The Periphery of the Mind

You need water. It varies from person to person how much you need, but you need it. So you basically have four choices:

1) go without. I've always heard you can three days without water, but I'd rather not test that.
2) carry water. At eight pounds a gallon (plus container), and considering a person can easily use a gallon a day, carrying isn't a great solution.
3) treat local water. A great solution if you've got a treatment plan and water to treat.
4) all of the above. The cop out "a little bit of everything, depending" answer.

Well, for our hiking needs we're looking into option number 4. We're intending to each carry a 100 oz Liter Camelbak water container, and we're also going to lug around a Katadyn Combi. The CamelBaks are kind of expensive for essentially overside water bottles, but the ones we went with have a bit of extra padding and latches and shouldn't risk any tearing or get smashed in storage. The Katadyn Combi is a beast; .2 micron-sized filter (1.0 microns or smaller is recommended), and good for 13000 gallons of water. Barring accident, I imagine we'll never need to replace the filter cartridge on this thing. As an additional precaution, we also picked up some anti-viral water treatment.

It's overkill, especially considering most problems come from unwashed hands handling food rather than bugs in the water, but I imagine this should cover any water we drink, anywhere we go.

We also picked up a couple sets of hiking poles with cheesy magnets in the handles, and an emergency whistle in case we get separated in the dark or something. Along with a cute little set of cookware. Other than food, firewands, and toiletries, I think we're set.

Labels: hiking

So, we now have tent, backpacks, and sleeping bags.

We picked up a couple of Sleepcell bags at Sam's Club last week. They're big, heavy, hard to repack (although the Professor knows what she's doing, so I let her), and didn't have a way to attach to our backpacks. This weekend we travelled all over NWA looking for better bags, and found some smaller, lighter bags at the Sportsman's Warehouse in Rogers. Now, while the Sportsman's is a nice store for what it is (namely, a wanna-be Bass Pro Shop), the backpacks we got there were junk. We took them back, and the Professor snagged some packs of compression straps. Looped the straps through some holders in the bottom of the backpacks, and we had the perfect location for our sleeping bags.

For what it's worth, I'd initially been wanting this model for myself, but while it's cheaper and rated to a lower temperature, the Sleepcells we got have better ventilation and can probably handle a better and more realistic range of temperatures.

Next up is probably a camelback water bottle, a first aid kit, hiking poles, and food-related gear. There's still more to get, but those are hopefully going to be our biggest and heaviest purchases left.

Labels: hiking