Scandinavian Hiking

Touring up Sånfjället

2013-04-20T23:45:00.000+02:00

Having a baby has put a cramp on my winter plans this year, or maybe I can say it poisoned all my winter plans in their sleep and burnt the bodies and launched the ashes into the sun. This Winter the only stand-out trip has been a run up and down Sånfjället. It was absolutely great, the area around Sånfjället is beautiful and the weather was fine. It also made me realise again that the gear selection I've settled on is really working for me. With the sole exception of my gloves, nothing stood out, by which I mean the gear worked perfectly and did its job in that effortless way whereby you don't notice it.

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Sånfjället
I headed to Vemdalen for a few days of skiing, which involved a little baby-hauling on cross-country skis using a rented Fjellpulka. It's a nice pulka to haul a baby, although it's heavy and feels over-engineered, and is sickeningly expensive to buy. I recently saw this great post by Backpacking North, with a MYOG pulka based on the classic Paris frame, which I plan to have a shot at.

My little guy (pictured above) is already 11kg and hauling his lazy sleepy ass all over Vemdalen was a great warm-up for touring. It's worth noting that I get regular abuse from the haters over my old-school leather basket ski poles, the Gipron 797s, but after this baby-hauling I will never look at another pole again. Heading uphill with the pulka was atrociously hard work. I would grind to a halt on the uphill slopes, and then had to have all of my weight driving down on a single pole, and then give a furious lunge on that pole to get the pulka moving. I would yank myself one step up the slope before coming to a halt again and having to repeat on the other pole. Through all this full-bodyweight abuse these poles barely even flexed. Super old-skool they may look, but damn they are tough.

Later Michi and I headed out for a little tour to Sånfjället, having knocked the dust off our gear with some 'side country' skiing at Vemdalen. We're both relatively new to touring, both using Randoneé gear, and were both just happy to head out anywhere where there were no other people.

I used almost the same gear I had with my touring trips last year at Riksgränsen, I was very happy with it all then and I was still very happy with it now. I didn't pack any overnight gear, but did pack down the Petzl Nao in case we got caught out later than we planned (a killer torch for skiing or skating), and also the Pieps Vector transceiver for its tracking and waypoint finding features, (Sånfjället at that time having as much avalanche danger as Holland in midsummer).

One change in my pack-list was the Stubai Tecblade loop instead of my old Ortovox Kodiak shovel. It has a very nifty loop-handle design that makes digging a little more comfortable, but had a very annoying habit of dropping its little plastic pipe ends as soon as the temperatures dropped below minus 10°C. These little plugs are just there to plug the sides of the handle, so they're not really important, but it seems like a pretty shitty design to have them so loose that they fall out so easily in the conditions that this shovel is made for. I also replaced my Ortovox economic 240 Avalanche probe with the Stubai Carbon probe. This is not some sign of gear wankery, I swear! When I bought the Pieps Vector from Sport-conrad, it was cheaper to buy it as a pack with a shovel and probe than to buy it on its own, weird.

We parked at a handy waffle serving restaurant in Nysäterns Fjällgård, and threw on our skins and headed up the clearly marked winter trekking path towards Sånfjället. It's a real stunner of a mountain, it rises out of the surrounding landscape like the fin of a shark breaking the surface of a calm sea. There are few other hills in the area, and it dominates the skyline.

I had the Pieps Vector in Summer mode to access all the fun tricks, and I tagged the car as a waypoint in case of terrible fog or something like that. Mostly just for fun and to try the waypoint feature out.

The route up was very easy, a gentle rise up out of forested slopes at first, and as the trees thinned out it became a slightly steeper route, but barely necessitating much hard work or any switchbacks. And by popping out the lifters on my bindings as the slope got steeper, there was nothing requiring real effort until the last few hundred metres. Good gear makes it so easy, it makes me think back to the insane effort it took me to get to Trolltunga without skis.

It was made a little more exciting when a thick cloud settle down on the slopes above the tree line, giving us very little visibility and giving the mountain a mysterious character.

This actually turned out to be the most fun part of the trip, we were trying to keep our bearings as well as we could in order to hit the peak we were aiming at, without getting disorientated in the murky fog.

We kept using dead reckoning to find our way, and although we could see no landscape or features, eventually the slope flattened out and we came across a little cairn, and guessed that it could be our target.

We had a little beer-break in the cloud, hoping it would clear up before we had to make our way down, which of course it did, in a well-mannered Swedish fashion.

I have to give serious kudos to the Klättermusen Irving down-jacket, the temperature was pretty low, and the wind had some edge to it up there, but having this jacket on is like being in bed with a couple of friendly Swedish girls; soft, warm, cozy and very morish.

Then in the middle of our cup of tea the clouds started to clear up and gave us a nice confirmation of our location, as well as showing us the way back. Interesting to note how far off Michi's phone GPS put us compared to our actual location. It has to be one of the nicest vindications you can get, when your gut instinct and ad hoc compassing turns out to be more accurate than the latest high tech gizmos. We gave it plenty of time to get a good fix but it showed us as being in a totally different part of the mountain. The Pieps Vector (when I got home and managed to sync the files off it), had been spot on.

It's a very flat view from Sånfjället out to the distant mountains on the Norwegian border to the west. Our next destination I hope.

In retrospect it would have been very smart to sit down the day before and put all the necessary GPS waypoints into the Vector before we set out, and use that as a our main GPS unit instead of a phone.

A highly recommended trip, even though it was super short. Hard to imagine a better way to spend a day.

First impressions of the Pieps Vector

2012-12-18T13:54:00.002+01:00

Skip to; The Good, the Bad or the Ugly.
'So, did you buy the suicide transceiver?' asked my ski-touring mentor, Nisse. He was referring to the new Vector, which is the most cutting-edge avalanche transceiver to date, released by Pieps, the Austrian ski-safety company. The Vector is a new breed of avalanche transceiver, making the transition from single purpose radio transmitter/receiver, to something more than that. Pieps themselves are going through a big transition, as they recently got bought up by Black Diamond. That change in ownership might be a factor in the strange release of the Vector. It was supposed to come out last year, however it was delayed until this season, and a source from within Pieps told Steve Achelis (of the superlative Beacon reviews) that the transceiver had been delayed yet again until next season in order to allow Pieps time to work on the user-interface. However it appears the launch has gone ahead, and I was able to order the Vector from the crazy cheap Sport-conrad, and just got it into my grubby paws a few weeks ago for a quick review.

When I asked Nisse for advice on a transceiver, his take on the offerings was that there were no bad choices, except for anything by Pieps, which he disliked on the grounds of their product, the Freeride. The Freeride is why he called the Vector a 'suicide transceiver' by the way. Pieps have a branding problem with quite a few ski tourers I've met, none moreso than Nisse, and the Freeride is often given as the reason for the acrimony. In a market where every other modern transceiver is engineered so effectively, and designed so well, that they all uniformly receive a maximum score on beaconreviews.com, the Freeride sticks out like a sore thumb, designed to cut costs, sacrificing safety for a low price. The Freeride has only one antennae, when the standard across the board is three (the Vector setting new standards by having four, one dedicated to just checking the others), meaning the Freeride is going to be an effective search tool only in the hands of an expert. The chip on Nisse's shoulder stems from the fact that this budget transceiver is exactly the kind of thing that's going to be bought by, and for, younger cash-strapped and inexperienced beginners to ski touring, rendering them much less capable of searching effectively for buried avalanche victims in an emergency. It's ironic how suitable the name for the Freeride really is, giving their users an effective and cheap safety net while others that might rely on rescue from those users would be more at risk.

