The Hard Way to Make S’Mores
Comedy camping with Gail and Porter Storey:
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EARTH DAY GREETINGS!
Your sister and brother Earthlings wish you a glorious Earth Day!
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Winter Hiking; How and Why
“No such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes,” my husband, Porter, says.
Porter in the High Sierra
Since we hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, we’re often asked how to hike in snow and cold. You probably know about layering (silk or soft wool next to the skin to wick away moisture, a middle layer like fleece, a waterproof down-filled or synthetic jacket with a hood, and warm, waterproof pants). With a few additions, you can hike comfortably even in below-zero temperatures.
A balaclava (not to be confused with the pastry, baklava!) and goggles keep you from freezing your face off. Porter likes gloves but I like mittens so my fingers warm up one another. Gaiters over my pants keep deep snow out of my boots. Trekking poles (or Nordic walking poles) are great for balance on slippery patches, and add to warmth with an upper-body workout.
Gail hikes at 12 degrees below zero
Hand warmers inside my mitts and toe warmers inside my boots complete my ensemble. I love that they call these Little Hotties!
Hotties
For serious traction on snow, ice, and slush, we prefer Kahtoola MICROspikes. They’re easy to slip on and off, lightweight, and their teeth-and-chain bottoms don’t pick up mud.
Above is the How. Here’s the Why:
Why
Got winter hiking tips to share?
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Happy Holidays from Gail and Porter Storey
Happy New Year, and let us know in the Comments how your 2010 was!
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Thanksgiving Blissings…
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Porter Auditions for America’s Top Chef
Porter did all the cooking on our 2,663-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail: hot mocha and oatmeal for breakfast, and gourmet dinners like ratatouille au rehydrated tofu, boeuf jerky stroganoff, and pan-seared wild salmon over udon in an Asian fusion sauce. (I carried the peanut butter and crackers for lunch.) Each evening, after our twenty-plus miles of hiking, he set up his wilderness kitchen of stove, ingredients, and spice kit and went to work. In this photo in the Sierras, he’s unpacked our food from our bear-proof canister (lower right) and wears a head-net because of the mosquitos:
Porter auditions for America's Top (Wilderness) Chef
My job as sous-chef was to stand by with water in case he set his pants on fire (happened twice). At home I do all the cooking, and his job is to decant the Malbec and watch it breathe.
Nevertheless. When he wants to cook, we have to go backpacking so he can try out his latest modifications to his latest ultralight stove. Here’s his 8 oz. stove kit, including a 1 qt. titanium pot, windscreen and stainless steel rods to hold the pot above the burner, his titanium ground protector (so as not to scorch the earth), ThermoJet alcohol burner on top of protector, and spoon to stir (the rods fit into the back of the spoon for storage):
8 oz. stove kit
Porter eats with his stirring spoon, and I have a plastic spork–a spoon with a jagged end for fork-like purposes. Mine is red lest I lose it in the dirt. But on our recent backpacking trip, I was dismayed to find my spork denuded of its jagged tines.
“I sanded them off to fit in the stove kit,” he said.
“?!”
Gail attempts spaghetti with fork-less spork
Whatever, it was delicious. Porter cooked it from a pasta recipe from Backpacker Magazine, except he made substitutions for thirteen of the fourteen ingredients. He did use pasta, though. The recipe also said to “drain the pasta,” but carry a colander? Fuggedaboudit. In any case, Porter used his highly insulated pot-cozy to retain heat and cook faster at high altitudes.
Porter in his man-cave making his pot-cozy
A Top Chef who makes his own cooking accoutrements? I’d vote for him, wouldn’t you?
We love comments and questions, and please pass the link to this post along to anyone who’d enjoy it. If you haven’t already, please do sign up for my blog at gailstorey.com under “To Stay on the List”!
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Just Rest.
My mind can make a problem out of anything. So for a backpacking trip up Colorado’s Buchanan Pass Trail, I turn a peaceful getaway into a problem to be solved. It’s a do-over, actually, of our previous hike when we missed that trail and slogged up a boulder-strewn jeep road. It was sleeting, I was crying, my husband, Porter, had forgotten his jacket, two feet of snow dumped on us overnight, and our struggle out the next day included my sinking hip-deep into quicksand. More about that another time.
