I love titanium. It’s so light, yet strong, and discolors beautifully when burned.

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Winter arrived early last weekend, a week before the solstice. The daily temperatures have been hovering in the low 20s Fahrenheit (that’s somewhere around -5 for you centigrade folks), with high winds and plenty of snow. I’ve been out hiking every day, practicing winter fire lighting and taking advantage of the snow for tracking. It’s also provided ample opportunity to test out the wool pants I bought a few months ago.

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After a long wait, the end of last week brought with it the arrival of my new BCNW-O1 bushcraft knife.

In late August, I had put aside some money for a new bushcraft knife. For quite some time, I had had my eye on a Skookum Bush Tool. Yet, over the summer I discovered Mike Lummio’s Bushcraft Northwest through his YouTube channel. One of his videos features his knife, the BCNW-O1. It has a very similar design to the slightly larger Skookum, which make it difficult for me to decide which I preferred.

The knife was listed as back-ordered on Mike’s web page, so in the beginning of September I emailed him, asking when the knives would become available. My intention was that I would purchase whichever of the two knives became available first. Mike initially told me 2 weeks. That got delayed to 2 months, due to a batch of special order knives with a sharper grind coming in first and his moving the school to a new location. Still, it was available sooner than the Skookum, so I decided on the BCNW-O1.

It was well worth the wait. I couldn’t be happier with the knife.

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Last March, I used part of my REI dividend on a pair of Sole Ed Viesturs Ultra Cushion footbeds. Prior to this, I’d been using Green Superfeet in my Lowa Renegade boots.

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A good hat keeps the sun out of your face, the rain off your head, and guarantees the wearer always be presented with a sort of respectability and cunning. With a hat on your head, the world seems a more acceptable place.

You see, a man should always wear a hat. I’ve noticed, of course, that you people up here never wear one. But you should, so that you can tip it whenever the occasion demands.

- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

In years past I was a boonie hat man. Mine would be with me where-ever I went. But I was quick to discover that it did no good in the rain. The cotton would simply suck up the water and chill my head. In the rain, I’d be better off hat-less. For a year thereafter I experimented with synthetic offerings from the likes of Outdoor Research and REI. They have hats for sun and hats for rain, but none that suited me well enough.

Then, a year and a half ago, I tried out Duluth Trading Co.’s Oil Cloth Packer Hat. It has rarely left my head since.

It is crushable, packable, breathable, water-resistant, and stylish.

The paracord chin strap is my own addition. It’s needed whenever there’s any wind, and provides a useful attachment point for hooking to my pack. When not in use, it’s stowed as shown in the pictures.

The original color is a deal darker than represented in my pictures, for it’s seen much sun and has been washed a few times throughout the years. Usually I wash it by hand with a bit of Bronner’s Magic Soap in the sink, then let it hang dry in the sun. At the end of last summer, the leather band surrounding the hat was entirely covered in salt crystallized from my sweat, so I tossed it into the washing machine with the rest of my load. It survived, faded but not damaged. Throughout all this wear and washing, the oil finish has thinned and is gone in some places, so the water resiliency is lessened.

I will probably have to replace it before the year is out. Though I have no complaints for Duluth, I think I’ll try a Filson packer hat next. They’re a local brand and have a reputation for quality. Tilley Endurables’s reputation is unsurpassed by other hatters for quality and durability, but they’re a bit pricey and none of their models have the classic style of the packer hat.

One word of warning for any considering the style: random people tell me at least every other week that I look like Indiana Jones (or, if they’re more intoxicated, “hey, you look that guy with the whip!”) — this despite the fact that Indiana Jones’ hat is clearly a fedora, and my hat clearly is not. With the new film coming out, I imagine these occurrences will only increase.

Tramps like to lie down on their sides a lot. They like to be in the shade and the only way to lie in the shade is on your side. You’re a lucky tramp if you have a hat, that’s good shade, but if you don’t have a hat you’re gonna have a sunburn and not just your face and your arms but your eyeballs, your eyeballs will get beet-red because lots of times there just ain’t anywhere to go to get out of the sun. A tramp ain’t gonna have a cigarette or a drink when he wants one and he don’t think about getting old, he just thinks about getting by, and if a drink of bourbon replaces a drink of water and he’s in the desert, well then he needed that bourbon more than the water, but he’ll take the water with him, case the bourbon dries up. So do yourself a favor and get a good hat.

- Eddy Joe Cotton, Hobo

Early last Fall, it became clear that my old pair of boots — 5.11 HRTs — were at the end of their life. New insoles bought me a little while longer, but the fact had to be faced.