However, I needed to buy a transceiver and the Vector seemed to be the one with most bells and whistles, which I love. I wrote a little about my jump into ski touring here, it was an incredible experience and I highly recommend it. I even got to see a little avalanche, which was amazing. I rented an avalanche beacon for those trips, but I want to own and practice with my own transceiver.

To start out with the basics, an avalanche transceiver is a radio-transmitter and receiver, that emits a signal at 457 Hz. If you get hit by an avalanche, and buried, the idea is your friends will take out their transceivers and switch them to 'Search' mode, and rapidly find your burial site. Then they can use extendable probes to poke around in the snow until they find your body, and then they can use their collapsible shovels to dig you out, hopefully alive. Mammut have a fun flash game that shows the basic stages of such a rescue here, and the Avalanche-centre goes into a fun bit of history about transceivers in the first article of this gazette.

The Ortovox 3+, the Mammut Pulse or Element, the Arva Link, are all supremely well engineered transceivers that have been in use for years and are the definition of bulletproof gear, they are the black boxes of the back-country. Perhaps the one shared feature of all those offerings, is the simplicity of the product. Even the top-of-the-line transceivers have the basic, simple software and UI of a 1970's calculator. The interface is simple, the options are limited, the capabilities are basically sending a radio signal, and searching for a radio signal. I can only imagine that the software running on these transceivers is as relatively simple and failsafe as the software running your toaster.

Enter the Vector, Pieps effort to make a new tier of transceiver, a versatile, multi-faceted unit capable of much more than just sending and receiving, but also tracking waypoints and journeys with the built-in GPS, measuring slope angles, measuring atmospheric pressure and altitude, showing compass data with waypoint finding, as well as being capable of using the GPS data to triangulate the locations of multiple buried avalanche victims in the search, displaying them clearly on a map rather than just displaying direction and distance data as with other transceivers. No other transceiver on the market has anything even close to the level of features the Vector has.

The Vector was a very lofty and ambitious project, and that's basically what attracted me to it despite the warnings. Why spend cash on a one-trick-pony transceiver that sits in a box for most of the year, gathering dust, when instead you can buy something versatile like the Vector that acts as a transceiver during your tours, and acts as a basic GPS receiver the rest of the year? Anyone with a brain might guess that the transition from transceiver as a basic, simple radio sender/receiver to a 'smart' transceiver with complex software might not be the easiest transition in the world. Anyone with a brain would realise that the best thing to do would be to watch from the sidelines as the early-adopters get frustrated by the bugs, and pick up the product after all the beta-testing has been done by the brainless guys. Brainless guys like me just can't resist the urge to be first, and always burn themselves on the buns straight out of the oven. Brainless guys like me can expect a nice new piece of gear buried in issues and firmware updates. And that's exactly what I got.

A stark illustration of the importance of rapid rescue of burial victims after an avalanche. (Falk, M., Brugger, H., & Adler-Kastner, L. (1994). Avalanche survival chances.Nature, 368(6466), 21-21.)

The Good.
The Vector is a gorgeous, Star-Trek looking thing, with a big, bright display, a rubberised body with big, tactile buttons, and the swivel antennae acting as a send and receive toggle is something that seems like a real improvement over the usual buttons and sliders. The joystick allows quick and easy movement and selection in the menu system, and the speaker can belt out a really loud ping when the volume is set high. Rather than saddle the unit with a delicate USB connector, a system of tough contacts embedded in a plastic bevel allow a springy plastic dock to attach, which connects via a USB micro B connector, allowing for charging, firmware upgrades and syncing data.

Battery life is seriously excellent, with a long life even with GPS updates set to the 'High' level of 1 Hz. I spent a weekend testing the Vector out with some other transponders, in temperatures between -10°C and -20°C, culminating in the timed rescue of a couple of hidden transponders. Despite the GPS updates being set to high during all of this, the battery life only dropped a few percentage points over the whole weekend. Getting a full season out of one charge should be possible, especially with the updates throttled down to once a minute ('Eco' mode) or once every 15 minutes ('Low' mode). One of the most common concerns I've had from more experienced skiers about this unit was that adding in all the bells and whistles would kill battery life, but this is obviously not the case. Once, late at night and in sick weather, I was heading out to a GPS co-ordinate where my snow cave was, and thought my iPhone would be OK to get me there. The totally charged iPhone lasted less than an hour before shutting down (annoyingly when it was still displaying over 30% battery life left). This was the wrong tool for the job, the Vector would instead be the perfect match for that kind of winter waypoint locating.

There is a nifty feature called 'Auto-high' for the Eco and Low modes where you can press the joystick for three seconds, and the unit beeps loudly and tracks in High mode for five minutes. This would be a useful setting for tours, Eco mode when slowly trekking uphill, and then 'Auto-high' to track the downhill section, the 'shit my pants' part of touring for me. As the joystick faces out when the Vector sits in the holster, it's very simple to press the unit in, even through many layers of clothes, and activate this feature.

GPS data is very nice to work with on the unit, with waypoints and tracks very easy to create or save with names (using the joystick to navigate an onscreen keyboard, which is surprisingly easy even with gloves on). The ability to navigate to a saved waypoint sounds great, although in practice the Vector showed both compass heading and the GPS heading to the waypoint, neither of which agreed or seemed to be totally spot on. The altimeter shows altitude both by pressure and by GPS. Barometric data is also a nice feature, showing QNH (normalised barometric pressure adjusted to sea-level), but I am not sure how accurate it is yet.

The unit weights in at only 226 grammes (without the holster, which is another 117 grammes). This is fine, although Pieps do list the weight at 200 grammes. They probably fibbed a little in order to match specs on their competition, almost all the transceivers on the market weight in at 200 gr or less, as that used to be part of the transceiver spec under the old the European Telecommunications standard ETS 300 718 V.1, but is no longer in ETS 300 718 V.3. The back of the unit shows a simplified set of instructions for searching, which is also part of the ETS spec.

As far as the actual transponder part of the Vector, it's thankfully excellent. It picked up signals easily, singly or mixed, showing distance and direction simultaneously for up to five transponders. The information is updated rapidly without any lag (although at very low temperatures the LCD display started to be slow in updating). Flagging for multiple burials is easy and quick, and the loud tone varies in pitch, tempo and duration as you close in on a beacon.

The distances shown on screen were off, consistently overestimating the actual distance, as did the Arva Evo3+ beacon I had with me. The most accurate was the Ortovox D3, which measured out the exact distance to the other beacons decimetre by decimetre. Below you can see it at the end of a 320 cm Stubai avalanche probe, the other end of which was exactly at the Vector. It wasn't so hot at directions or multiple burials though, which is where the Vector really excelled.

That's all in the 'Find mode', but there is a 'Map mode', which is one of the key selling points for the Vector, but probably shouldn't be in the 'Good' section. It's a bit messy, and a bit hard to orientate with. In this mode, the screen shows ground covered with a clear section, uncovered ground with a black 'fog of war', your position as an X, and detected beacons as little round dots. This has the potential to be a ground-breaking interface, showing via the GPS/transponder data a neat map with all beacons highlighted, in practice it was just not reliable or intuitive. It's probably good for the initial search, when no signals have been detected and the avalanche site has to be strip searched without any spots being missed.

If you just look at the Vector as a basic transponder, to either send a signal or find others with the 'Find mode', it's absolutely fantastic.

