Monthly Archives: September 2009

Backpacking Shelter

Posted on September 17, 2009 by Jon

It’s hard to say what piece of gear is the “most important” when putting together backpacking gear, since most long-distance backpackers are cutting it down to the bare minimum anyway, and every piece of gear is actually essential. That said, the psychological first step in my gearing up quest was to take care of my shelter. Small and light are the watchwords here, and shelter seems to be an area of backpacking gear that tends towards the heavy and overbuilt, almost as much as rain gear. My search for light and fast shelter quickly pushed me out of the standard outdoor store and into the world of cottage gear makers. These folks, when faced with the problems of super-heavy, overbuilt gear, decided to do something about it, and began making their own gear, and then selling the better designs to others that were, like them, annoyed at how heavy most camping gear is. I started compiling a list of my options for shelter, and it basically boiled down to three broad types of… Read more

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Georgia to Maine

Posted on September 10, 2009 by Jon

I suppose this will make it “official”, or at least utterly embarrassing if it doesn’t actually happen, but whatever. I’m going to hike the Appalachian Trail this coming Spring and Summer. I plan to leave Amicalola Falls State Park and hike up to Springer Mountain and the start of the Trail on March 16th, give or take a day or two. With any luck, 2,168 miles later, I’ll climb Mt. Katadhin in Baxter State Park in Maine sometime in the second half of July. I will walk an average of close to 20 miles a day, taking a day off once a week or so to resupply, eat non-dehydrated food and clean myself more thoroughly than I can in the woods. I will carry everything I need (or at least everything I need for a week at a time) with me. It weighs less than 15 pounds, not counting food and water. Food will weigh about 2 pounds per day, and I will carry two liters of water (4.4 pounds for the conversion-challenged). All told, on the heaviest days of my trip, I will be carrying 33 pounds of… Read more

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A New Direction

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Jon

For the few of you who read this blog regularly, you have undoubtedly noticed the paucity of posts over the last several months. This is attributable to many things, but mostly it is because this blog, and all of my online doings, have become part of a wholesale reappraisal of my life (getting a jump on that old canard the mid-life crisis). During that reappraisal, I spent a good bit of time reading the things I have posted here over the years, and decided that I didn’t like the direction my writing here was moving in. It had become too reactionary, too temporally topical and in some cases downright silly. Instead of continuing on in that vein, or simply walking away completely, I have decided instead to refocus my writing on subjects near and dear to me, but to shift the emphasis from that of critique to something more like reportage; focusing on things as I encounter them, making sure to keep in mind that watching them on television or reading about them on the internet is… Read more

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