, but while making the strap he accidentally cut the webbing too short. To solve this he sewed on another piece of webbing as an extension and found that the overlap between the two pieces made a good pen holder.

I thought this was a neat idea, but the tri-glide fastener used in BFE’s version seemed a little cumbersome. I knew I would want some sort of quick release buckle. A traditional side release buckle would be too bulky for my tastes, particularly when the notebook is shoved in a pocket. The other thought I had was that using elastic webbing for the pen loop might increase the versatility of the strap, since it could expand to fit different sized tools.

I didn’t have any 1” elastic webbing hanging about, but I did have some spare webbing and an old buckle from a previous project. With those two things along with a knife and my repair kit, I set out to see what I could do about whipping up some kind of strap.

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I bought one of the newer 27oz wide mouth Klean Kanteens back in March. My favorite bottle is still the old 40oz Klean Kanteen that I keep in my EDC bag, but I’ve been wanting something a bit skinnier that could fit in the bottle cage on my bike. I also was looking for an excuse to try out one of the newfangled wide mouth Klean Kanteens. I prefer a wide mouth opening on my bottles, but my 40oz Klean Kanteen (despite being beat on fairly heavily for the past few years) is in too good a shape to justify replacing it with a 40oz wide mouth. A new 27oz wide mouth bottle that would fit on my bike (not to mention in most car cup holders) and so supplement the 40oz bottle was easier to talk myself into!

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My last trekking poles were a pair of REI Peak UL Carbon Compacts. I was quite fond of them. At 11 oz for the pair, they were one of the lightest pair of telescoping poles available. Sadly, I broke them last January. A lot of folks who have only used aluminium poles cast a critical eye on those made of carbon fiber, thinking them flimsy and weak, so I think it is important to point out that it was a piece of the plastic locking mechanism that broke, not the carbon fiber pole shafts. I think that carbon fiber is a perfectly adequate material for trekking poles and should stand up to all reasonable abuse.

When my old poles broke, I took them into REI hoping that there might be some way to repair them. We spent an hour or so going through all their spare parts and trying to hack something usable back together, but in the end we couldn’t come to a solution that I was satisfied with. The fellow I’d been talking with mentioned that he could give me credit for the broken poles, which surprised me. I’ve returned plenty of used gear to REI, but never an item that was actually broken (and broken, as far as I’m concerned, due to user error and not any fault in the product itself). I guess they’re serious about that guarantee.

The credit was certainly welcome. I took it, but now I had to decide what to replace the poles with. REI no longer makes the Peak UL Carbon Compact trekking poles, so I couldn’t get another pair of the same. I started to look around to see what was on the market. My first limiting factor in the search was that I needed telescoping poles. I use trekking poles to pitch my Kifaru Paratarp. For the tarp, the needed height of the rear pole is 26”. This rules out a lot of poles that only collapse to something closer to 30”, such as those from Titanium Goat and Gossamer Gear. The other big factor was weight. Ideally, I wished to stay as close as possible to the 11 oz weight of the old poles. A quick look around told me that I would have to come to terms with at least some weight gain, as there didn’t seem to be anything to compete with the weight of the Peak UL Carbon Compacts. Some poles weighed 20 oz or more for the pair, which was just ridiculous! Leki had a few poles in the 14-16 oz neighborhood. A decent weight, I thought, but none of the poles really jumped out at me.

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