The Bad.
More bug hunting time is definitely needed for the Vector, so far the massively overwhelming impression is Windows ME-level 'buggy'. Everything from the unit itself, to the software, to the online resources shout out that this was a rushed product launch. Even before opening the box warning bells were going off. The unit I received was already opened, there were a few marker scribbles on the dock, and it showed the GPS unit had been turned on a few days prior to shipping. Maybe there was a unit-by-unit check going on?

The documentation was mostly online, no manual was included but some faded quick-start guide in German showed how to logon to a Pieps website for a full manual or registration. The online guide to registration gave two links, one was a dead link (as was the supplied link for declaration of conformity to the EU radio transmitter directive 1999/5/EC) and the second had a typo in it, which thankfully Google autocorrected. This lead to the website for registration, firmware updates and presumably GPS data downloading, although so far that hasn't worked. This website, which I guess is the only interface between computer and the Vector, is a mess. It's entirely built on the Microsoft answer to Flash, 'Silverlight', which is about as enticing as you can imagine an MS version of Flash to be. It's a horrible, buggy and laggy piece of shit, replete with random logouts, and interface hiccups that tear at my soul. A failed attempt to supersede a dead technology. So far all my efforts to sync data with the Pipes website have failed, and choosing the 'connect to local unit' option is grayed out, and despite trying the usual bag of tricks (restarting, re-plugging, updating and praying), I have yet to manage syncing any data from the Vector to a computer.

The bugs in the Vector itself are harder to pin down, they happened often and varied constantly. You can see all three transmitters showing a 'Fail' on the startup check in the picture above, although a restart fixed that. I am often not sure if what I am seeing is a bug or not, because so much of the interface is sparsely documented. For example, in order to use the entire spectrum of capabilities of the Vector, you have to either tell the Vector that it is Summer, and you are using the Vector outside it's job of being a transceiver, or you have to tell it you have a Pieps Backup, which is a simple, single antennae transceiver that is designed to be worn deep under clothing and simply send a signal in the event your main transceiver is out of action.

So the first thing I did was to save the setting for Summer use. The Vector refused to believe it was Summer. Maybe it's smarter than I give it credit for and it can tell from the internal clock that I'm lying, but it point-blank refused to show a menu without instead being told I have a Backup, which I don't. Then, 4 out of 5 times, the full menu was available. I am not sure why it's not 5 out of 5 times, but that is probably a bug too. I also guessed from the title of the menu option 'Beacon Mode Summer 457 OFF' that the Summer mode would turn the 457 Hz transmitter off, but it still displayed a 'SEND: OK' screen once booted up.

There are numerous other bugs that have cropped up from time to time, the display will suddenly be set to 100% contrast, or the volume will be set to 100%, or the boot-up screen will overlay the display, or the centre joystick button will refuse to actually 'OK' a menu choice (even though the unit makes a tone to indicate the button has been pressed). Right now as I write this, the Vector is having trouble displaying a charge screen, when plugged in to recharge it flashes up the battery percentage and then goes blank. There are a LOT of bugs, that I hope will be quickly ironed out.
Finally the holster does orientate the Vector so its screen is pointed out at the world, exposed to whatever knocks you receive. This is true of some other transceivers, but I don't think other transponders have such a large, delicate screen. The orientation also means the joystick is pointing out, and I accidentally activated the 'Auto-high' GPS mode a bunch of times in my first day skiing while wearing the Vector. However, I really like that it's so easy to activate that feature, especially seeing as it doesn't come with much of a battery penalty, so I don't mind this at all.

The Ugly.
One issue with avalanche beacons is how they deal with the eventuality of a second avalanche. The scenario is that you witness an avalanche, you see someone get buried, you take out your transceiver and start to search. However a second avalanche hits, and you are buried with your transceiver in 'search' mode. In order to allow you to be found, many transceivers have either a timer, or a motion detector (or both) that can return the transceiver to send mode. (In addition, many units have the switch that toggles from 'send' to 'receive' designed in such a way that it can very easily pop back into send mode, and the act of toggling from 'send' to 'receive' is usually a little more tricky, with some kind of protection involved to make it impossible for accidental switching). The Vector has a big issue here. Although the hardware is certainly capable of it (it has a clock function and an accelerometer), the software doesn't have a timer or a motion detector method to revert to send mode. The reasoning for this choice is obvious once you look at how the Vector differs from the competition, and how the Vector forces you to make some choices before allowing you full access to its capabilities.

All of the capabilities of the Vector are inaccessible in normal winter mode. In order to access them, you have to tell the Vector that you are in Summer, or you have a backup transmitter. Pieps had a pretty obvious dilemma here, the transceiver is designed to be worn deep under clothing, strapped tightly to your body. Avalanches are violent, turbulent things, and it's not very likely a device in your hand is going to be found anywhere near you if you are caught in an avalanche. So if you made a transceiver that has a lot of cool functionality built-in, like GPS and barometers and altimeters, you are making a unit that is much less likely to be worn deep under layers, strapped tightly to your body, and is more much more likely to be found in your hand. So the options Pieps want to give are either you are using the Vector as a transceiver, in which case it's boringly functionless and strapped to your body, or you aren't using it as a transceiver because you have a Backup, in which case you can use the functions and can run the risk that it gets torn from your grasp in an avalanche. It's not optimal to think of the Backup as a real transceiver though, it has just one antenna, and can only transmit for an hour. An hour is fine if you want to be recovered alive, however only having a single antenna sending means that the transmitter can't do what some of the rest of the triple antennaed competition can do, which is to change the transmitting antenna to the most optimally orientated one, or to switch antennae if an antennae is damaged.
The second, and biggest, 'ugliest' feature of the Vector is how it adds all these bells and whistles to what has been until now, an object designed to do only one thing. Here's a quote from 'Backcountry skiing', one of the great Mountaineer books series.

Avalanche transceivers are designed to do one thing and one thing only: to decrease the burial time of the person caught and buried in the avalanche.

When I mentioned to an extremely experienced ski touring friend of mine that I was testing the Vector and that it had GPS, he was genuinely horrified with this break away from the single function of previous transceivers. In fact I found a lot of interesting mails between various members of Alpine organisations which all reiterated what he said, that the transponder should not be something with functions that take it out of the holster and put it into the hand.

Compass, altimeter, inclinometer are used in particular moments (poor visibility, snowfall, difficulty finding the way, on steeper slopes) as well as in situations where avalanche danger is present. In a critical, not harmless, situation the avalanche rescue transceiver needs to be “protected”, on the body. We rescuers don’t want to rescue avalanche beacons, but people. Are – in a critical moment – transceivers in the hands instead of on the body we risk to find only the device instead of the person.

And...

For obvious reasons, an avalanche rescue transceiver should always be worn in a safe and protected position while touring in the outdoors. The "new" functions (as mentioned above) would be mainly used when the avalanche danger degree is fairly high and people start to feel unsafe. This means, that the user would then take the avalanche rescue transceiver out of the safe place - normally on the innermost layer of clothing - in order to access those "additional functions". In reality, this means clearly, that the avalanche rescue transceiver will not be protected exactly in those moments when the user in very likely to take higher risks.

Most of the critique in these mails has been anticipated by Pieps with the Vector. It was thought that battery life would suffer with more functionality, that the transponder would be more complicated to use compared to more simple models, and that interference from the extra electronics would render the transponder less sensitive to detecting signals. However the battery life is excellent on the Vector, the search interface is intuitive and easy to follow, and the detection and sending capabilities seem as good as with other transponders.

