Brett on Stuff

Sounds heavy - but this newest addition to my backpack is worth every ounce in carrying with me.

Chester Morgan Marl was born last night weighing in at 6 lbs 14 oz. Theresa did an amazing job of delivering him with a natural birth at Swedish hospital.

I’ve seen Theresa do some pretty amazing things - like 50 miles of mud, roots and ladders on the West Coast Trail or rock climbing Devils Tower - but her stamina for 22 hrs of drug-free labor blew me away. I’m in awe.

His name is in honour of my birthplace (Chester, UK) and because we think it’s cool.

More Pics at http://chestermorgan.smugmug.com

Theresa is due in early August. As we leave on July 12th for our trip, there is a very small chance that she might go into labor early. It’s unlikely enough that we both feel comfortable about me going on the trip still. That said, I want a way for her to get in touch with me on the trail if the need arises, so I could evacuate the hike and get to the hospital as soon as possible.

So what are my options? I’ve been looking into a few:

1. The  Spot Satellite Messenger.

This is an interesting little device. That allows for backpackers to send a distress call. When activated, the unit broadcasts it’s own GPS location every ten seconds together with a distress signal. The distress signal can be "OK, Send Help, or Emergency" based on the buttons on front. Friends can track your spot beacon online and see where you are and that you are OK. Available from findmespot.com. It weighs in at 7.4 oz and can run for 14 days on standby and 7 days when broadcasting.

Not very useful for my situation as Theresa has no way of communicating to me. It’s outbound broadcast only, no receive capability.

2. Satellite Phone.

Satellite phones don’t require typical cellular tower coverage as they use orbiting satellites to communicate. For best coverage you need a network that uses low orbit Satellites. There are two gigs in town for the US. Globalstar and Iridium.

The Iridium 9505 handset can be rented for about $40 / week but is heavy at 13 oz. It only has 3 hrs of talk time and 30 hrs on standby.

The Gobalstar GSP-1700 is better at 7 oz but rental rates are in the $100 / week range.

The standby time makes this less than ideal for me. I would have to arrange a few key times of the day to either call Theresa, or have the phone on waiting for an inbound call.

3. Satellite Pager

Also running on the Iridium network is the Motorolla 9501 Satellite Pager. It receives inbound text messages up to 160 characters. The messages can be sent easily via Theresa from a website.

It’s the lightest option at 4.16 oz and has a standby time of an incredible 30 days! It also runs on a single AA battery so it’s field-replaceable for any PCT‘ers looking to getting encouragement from home.

Rentals are available from http://www.gitsat.com/. Their rental rates are quite reasonable at $25 / week. However they do stiff you on shipping at $50 to and from your home.

We’re searching for a replacement hike for our Wonderland Trail trip. So far we have narrowed the search down to 3 candidates:

1. A section of the PCT in Northern California (JMT maybe)
2. Olympic Coast
3. Boundary Trail

1 is challenged for us logistically at such short notice. 2 sounds fun - but too similar to our WCT experience last year and probably not "epic" enough.

3 is an interesting candidate. Its way out in the wilderness, with Grizzlies and Gray Wolves, and best of all - mostly snow free (so we believe). Sounds entertaining…

Length: 98.0 miles
Difficulty: Very Difficult
Overall rating: 10
Season: This trail is accessible July-September.

Boundary Trail is located in Okanogan National Forest.

Links:

nwsource Review

twohikers.org

Time to study the maps and see if we can make a loop out of it. With 6-7 hrs drive from Seattle, travel time will whittle our trail time down a little.

This ‘trail’ built between Chorro and Gaitanejo Falls was built in 1905. The walkway has now gone many years without maintenance, and is in a highly deteriorated and dangerous state. It is 3 feet wide, and is 700 feet above the river. Nearly all of the path has no handrail. Some parts of the concrete walkway have completely collapsed and all that is remaining is the steel beam originally in place to hold it up and the wire that follows most the path (Wikipedia Info)

Wow. Makes me want to get my rock climbing shoes on.

For better or worse, my DNA is full of engineer genes. This means, I’m constantly coming up with more crazy or fun ideas for new stuff than I could ever execute on. I love the MYOG (Make Your Own Gear) movement, but just don’t have time to spend on it.

Here’s my latest brain-fart:

I’ve been keeping my eye open for a while now for a true Ultralight Tripod. Would it really be possible to have a sub-pound tripod that could accompany a digital SLR in the field without feeling like I’ve regressed to the old way?

So far… nothing. Carbon fibre is the most promising, but they are still 2lb+ tripods. Generally the photo community says that anything lighter weight is too flimsy or unstable.

So what if one added some weight in the field to pull the center of gravity down and anchor the tri-pod in place?

Here’s the idea: a tripod with a threaded pipe connector at the base. You whip out your flimsy tripod, whip out a platypus - fill it with 4lbs of water (or sand) and screw it to the bottom. Voila. Now all I need to do is find a light flimsy tripod.

Target weight: 10 oz, available sometime in the future.

(Warning: Technology rant imminent…)

I recently subscribed to BackPackingLight magazine, produced by the team at backpackinglight.com. For some reason, I must have misunderstood the offering. I assumed it was a print magazine and would come in the mail. The idea of noodling over the pages at a local coffee shop sounded quite appealing.

Last night I received an email informing me that my magazine was ready for electronic pick-up. Interesting… I’ve read a few e-books before - so why not - save a few branches - sounds like a fine idea.

Unfortunately, BPL Magazine uses Zinio for their distribution. Zinio is the weak link in the deal.

IMHO Zinio has fallen into the same trap as the music industry - they are seemingly so paranoid about copyright infringement that they have tried to build their own form of DRM protection. Instead of simply rendering a PDF of the magazine, they have built a custom Flash based viewer. The viewer makes reading the magazine a miserable experience.

There are many flaws with it:

• You can only zoom in predefined steps
• You can’t drag-pan the page around without using the shift modifier
• The custom scroll bars are flaky
• It’s really slow to render
• The print feature only prints one page at a time

I would love to know what BPL Issue 9 contains - I just can’t bear to read it in this viewer.

(OK - rant over, back to your scheduled viewing :))