I knew exactly what boots I wanted to replace them. Trouble was, I couldn’t afford them. (Still can’t, in fact.) So I had to search for something else to hold me over for a while. I’d heard much positive review of Lowa and Vasque, and thought this an excellent opportunity to try them out. After much research, I settled on the Lowa Renegade GTX hiking boot.

REI happened to carry them and, rather conveniently, I had a pair of boots that I’d been given a while ago but never been very fond of (Montrail Torre GTX — I wore them in Thailand). So I took (perhaps unfair) advantage of REI’s lenient return policy, and ended up with a pair of Lowa Renegades for only $30.

The craftsmanship is excellent. I can spot no failures of any kind along the boots. Most any other boot I’ve worn for this amount of time has shown some small failure: a broken stitch, or a bit coming unglued somewhere. Not so with the Renegades. The Germans, I think, know a thing a two about making boots. (Actually, they’re made in Slovakia, but I’m Am’r'can, damnit, so that’s close enough for me.)

The soles are Vibram, like most other boots, and provide excellent traction on varied terrain: concrete, dirt, rocks, etc. Snow is a little iffy, but that’s been the case with any boot I’ve had.

The Gore-Tex liner is great. Verifiably waterproof and breathable (though I’ve not had the opportunity to wear the boots in hot weather).

The break-in period was non-existent. They were comfortable and supportive as soon as I put them on.

My feet registered no complaints concerning the standard Lowa insoles, but they were small and flimsy, like those provided by any other boot manufacturer, and I’ve been in a love affair with Green Superfeet since the Summer (more on that later), so after a couple weeks I swapped them out, and have been happier for it.

Some people report Lowa runs slightly large, but I found this to be untrue. I ordered my normal boot size, and they fit perfectly.

The absolutely only complaint I can offer for the Renegades is the lacing system. Lowa is quite fond of their D-rings. I am not. They allow for slightly faster unlacing, but slower lacing. And if you lace too fast, without paying attention, the lace may not make it’s way entirely inside one of the rings, and pop out eventually. This happens every now and then to me. It’s not enough to turn me off from the boots, or dissuade me from recommending them, but it is a minor annoyance. (And I had to find something to complain about.)

I’ve been wearing them daily for close to 5 months now. Though this Fall and Winter, regrettably, have seen me mostly in urban areas, not logging any serious mileage over mountainous terrain with heavy loads, I am very pleased with the Renegades and whole-heartedly recommend them to anyone looking for a mid-to-light hiking boot, or footwear for every day urban wear. (Plus, they look quite snazzy with TAD Legionnaires, no?)

3-3-08 Update:

I wore these boots yesterday on a 23 mile hike, with about 1300 ft elevation gain, under a 75lb pack. My feet aren’t too happy about it, though they’ve ended up worse after shorter humps with lighter loads in lesser boots. Last week I did 12 miles under the same load with no problem. They’re definitely light hiking boots. I probably won’t go over 12 miles with them again.

Steampunk: a history that wasn’t quite. At once both Victorian and Dystopic. A world filled by brass gears, pin-stripe suits, and a steam powered Deus ex Machina.

I’ve been familiar with steampunk as both a literary spin-off of cyberpunk and as a modding community, but only recently — through SteamPunk Magazine — come into it’s aberration as a subculture.

This third issue of SteamPunk Magazine is my first. I found it to be a most delightful mixture of short-fiction, interviews, tutorials, and rants. My preferred rant was My Machine, My Comrade by a one Prof. Calamity, in which he sees steampunk as “seeking[ing] to liberate the machine from simply existing as an instrument of work, while at the same time not elevating mechanical forms above all else… Steampunk seeks to find a relationship with the world of gears, steel, and steam that allows machines to not only co-inhabit our world but to be partners in our journey.” My favorite fiction was Margaret P. Killjoy’s Yena of Angeline in “Sandstorms by Gaslight” which (very much like mine own fiction) seems to go nowhere. It has no direction, and does not leave its reader with a sense of anything being accomplished, which makes it a disappointing first read. But, again and again, I find my mind wandering back to the world that Killjoy crafted and the characters that inhabit them. Ant that, I think, is some element of praise.

A SteamPunk’s Guide to the Apocalypse is a survival manual of sorts, covering basic aspects of shelter, water, and food. It should provide nothing new to the established crazy and serves as no replacement to In the Wake (or any of the works listed in the Guide’s Appendix B), though features thoughts on reclaiming urban resources that are lacking in other guides. But, like In the Wake, it is available as a free download, thus nullifying any excuse to not peruse the contents and keep it as a handy reference. I purchased it partly to support SteamPunk Magazine, but mostly for Colin Foran’s artwork, which provides a wonderful backdrop to the gritty subject of post-Civilization apocalyptic survival. Beyond comparisons to other manuals for outliving Civilization, my main criticism is that of the style of writing. Writers in the Victorian era were much more liberal than us in their use of capitalization, but there was a system. When I read those works, I feel the capitalization adds a certain emotion to the writing. Being a SteamPunk’s Guide, the author of this work (by happenstance, the same Margaret Killjoy whom I praised above) attempted to duplicate this capitalization, but failed. Whether there was or was not a system, it feels arbitrary, and detracts from the overall work. The Guide does present an attempt to emulate that era’s vocabulary, and I think does a good job of that — combining a sense of Victorian grace with modern punk and a bit of wit, for an agreeable solution of steampunk.