The point about the danger of having the beacon in hand instead of under a layer of clothing still stands though. This is perhaps the real crux for the Vector, does it ask for trouble by having so many useful features? Pieps have obviously tried to anticipate this also, with the need for a Pieps Backup or the confirmation that it is Summer before allowing access to all the extras. Will that be sufficient?
For me it feels like a non-issue, the Vector is a perfect machine for me. Most of the time I want a GPS with killer battery life, for navigation and track recording on very safe terrain. For those times I am actually in avalanche territory the Vector will be so firmly attached to me it may as well be up my arse. I'm not the kind of guy that accepts risk easily, and no sudden urge to know what the atmospheric pressure is would get me to pull the Vector out of its safe warm little holster (in my arse).
From reading what members of other transceiver companies have said regarding the issue of adding new functions to transceivers, it seems that Pieps are on their own with this new, riskier direction they are taking with the Vector. And I guess this acceptance of some risk for their users fits well with their new parent company ...

“In this sport,” Chief executive of Black Diamond, Peter Metcalf said, “death is part of life.”

Bottom line of the first look.
I'm reading over what I've written, and to be honest it sounds very negative. I want to try and pull back on the negativity for a bit. Yes, there are bugs, and yes, right now the whole experience feels very much like a Beta-test. At the same time if I had the option to go back and just buy a solid, reliable and bulletproof Ortovox 3+ or Mammut Pulse, I don't think I would. The Vector is a real step forward for transceivers, with the possibility of real, genuine improvements in search times because of the GPS technology. The rechargeable battery, the tough and tactile body, and the promise of a less buggy future firmware update bringing the software up to check, all keep my opinion of the Vector pretty high. It's flawed, but a big leap forward.

That little guy (on his first ever cross-country ski trip) is the reason for few updates on my blog and few trips in real life recently, but I've already booked in a good bit of touring for the next few months, and will return to take another look at the Vector after a little more active use and a lot more practice rescues. Here's hoping to a firmware update or two to handle some of the issues, and maybe a less horrific computer interface too.

''Two thirds of avalanche fatalities in Utah as well as nationwide are not carrying basic rescue gear. This indicates that ignorance is the leading cause of avalanche death. These statistics are very similar to the number of drowning victims who don't wear personal flotation devices.'' (http://utahavalanchecenter.org/)

I should also add a caveat. When you look for ski-touring gear it seems like the trifecta of Probe/Shovel/Transceiver are the garlic to the vampire of avalanches. Spend a couple of hundred euro, strap on the transceiver, stick the shovel and probe on your back and you'll be fine. Statistically however, if you do get buried you have less than a 50% chance of getting out alive. The beacon/probe/shovel only gets used after you've already fucked up your decision making process, which happens even to the experts. The best way to survive an avalanche is to not get caught by one, and the best way to do that is to know your avalanche criteria, slope angle, route finding, islands of safety, etc. Just like with climbing, the biggest danger is either total ignorance of safety issues, or just ignoring the safety issues. Here's another relevant quote from the great 'Backcountry skiing' book ...

Nothing, including modern beacon technology, can replace Avalanche avoidance when it comes to keeping you alive in avalanche terrain.

Pretty-light photography, the Olympus OMD EM-5.

2012-08-20T17:07:00.000+02:00

Skip to section; DSLR is dead, The OMD EM-5 in the field or The Lenses.
I did a post about electronics for hiking here, with the conspicuous absence of the 800 lb gorilla in almost every hikers pack list, the camera. I know damn well that for all my non-blogging hiking friends (the lazy scum), bringing a camera is as important as bringing a tent. And for the wonderful blogging/hiking community the camera is both the capturer of memories and the peephole that allows our astonished audience (Hi!) to witness our rainy adventures through our eyes.

My camera lived outside the shadow of my surgical blade, a blade that without remorse carved the fat away from my pack-list, shaving grammes from tent, rucksack, clothes, sleeping bag alike. The camera laughed from its pedestal, immune because I want a camera with high image quality, tough construction that can shrug off the occasional shower or whack, and a manual mode. I did give the whole 'phone as a camera' thing a try at one point to save weight, but that just ended in a load of shitty high-res noisy JPEGs and me hating my 4S a little bit more. And the couple of waterproof digital compact cameras I've had tended to just take flat, boring pictures regardless of subject. So my rugged, heavy and fantastically fun Nikon D80 continued to scorn my attempts to cut-weight, like that racist South African ambassador in Lethal Weapon 3 scorned Danny Glover. When fellow hikers gasped at the leaden 600+ gramme D80 coupled to a 550 gramme Tokina 11-16mm wideangle, the camera smirked, lifted up its passport and sneered "Diplomatic immunity..."

BANG!

"It's just been revoked" quips the Olympus OMD-EM5.
This is the camera that finally persuaded me to quit DSLRs, and move to a relatively new, exploding format called micro four thirds (m43). My sad old worn D80 and all its lenses were sold and just about covered the cost of an OMD-EM5 and a handful of lenses, so financially it was an easy move. Let me give you a little quick background on why I went to m43. (BTW, any photos that aren't of camera gear in this post were taken with the EM5).

DSLR is dead.
The DSLR has just totally and utterly dominated prosumer cameras for the last few years. Ever since the release of the Canon 300D and equivalent Nikon D70, people have started to realise that they can have a near-pro experience with one of these low-end DSLRs for a decent cost. I had the 350D and was amazed at how, with a nice lens, I could take excellent pictures with this tough, small, and modestly priced body. The progressive successors were better and better, cheaper and with greater resolution and then with excellent video capabilities. And today it's impossible to go to anywhere populated by people with cameras, without seeing a very high ratio of DSLR to compact pocket cameras. They are immensely popular and have democratised photography in the same way Gutenberg democratised knowledge.

However in the wings await a few pretenders to the throne. While Nikon and Canon have more or less split the consumer DSLR market between them, and have been loath to impinge on their own success with a smaller professional camera, other manufacturers such as Fujifilm, Pentax, Sony, Panasonic, Olympus and Samsung have all seen and seized hungrily the opportunity for a compact, professional camera with interchangeable lenses.

Mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras.
The actual SLR part of a DSLR refers to the mirror and prism system used to show you in the viewfinder what the camera is looking at, and to allow the light path to be redirected to the sensor when you press the shutter release. Olympus had a series of cameras back in the 70s, called the OM series (You can see Mac Es OM10 in this post), that tried to make as compact an SLR as possible (and basically aped the design of a Leica M1 a little too). This new OMD is an m43, and like the Fujifilm X mount, the Pentax Q & K mounts, Samsung NX mounts, Sony E mounts and the Nikon 1 mount, is designed for a generation of cameras that omit the mirror and prism. Instead, you take a sensor, changeable lenses and make a nice professional body around them, but instead of an optical viewfinder, you have an electronic viewfinder that shows you a video stream of whatever the sensor is seeing. The lack of the mirror system means you can cut size and weight, as well as taking out one of the last remaining moving parts (by the time I sold my D80 it had taken well over 25,000 pictures, which means it was halfway to its rated 'end-of-life' for the mirror actuator).

Pick of the bunch.
My mate Michi is big into photography (in a kind of full frame analogue, home negative scanner kind of way), and he one day announced that it was time to sell our DSLR gear, that prices would soon start dropping as DSLR begins to lose popularity, and that the best camera out there at the moment was the EM5. And after a little cynicism and a lot of reading, I decided he was right.