“How could we have missed this before?” I ask now at the well-marked trailhead.
He doesn’t answer. He’s deep in a thicket of thoughts.
Porter in the thicket of his thoughts
We continue up the trail. Some preoccupations fall off, others grow louder in the stillness: Did we lock the car? Should I be home working? Will we get to camp before dark? We’re in our thoughts, but want really to be in this lush green forest of aspen and spruce, fragrant with pine and dust. My mind–inside; nature–outside, and the bridge between the two feels broken.
The broken bridge
But the trail is more continuous than we think, over St. Vrain Creek, through bluebells, paintbrush, sunflowers, daisies and black-eyed Susans.
Climbing higher into the Indian Peaks Wilderness, we reach Red Deer Lake at dusk.
Red Deer Lake, 10,372 feet
No thoughts disturb its surface. Brook and brown trout swim in its deep blue. We sleep.
Dawn
This fir-scented dawn is both dark and light.
Morning, we climb rocky trail across alpine tundra to see what grows above treeline.
What grows
We reach the summit of Buchanan Pass, 11,837 feet.
The summit of love!
Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to be.
Just rest.
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How to Pitch a Bedroom in the Woods
I’ve never been on an outdoor trip with my husband, Porter, for which he didn’t invent/adapt/sew multiple pieces of gear. Even on our thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, he entertained himself each evening by modifying our packs, stove, water purifier, and clothes while I entertained myself begging him not to modify something that worked fine. He’s on the mythic quest for the ultimate in ultralight backpacking.
I, on the other hand, am on the mythic quest for a comfy bedroom deep in the woods. But how to carry a bedroom when even a tent is against his ultralight rules? So for our recent backpacking trip into the Indian Peaks Wilderness, he experimented with attaching his home-sewn 15 oz. tarp above a GoLite Shangri-La 2 Person Tent Nest, made of tight-weave mesh netting with a coated nylon floor.
After some debate over whether to pitch the GoLite Nest tent or the tarp first, we pitched the Nest, then the tarp, and would have had to re-pitch the Nest again had I not decided to cover the corner sticking out with a large trash bag.
Tip #1: Never go camping without a huge plastic bag.
Tip #2: Pitch either the mesh tent or the tarp first, it won’t turn out right anyway.
Attach the net ridge to the tarp ridge.
Porter sewed our tarp from a design by Ray Jardine, the guru of ultralight backpacking whose philosophy and techniques are known as the “Ray Way.” Porter modified Ray’s modifications by using spinnaker nylon, lighter than regular silicone nylon, and reinforced the tarp to attach clips from the Nest for more lift and room inside:
Grip-clips attach net roof to inside tarp roof.
Many steps later, involving loosening, moving, and tightening guy lines and pull-outs, pounding in stakes that won’t stake due to bedrock, and tying taut-line and clove hitches, our tarp and mesh tent are assembled:
Porter modified Ray's straight ridge with a catenoid curve to flap less in the wind.
“I like camping except it takes so long to set up camp,” I say to Porter.
“Setting up camp is camping,” he says. “That’s what camping is.”
Whatever. And we still have to unpack our backpacks, roll out our sleeping bag and pads, filter our water, set up the stove and cook dinner, clean up, and hang the food bags high in a tree away from bears.
Tip #3: Don’t let Happy Hour catch you unawares, even at 10,372 feet. Carry a PlatyPreserve wine preservation bottle with a very nice Malbec. Who the hell cares how much wine weighs?!
That night it rains hard, and the wind blows off Red Deer Lake. With our tarp pitched sideways to the wind, we stay warm and dry.
Tip #4: Snuggle! It’s the whole point of camping!