You’d think that after however many thousands of years, pants would have stopped evolving. How much can you do with a pair of pants? Apparently, if you’re Triple Aught Design, just a little bit more.

TAD Gear’s Force 10 Legionnaire Classic Cargo Pants are an amazing pair of pants. I mean it. Really. There’s pants, and then there’s TAD pants. With a really big gap in between the two. And the TAD pants are on the upper end. Way up.

The Legionnaires are made from 7.5 oz cotton “gabardine” — which is just a fancy way of saying twill (I had to look that up). (They’re also available in ripstop.) They have two front pockets, two rear pockets, two cargo pockets, and two thigh pockets.

The cargo pockets aren’t just normal cargo pockets — they’re 9″ deep behemoths (that’s a Hebrew word for beast, by the way). They’re great. You could probably loose something in their abyss, but they’re somehow non-intrusive.

The two front pockets aren’t just normal pockets, either. They both sport clip reinforcements. That’s right: both sides. And they aren’t just little reinforcements on the seams, like on 5.11 pants. They’re diamonds that reinforce the whole shebang and provide a more secure hold for your pocket knife, thanks to the thicker fabric. The right front pocket also has an interior coin pocket. (Note: I’ve found that these pockets do not work with Emerson Knives’ wave opener.) I should also mention that the pockets are made of the same tough material as the rest of the pants — a welcome feature, to be sure. The first failures I always experience on pants are holes in the cheap material used to make pockets.

The back pockets are just normal back pockets. (You thought I was going to say they weren’t, didn’t you? Well, they do have the very stylish button-and-ribbon closures that are also found on the cargo pockets.)

The front of the pants have two D-rings, one on each side. Again, beating 5.11 pants by one. I really don’t know why more folks don’t put these on their pants.

Every single stress point on these pants are bartacked. All of them. There’s not a single point where reinforcements are missing. The butt is reinforced, the knees are reinforced and slightly articulated, every seam is reinforced.

The absolute best thing about these pants are the two front thigh pockets. It’s honestly hard for me to put on a pair of pants without these now. They’re a perfect fit for seemingly everything I want to put in them — cell phone, gps, camera, energy bar, notepad.

Another amazing feature — and one that makes me love TAD even more — is that the only logo on the pants (excluding the “TAD Gear green label” on the inside of the fly) is velcroed on to the right cargo pocket. Velcroed. TAD is actually giving the wearer the option of advertising for them. What other company does that? Everyone else plasters their logos all over their products and forces me to go to the trouble of cutting them off or covering them up. (TAD, Kifaru, and Arc’Teryx are usually the only companies I billboard for.)

Last June I used the uniform grant I had been given to buy a pair of TAD’s Force 10 Combat Pants (seen here on patrol) and I actually like the Legionnaires better. The Force 10’s triple reinforced knees added a good deal of heat in the sun and I didn’t find them necessary for my needs. I liked the top slot of the cargo pockets, but I found that the internal dividers would sometimes annoy me as I’d blindly reach into the pockets, groping for something, and put my hand into one of the smaller pockets instead of the main bellow. The ribbons on the cargo pocket buttons weren’t sewn down (as they are on these newer Legionnaires) and often got in the way. The one feature I really wish they’d carry over to the Legionnaires is the diamond gusseted crotch.

In case you haven’t caught on, the Legionnares are amazing pants. They’re expensive, but worth the money. Go hungry for a few days if you have to. I’ve worn these pants every day since I bought them last month, and if I had the money I’d purchase a second pair.

(MilitaryMorons, of course, has a better review, though his are a slightly older style. These new ones have a zipper fly instead of buttons and all pocket ribbons are now sewn down.)

Some people have been curious about my rolls. I started rolling my pants last year at MutantFest. I got too lazy to blouse them every day, but wanted to keep them out of the water and mud. After that, it stuck. I started riding a bike, and the rolling kept the right pant leg from getting messed up the chain. It isn’t dependent on wearing combat boots — I can do it with shorter hikers. I’ve since discovered that rock climbers roll their pants. I like to think that copying them makes other folk less excited than bloused pants with combat boots. But most of all, I keep doing it because I can refer to my rolled pants as “combat knickers”, which is a source of great amusement.