First off I think he's right to pick m43, the biggest advantage of the m43 system is that because the sensor is smaller than with the systems still using APS-C sensors, the lenses can also be much smaller. You can see this with the Sony NEX cameras, which are remarkably compact in the body, but have these massive DSLR sized lenses attached. We're used to our gadgets getting smaller every year, but it's near impossible to minaturise the optical path parts. The idea with the NEX was to have a minaturised camera as much as possible, without cutting corners on image quality by using a smaller sensor, so they still have the APS-C sensor found in amateur DSLRs. The EM5 is riding the (thus far, and with guys like Stefan Hell around...) never-ending improvements in optical systems, one of which is the quality of image that can be wrung out of a certain sensor size. (The CCD sensor manufacturers for a microscope I work with used to make their sensors by buying intel 286 processors (134,000 transistors), and scraping the back off the CPU to allow light to fall on the transistors, using them for image detection. That was back in the early 80s, today they have similar sized sensors with over 6 megapixel resolution). With the smaller, but still powerful m43 sensor, lenses can be made ridiculously small, allowing for a really full on minaturisation.

The other, perhaps bigger advantage of m43 over the competition is that it's going through the same 'success breeds success' firestorm that the Apple App store went through. The early launch of m43, and the joint forces of Olympus and Panasonic meant there was a fairly healthy selection of lenses to choose from for m43, and that attracted buyers, and so more lenses came from third party manufacturers (Sigma, Tokina, Tamron and recently Cosina have joined the m43 group), which attracted more buyers, and so more lenses and so on. Today there are over double the amount of lenses for m43 compared to second place Samsung NX system, and more in the pipeline (including soon an insanely attractive Voigtländer Nokton 17.5mm F0.95).

Finally, the big advantage of the OMD-EM5 over other m43 cameras is how premium the body is. It has a sensor that finally delivers professional level picture quality despite its smaller size, a fantastic anti-shake system, a weather sealed body with a selection of weather sealed lenses, as well as a very rugged and solid magnesium casing. Coupled with a quality lens, such as the Panasonic-Leica 25mm prime, the image quality can be staggering.

The OMD EM-5 in the field.
I've had the EM5 out on quite a few trips now (coming up to 4000 pictures), it's had its first few falls and it's been rained on and so on. I've just started to flick the aperture and exposure dials around with the same unthinkingness as I did on my Nikon. It feels like I know the camera a little. So what's the verdict? (This won't be a very technical overview, if you want that, check the glowing review at Dpreview here).

The camera is actually one of the heaviest mirrorless cameras around, which sounds a little like I missed my main goal of reducing weight. However I still am very forgiving to the camera in my pack as far as weight goes. The solid build, weather sealing and small size, as well as the great battery life (my chief worry moving from SLR to something with a continuously running EVF) all mean that I find the 425 gramme weight light enough. Add in the ridiculously low weight of these primes, and you can see how magically light this system is compared to the DSLRs. For example, the wideangle pancake and body come in at less than 500 grammes.

There are also plenty of cool features, one that sounds very useful to a guy who loves winter hiking in Scandinavia, called live view. It's basically a method of allowing for very long exposures while intermittently updating the screen with pictures of how the exposure is going thus far, allowing you to fine tune nighttime pictures with ease.

The software is also insanely customiseable, there seems not to be a button or a dial that cannot be reassigned to some other switch, and not a sub-sub-menu that cannot be brought instantly to screen with some shortcut. The abundance of clicky dials and function buttons (more can be added with independent actions if you pick up the battery grip) make manual mode a pleasurable, intuitive experience. Even the manual focus mode is a pleasure to use, a twist of the focus ring causes the EVF to show a 5x to 16x crop of the FOV, allowing for really fast, accurate manual focus. I should also briefly mention the vivid colour reproduction, low noise at high ISOs and the anti-shake sensor that allows shake free exposures at relatively slow shutter speeds.

However after some use, it became clear that the main advantage turned out not to be the weight, or the massively improved image quality compared to the D80, or the video capabilities, but the tiny size. The D80 was so big, chunky and awkward that it never felt at home slung around my neck, and either it was out ready for action and annoying me, or buried down in a pack somewhere. The joy of the EM5 so far, especially with the weather sealing, is that the camera can hang around my neck for hours without getting in the way. With one of the tiny pancake lenses on, it's almost ludicrously dainty and fits easily in a jacket or hipbelt pocket. I take way more pictures with it than I did with the D80, and I am very much one of those people that follow the "take 1000 pictures and 1 of them might turn out nice" school of thought. Michi sold his Fujifilm DSLR and also bought the EM5, but he's more of a "keep it in the box and take it out once a week to take one, single, perfect picture" guy (an example below). Probably also why he shoots JPEG and I shoot RAW, I often need to 'fix it in post'.

The Lenses.
Panasonic Lumix G 14mm f/2.5 (Reviewed nicely here)
Michi briefly had the weather sealed kit lens (12-50mm F3.5-6.3, check out some nice pictures taken with full advantage of the weather sealing here), and by all accounts it seems like a decent jack-of-all-trades that would be perfect for hiking. However I've had bad experiences with kit lenses, and decided to go prime only with this camera. I went for a Panasonic 14mm F2.5 pancake (55g!), which is adorably small and dainty, and takes acceptable, fairly wide pictures, such as below at the wonderful Finnsvedsberget.

Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm f/1.4 (Review here)
Then I picked up the very hard to find Panasonic 25mm F1.4, (200g) which has just set up its home on my camera. With the m43 2:1 crop it turns into a 'nifty fifty', and if there was ever a lens that could steal my heart away from the Tokina 11-16mm that made my Nikon days so wonderful, it's this piece of sexy (gl)ass. It is very, very difficult to take a boring picture with this fast lens. Feels great, fast focus and wonderfully sharp.

Olympus M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 45mm f/1.8 (Reviewed here)
Finally I grabbed the lovely Olympus 45mm F1.8 (116g), which also manages to pull of pretty amazing pictures. Very easy to do the old razor sharp portrait with tons of blurry bokeh with this, and suitable also for recording a little bird-on-snake violence.

There are some niggles - because of the weather-sealing the buttons are a little... 'squishy' feeling, and an EVF can never hope to be as good as an optical viewfinder (although the ability to apply S-curves and see their affect live in the EVF is fun, and the manual focus system mentioned earlier is genuinely useful). I would also say that it takes some time to get used to how small it feels in the hand, compared to the nice grips of a full sized SLR. Overall though, I can take along this camera, with three or four lenses, some ND filters, gels and a spare battery, all for a fraction of the weight of my previous set-up. All that weight lost, with nothing but better image quality to show for it. (Below you can see the 45mm on camera, the 25 with its beautiful lens hood, and the svelte 14mm).

If you want to check out some other takes on m43 as well as the Sony NEX system, check out Hendrik's blog (Hiking in Finland), he has been reviewing lightweight cameras for ages. Here are his thoughts on the GF1, the GF2 vs. the NEX 5, and the Panasonic GH2. And here's Mark's (at Backpacking North) take on the GF1. And finally, here are some 100% crops from some of the pictures in this review. I love that you can see a single leg of the coffee filter partially eclipsing the sun in this drip of coffee below, really fantastic detail.

Happy exposing!

Dr. MacLeod, or how I learnt to stop worrying and love the fall.