The next morning we climb from Red Deer Lake to the top of Buchanan Pass at 11,837 feet, and return tired but happy to our campsite that evening. All of the tarps Porter made have low-impact colors, and we named this one NightSky for its deep blue, almost invisible in the trees:
Tip #5: When you break camp, fold the guy lines into the tarp to keep them from tangling, or you’ll never, ever get them untangled again:
The tarp rolls up small and goes into a stuff-sack (with its lightweight tarp stakes in a separate ditty-bag):
Since you don’t need tent poles, it weighs barely 1 lb. (Our Pacific Crest Trail tarp was even lighter at 7 oz.) The GoLite 2 Person Nest weighs 1 lb. 8 oz., or you can sew your own even lighter mesh net-tent from instructions in The Ray-Way Tarp Book. Where bugs are few, you don’t need even a mesh tent–just throw over your face a small piece of netting sewn to the top of your sleeping bag or groundcloth. (More about this in another post.)
Tip #6: Feel free to ask questions in the Comments. And for other posts on our outdoor escapades, as well as ultralight gear from sleeping bags to stove kits to making a wilderness fashion statement, sign up under “To Stay on the List.”
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Fourmile Canyon Wildfire
I’d hoped by now to post that the Fourmile Canyon wildfire in Boulder’s foothills was over, but it’s still burning, 30% contained. More than 3,000 people have been evacuated and 6,422 acres burned, including 169 homes. Friends have lost their homes, and others are going about their daily work with their most important possessions in their cars in case they too have to evacuate. Amazingly, no people have died in this fire, thanks to the more than 900 firefighters from 20 states, air tankers and helitankers dropping fire retardant, and the cooperation of local, regional and national agencies, not to mention the residents themselves. The entire Boulder community is pulling together to help, and our hearts are filled with compassion. We mourn for the forests and wildlife.
This post is mainly personal, in response your kind inquiries, to reassure our friends everywhere that Porter and I and our house are fine. On Labor Day, when the fire broke out, we were on an all-day hike up to Boulder’s Bear Peak, 3,000 feet above Boulder.
Bear Peak
From a saddle on the Fern Canyon trail, we caught our first glimpse of the billowing smoke. We didn’t know where it was coming from, and could only hope it wasn’t a populated area.
Smoke from wildfire
We considered descending, but the wind was blowing the smoke in the other direction, covering Boulder:
Smoke covers Boulder
The air was definitely better up here. Here’s Gail at the Bear Peak summit before we had a clue of the devastation below:
Gail at summit, 8,461 feet
Here’s the view of the Fourmile Canyon wildfire from the summit of Bear Peak:
view of wildfire from Bear Peak
We descended via the Bear Peak West Ridge Trail:
Porter on Bear Peak West Ridge trail
Thank you to all the firefighters, emergency personnel, agencies, volunteers and most of all those who personally survived the fire with cooperation and courage.
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How Does Nature Affect Our Minds?
An article by Matt Richtel in The New York Times, “Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain,” shares the experience of five neuroscientists who spent five days without computers and cell phones, rafting a river in Utah. At first, the scientists were divided on whether heavy use of digital technology took a toll on attention and focus. Flowing down the river, they felt the freedom and clarity of not being electronically interrupted. By the end, they brimmed with fresh ideas for their research. Was it from the quiet, the exercise, or nature itself?
In my own experience hiking the 2,663-mile Pacific Crest Trail with my husband, Porter, I felt a synthesis of all three–mind and body in nature. Nearly six months without cell phones or computers allowed for a deep interior rest, even as we struggled to hike twenty-plus miles a day over mountains, across deserts, and through rivers. Our attentiveness grew at once sharper–to navigate, find water, watch for mountain lions and bears–and more intuitive, sensing our way into the wilderness.
How did nature affect our minds? Immediately after our return, we were able to make a series of complex decisions with refreshed analytic powers as well as trust in the spontaneous flow of life. Our lives changed in ways we were suddenly ready for. We moved to Boulder, Colorado, where outdoor adventure is a vital part of our days. Having left his old job to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, Porter found deeply satisfying work in hospice and palliative medicine. I spend part of the day hiking in the Foothills of the Rockies, and part at the computer to bring the wordless knowing of nature first to consciousness and then into language, through my book and blog.
Our digital technologies, from devices to social media, reflect our longing to connect. They’re not an end but a means to relatedness with each other and the world. For a direct connection unmediated by technology, listen to the wind, feel the bark of a tree, look into the sky or into the eyes of another. Fall silent. That’s nature.
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