2012-08-09T23:18:00.000+02:00

I wrote in typically exhaustive detail about my fear of lead climbing here. To recap, when lead climbing, you have to climb over the bolts that you periodically clip into, and at that point if you fall, you fall double the distance of however far above the bolt you climbed. Check out the picture above, where Nisse, my most daring and powerful climbing buddy, is over the bolt (just by his right foot), and is pulling out rope to clip into the penultimate bolt on this amazing route, Ignition (7a), Nacka Kvarn. If he slips now, he will easily take a four or five metre fall, but he's a bad motherfucker who doesn't give a shit.

This risk can be terrifying, and for mere mortals the fear of the fall means you will climb badly, without daring or confidence, 'over-gripping' the holds and getting exhausted. Before reading the book this post is about ('9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes' by Dave MacLeod), when leading I was often terrified of doing routes that were a full two or three grades below what I could do when fearless top-rope climbing (where you can't fall at all, and so a measure of physical capability without any reckoning of mental ability). However this book changed everything. Like when Lordi won Eurovision. Or like when I totally fucked my ankle up two months ago which is why I've been doing fuck all hiking lately (lots of reading though!).

There are a lot of books about climbing, with how-to's and (1), (2), (3) figures showing stick figures doing heal hooks and figure fours and so on. This abundance of self-help books is part of the problem according to MacLeod. His book stands out markedly from the competition with its figure-free text and direct, almost accusing tone smacking you in the face like an angry wet fish. I have a little collection of climbing books, and people always flick through them, ignore '9 out of 10 climbers...' and borrow the superficially more interesting and colourful 'Freedom of the Hills', 'Extreme Alpinism' or 'The self-coached climber'. Those books sluttishly gave up their stock of goods early, whereas '9 out of 10 climbers...' just keeps on giving, repaying whatever work you put into it with a rich harvest of improved technique and self-examination (like my wife). MacLeod obviously has a knack for coaching (he runs a superb coaching blog thing here), and this translates very well to the book.

You can almost appreciate that just from the section headings, listed on MacLeod's website. Every section is precise, succinct and holds a single focused idea, jagged and sharp like a shard of glass. These ideas are obviously the results of years of experience and thought, often at once obvious, and yet also revelational. Sometimes they are something I have been thinking about, an idea that I had glimpsed a vague ghost of, but was now suddenly presented to me in a clear and eloquent form. And sometimes the ideas just feel totally novel, invigorating and fresh, a blast of new thought instantly blowing away old conceptions and revealing a new perception, like that moment when a magic-eye picture suddenly swims into focus. If anything the book is too dense, there is so much to take in that a single read just leaves an impression of the details. Getting your copy underlined and note-filled, dipping into it as you progress is a very rewarding process, and today my copy is as stained, worn and well-thumbed as a porn mag before the internet.

One repeated admonishment from MacLeod is the idea of overcoming the fear of falling. To do this by learning to fall, to practise falling in the gym, a little higher every time, and then in time to practise outdoors, until the bodies natural fear of falling is overridden. This is the advice that I feel has had the most obvious impact on my climbing. A few dozen evenings of falling practise indoors and I found myself seeing deep, coherent improvements in my leading.

The fear of falling is still there, I get a floaty feeling in my feet, and sweaty palms just thinking about going over the crux bolt on a recent awesome hangdogged climb (Wild Kids at Vistingeklippan, being climbed by beautiful Sandra above). The cliff was over-hanging, a ledge was the next step, it had to be heel hooked and half-mantled to get onto. And yet the overhang meant that my body had to really hang out over the full exposure, with only a very dodgy sloper for one hand and the half-promise of a crimp for my left when I stood up for the next clip. It was terrifying, and I yelled out a lot to distract myself from the fear, but I think the key in being able to get to the next clip was the fall practise. I don't do it as much as I should, I haven't started falling outside yet, but already, just around 50 practise falls in, I know the only route upwards is to ignore everything but breathing and making the moves you have to make. I climbed ugly, but I kept moving up, and a ghostly floating Dave MacLeod head over my shoulder urged me on the whole way like an Episode VI Ben Kenobi. It's actually embarrassing to consider that a scary fall, when you look at the kind of fall Dave takes in the video below (whatever happened to his poor hat?).

Wild Kids was a climb that was absolutely at the bitter end of my physical and mental limits, however the book and its lessons have also allowed me to lead easier routes with the same relaxed technical efficiency that I would previously only have been able to do when top-roping. What I can lead has really caught up to what I can toprope, but all my climbing has improved. The rising tide has lifted all the boats. The pie has been made higher. I'm eating my cake, lying in the bed that I made with two birds in my hand.

The falling thing is just one premise out of dozens explored in the book, I just focus on it to pique your interest and whet your appetite. This tiny, flexible little paperback is packed with nuggets of philosophy. 'If you know the Way broadly you will see it in everything' is a quote by Japanese Samurai, Miyamoto Musashi, and this applies to MacLeods book nicely. His insights are occasionally so abstract and general, and yet focused on overcoming the mental problems that hold climbers back, that they don't just apply to climbers. A lot of his advice ('What you do, you become') strikes me as equally valuable to my BJJ, or even my job. This is something that I picked up from the seminal 'Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance', that problems/distractions/mindsets or attitudes that you have in any one area of your life, you will tend to have in other areas. And equally, tactics you use to overcome them in any one area will change yourself in other areas of your life. I can't help but see that pedantic, autistic way I force myself to set-up my anchors or rappel in order not to die, has started to infiltrate into my work life, letting me attack large, complex projects with a fastidiousness that surprises me.

Here's to the hope that all the self-improvements from '9 out of 10 climbers...' also cross over from climbing to the rest of my life. And here's to Dave MacLeod, great climber, great writer. I can't just recommend his book, after all I recommend the other climbing books I mentioned too, they're great, but they haven't (and many other good books haven't) given me such a book-boner as this one has. '9 out of 10 climbers...' gets a strong, underlined recommendation. Go buy this book!

Tech in the wild, iPads, iPhones & Ebooks

2012-06-15T09:56:00.000+02:00

I really want to like technology in the outdoors. Most people pooh-pooh the idea, to them it's sacrilege to desecrate the outdoors with buzzing phones, screeching radios, chirping doodads etc. We spend our days surrounded by LED screens flashing the latest updates at us, emails vibrating the phone in our pockets and blaring alarm-clocks cruelly wrenching us out of sleep every morning. To get into nature is to get away from stressful modern life with its constant chittering chattering data, to tune in to the bigger, slower movements of the universe, to be able to notice the more subtle marks of nature.

Those quiet moments are valuable and wonderful, but there is something powerful in having technology in the wild. It's the comfort from being inside a snug cabin during a storm, hearing the wind tear at the roof, seeing the rain smash impotently at the windows. The same comfort in spending hours building up an igloo in the bitter cold, under dark, snow-heavy skies, and then finishing and retiring to the shelter, ensconced in layers of plastic and down, safe and warm.

To me, technology is that which allows us to thrive in the outdoors. The gear we buy today with our spare cash for our fun hobby, would shock the explorers that filled in the blanks of the maps of the most inhospitable regions of the world. Membranes that open and breath when warm and close to trap air when cold, nanosphere coatings on jackets that spill water and dirt off like magic. GPS receivers that pinpoint our location to the centimetre in seconds, satellite phones that allow us to call for help anywhere in the world and LED headlamps that can light up the night for weeks on end.

That kind of technology, which transforms a terrifying, lethally dangerous environment into a playground, delights me. So while I do enjoy a break from emails and webpages when I hike, I don't try to hide away the technology that makes the outdoors easier. I cherish all of these high-tech gadgets. And in that vein I wanted to find some reason to bring my favourite home gadgets to the outdoors.

The dream.

Ideally, all of these outdoor apps that I play with would be as functional and useful as any other gear I bring on trips. I would reach for Star Walk, or Svampguiden, or Theodolite, as often as I'd reach for my Mora knife, or my primus. More importantly, I would use them and get the results I wanted. However it's just a dream. All too often the reality is a bitter disappointment filled with bugs, frozen screens and annoying glitches. How often do you take your knife to do something and it just crashes on you? How often do your shell pants randomly restart? Even the touchiest, most delicate stove I've ever used hasn't required as much fucking babysitting as even the best of these outdoor apps.

Power.

The single, largest, most frustrating problem with phones/tablets these days is battery life. And that problem is just magnified a hundredfold when you're a hundred km from the nearest power outlet. Solar packs might work nearer the equator, but up in the northern latitudes they're limited by basic physics. Spring sunshine here will maximally only give a hiking-sized solarpanel around 1 Watt hour, and how often can you count on decent sunshine? Powerpacks are heavy, and modern smartphones or tablets scoff batteries up like a German eating sausage. Even worse, in cold weather it's not uncommon for devices to just shutdown abruptly even though the battery still reads over 50% full. Once a heavy drain like GPS meets snowy weather, all bets on runtime are off. It's not just the inevitability of power running out, it's the nonstop niggling worry. That little battery icon becomes a chittering monkey on your back, a constant gnawing worry that is impossible to ignore.

Utility.

What are the most useful benefits of this gear? The key advantage from a phone by a long way is communication, and its value has no limit. Having a phone in a waterproof bag is absolutely the most basic safety gear to pack. Having GPS on a phone is nice too, but being sure about your location is so fundamentally important that GPS can only aid, and never replace, a map, compass and the knowledge to use them. Everything else, on every one of the outdoors apps I've ever tried, has just been some fun triviality. A base distraction, sometimes infotainment like the wonderful Star walk, sometimes educational like Svampguiden ('The mushroom guide', pictured above, probably the most beneficial and useful app), sometimes just pointless drivel like Spyglass.

And that's what's really driven me away from bringing the iPad on trips, or from taking the phone out of its ziploc bag and turning it on. The jarring dissidence between wide open blue skies and shimmering sea, or scudding clouds lashing rain down on a misty forest, or a crystal clear, snow covered landscape under dancing northern lights, the dissidence between that kind of epic, beautiful scenery and a jabbing finger pricking at a glowing screen, mumbling that 'it'll work any minute now'. It's like having a monkey in the Louvre sticking its finger up its arse and smelling it, intent in its own squalor while ignoring the surrounding magnificence. Having a phone with a full battery, turned off and wrapped up safe in your hip belt pocket, is a lovely ace-in-the-hole. Taking it out and turning it on to play with it never seems to add much to the party.

The outlier.

There was one piece of modern, digital entertainment technology that did actually click with me in the outdoors. One touchscreen that not only worked well, but felt as integrated with me on my trips as my gloves. The ebook reader. Here was everything wrong with the iPad righted. Battery life that is measured in months, not hours. A tough, tolerant body that takes up virtually no space, and onboard it are countless hours of entertainment (depending on how slowly you read). A screen that is easy to read by the dimmest headlamp, and yet only becomes better in strong sunlight (the iPhone in the picture below is actually on, and has its display set to maximum brightness).

The strangest thing to me is how I normally find playing around with apps pretty entertaining, but find it is a total misfit when lying outside your tent enjoying the setting sun. Reading though, feels right. Even years ago I would bring books on hiking trips (real, old-fashioned, dead tree books) and would have brought dozens if it wasn't for the weight issue. Now here is a machine that can hold ten thousand books, and yet weights only 220 grams.

Kindle touch.

I gave it a bloody long go with the Kindle touch, and really enjoyed every minute of it. The placement and sensitivity of the power button was a major pain in the arse though, the slightest touch would turn the Kindle off, and it is placed in a the middle of the bottom, sticking out of the case so even a passing breeze seems enough to activate the button and interrupt your reading. The lack of hardware page turning buttons mean constantly having to move your fingers and touch the screen. And as a final gripe, I wanted to place it into a ziploc bag, as I usually do with electronics, and use it through the plastic, however this made the Kindles sensitive touchscreen go mental. So it had to be outside the bag during use.

Adlibris Letto.

My wife (who works for Adlibris) turned me on to the Letto, which was only released a few weeks ago. It's a Swedish version of the French Odyssey e-reader. She thought the hardware buttons might make it easier to use in a waterproof container. I ordered one, and migrated my library over to try it out. At 195 grams, it's 25 grams lighter than the Kindle. It has two page turning buttons, one on each side. The screen is much less touchy than the Kindle, and Hey Presto! it works perfectly inside a ziploc. And finally, thank the Gods, the fucking power button is not a super sensitive hypochondriac, and only turns the reader off when actually pressed on purpose. Tech-wise, it does all the usual stuff, browser, headphone jack, wifi and so on. And finally, it has a handy SDHC slot so you can expand your storage from 2 to 34 Gb.

So as happy as I was with the Kindle, the Letto is just a featherweight more perfect, and now my Touch is for sale, make me an offer in the comments. Not that I want to say the Letto is perfect, by the way. The touchscreen keyboard is nicer to use on the Kindle (probably due to the crazy high sensitivity), and the Letto software is a little more buggy, so there are flaws. It's pretty damn close to book reading Nirvana though. And I suppose an enterprising mind might find things other than books to read on it.

Bottom line.

The iPhone stays in my pocket, turned off, and the iPad stays at home, but the e-book reader is the best thing to happen to outdoor electronics since GPS, in my humble opinion. Although I think it's just the best thing to happen in technology since the invention of the battery, so I might be biased. Together with the amazingly functional, and amazingly ugly Calibre (a Swiss army-like book library and convertor), you can have enough reading in your pocket to last you for years, and the battery life to match. And they're not even expensive!

P.S. Sorry for the unbelievable tragic picture quality here. In the never-ending battle against bulk and weight, I've made the greatest of sacrifices and sold my DSLR. Goodbye Nikon, you will be fondly remembered. Hopefully a future post will describe in detail the move away from a multi-kilo DSLR system to something much much smaller, but with even better picture quality. Right now though, I'm stuck in camera-phone purgatory.

Edit! The post on a lightweight camera (an Olympus OMD EM-5) has been made!

Gear guilt, ski-touring, and falling in love with Hilleberg.

2012-05-17T16:56:00.000+02:00

Buying gear feels indulgent. It feels like I read about gear too much, which seems consumerist and shallow. My cynical view is that I buy whatever accoutrements needed to live out the little fantasy I have of myself, like Barbie doll accessories. Which at the very least was once true, I went through the adolescent search for an identity with a costly and varied path; rugby, karate, football, fishing etc. All hobbies dabbled with for an intense moment, and then left behind, piles of flash gear growing dusty in the wardrobe. I kind of feel that's why the Irish economy has fallen apart, I've moved out and nobody's buying shit anymore. Now that I'm a little older, I'm kind of allowing myself to not be so cynical about buying gear. I've picked up a few hobbies that resonate enough with me to stick. BJJ and climbing both feel like long-term partners that have much to offer over the next couple of decades. And all BJJ needs is a cup, which is optional depending on how delicate your balls are. On the other hand climbing can be a gear-addicts wet dream.

Skiing is something that has really challenged this gear cynicism, because without the gear, there is no skiing. Ever since I moved to Sweden I started to pick up XC skiing, because without it Sweden in Winter is a morass, and people that can't ski are looked upon by the locals as being a bit shit. Ski touring was a related skill that seemed a little more complex to get into, but I enjoyed the idea of it so much that I spent a lot of effort investigating every aspect of touring. Books on touring and free-heel skiing were bought, and a whole stack of data about gear assimilated. And I felt guilty, because here I was, thirty years old now, still wanking over shiny new toys I would never have the tenacity or patience to master. I still had a dream though, mental pictures of myself skinning up a mountain, pathfinding in a white-out, sleeping through a blizzard, skiing down terrifying slopes…

In the end I got annoyed at my day-dreams ending with "Maybe some day in the future". So in a fit of mental haphazardness I spent way too much money on a ton of incredibly expensive, incredibly beautifully engineered touring gear.

Then I pushed myself into picking up this shit, putting it on and learning how to use it. And within a few months I had toured up and down a mountain or two, navigated across the mountainous Swedish-Norwegian border in a dizzying, nauseating white-out, slept through a few blizzards and skied down some extremely terrifying slopes. This whole transformation in my skill set/experiences happened over just a few trips. So I thought it would be cool to scribe out my journey into free-heel skiing, because if you, my dear reader, want to take that journey, I want to encourage you very much to do it. All you have to do is spend loads of fucking money.

The first three times I downhill skied, was in 2010, January 2012 and February 2012, at a very gentle Swedish resort called Romme Alpin. It is not very alpine. I rented some gear, and an incredibly patient German coworker took me from being unable to stand on the skis, to being able to get down a red slope in one piece, despite the occasional ass slide.

At this point I realised that if I wanted to progress to touring, I would have to choose between Telemark or Randonnée. Telemark skis have a free heel all the time, and you have to be very skilful to ski downhill with free heels. Randonnée makes the gear skilful instead, you have free heels when touring, and press a button to fix the heels for conventional downhill skiing. Telemark takes a long time to master, whereas I thought I could now handle the fixed heel downhill, alpine part of the Randonnée tour. The equipment was way cooler too. So on the fourth round, at Kungsberget, a more jump orientated ski resort, I had my own Dynafit skis and boots. Words cannot describe how beautiful the Dynafit gear is.

I was just about starting to get the hang of the skis that day, when one of our party took a bad fall, got a savage concussion and I had to take him to the ER. And on the way, I couldn't help but notice how warm and sunny it was. And how little snow was on the ground. The season was over for 2012. Boo!

However in Sweden we are lucky enough to have time machine trains, that can transport you back to Winter for around 150 euro. So the fifth ski-time took place 200 km North of the Arctic circle, at Riksgränsen, a sprawling complex of lifts that cling like cobwebs over the massive shoulder of a raw, boulder strew mountain straddling the northern reaches of the Swedish-Norwegian border. I spent a lot of time skiing downhill off-piste, and did my first real Randonnée tour (and saw my first avalanche!).

The sixth and most recent ski trip took place at Katterjokk, near Riksgränsen. This was definitely a break-through for me. I took a half-day of private tuition, learnt how to really make the skis work while saving my energy, and after that I didn't feel exhausted after a long off-piste bash, I felt in-control and capable. This was also total exhilaration, from a dizzying height with what felt like ridiculously steep drops, to travel with tight jump turns down a pinched couloir at breath-taking speed. An instant heroin hook.

These long trips in Norrland were done with a guy I climb with, Nisse. And this dude is the same in skiing as he is in climbing. Last year I would go to a crag and find routes I could do, and then do them. After I started climbing with Nisse, we would go to a crag, and find routes we wished we could do, and then do them. It took a hell more blood/sweat/tears but I saw my skillset grow in leaps and bounds. It was the same with skiing, instead of practising on pisted slopes over and over, I tagged along with the bad boys and terrified myself down, what seemed to me to be, vertical drops. After a day of 'ardcore, heading along a pisted route back to my tent in the evenings seemed horribly tame. It felt like going XC-skiing in prepared ski-tracks, mindless and predictable.

The most recent trip was also notable for having constant storms, almost from start to finish, four days later. Almost non-stop near-gale winds, with non-stop wind drift and heavy snow. I was prewarned though, the last trip had been pretty terrible at times. Then I had had a tidy snow-cave to retreat to, but this time I had Michi's Staikka. It was my first time in a Hilleberg, but by Pluto's beard it won't be my last. Fucking incredible from erecting to packing away. OK, 3.6 kg is ridiculous for one person, but it was very much a base camp tent so the weight was less of an issue. I set it up on day one and took it down when heading home.

The Staikka has three crossing poles, is self standing, and was tied down with a load of MSR blizzard stakes, which I stamped almost a metre down into the snow. I dug a hole in the vestibule to have my boots in, and at night would string a few extra guylines out to my skis. Plenty of room for digging a little kitchen into the second vestibule, and loads of room to lounge around reading, while the wind went apeshit outside.

Rock solid, unshakeable in non-stop screaming wind. Day one I had built a wall of snow around one half of the tent to shelter it, but in the middle of the second night the wind shifted and the bowed walls woke me up. I was too exhausted to care, and in the morning the storm had built its own wall of snow on the exposed side. I never really got Hillebergs before, but now I do. It's a storm shelter you can put up solo, in two minutes, and it's bombproof. Funnily enough one of the rare Hilleberg staff was with my gang of skiers, but he stayed in a hostel. For SHAME!

I can't justify 3.6 kg, but as I'm heading to the states in June I plan to pick up a bargain USD priced Unna or Soulo for these kind of horrible winter conditions. There are lighter options out there that might possibly handle this kind of weather, but 1.5/1.6 kg for a 'fire and forget' gale-proof tent is well within my guidelines for reasonable. Probably useful to have something self-standing for kayak trips too.

More fucking gear though. Gear-guilt is an annoying feeling, it seems so unjustified! I just wrote about the ColdAvenger recently, without it I would have had a much less fun time out in this rough weather (during one particularly harsh moment a huge crowd of skiers were hunkered down behind a huge boulder on the summit, trying to protect their faces from the horizontally blown, diamond sharp hail, while inside the ColdAvenger my baby-soft skin was as safe as a ~~bank~~ Volvo). All this pricey touring gear made me feel guilty, but without it I would never have had these amazing trips. Six months ago I had a little more savings, but if six months ago me had seen what I was doing on these skis, he would have shit himself out of jealousy (that's my go-to reaction for jealousy). The price of all the gear and all the travel and food was hefty, but still a bargain in exchange for the experiences I've had. So surely it's silly to always feel guilty over buying gear, when it allows us to partake in these fantastic adventures? Fellow hiking blogger Martin Rye puts it nicely here, when he says "Get trip focused and not gear focused. Gear is a means to an end." Wise words, and for me, the Staika and Dynafit gear made a hell of a means to a hell of an end.

Feel free to reply in the comments and tell me that I'm not a consumer whore for buying all this shit.

Fixing the Talus ColdAvenger

2012-05-03T22:59:00.002+02:00

Feel free to skip the adulation and bitching, and head straight to fixing the fogging.
I've been using the Talus ColdAvenger for about two years now, and it's been a bittersweet relationship. You know those write-ups after trips where people go through gear that worked, and gear that didn't work? The ColdAvenger is Schrödinger's cat for those lists, it both works and doesn't work. In Winter it's something I consistently use and rely on, and yet it regularly annoys the shit out of me.

You can see both parts of the USA made 'Expedition balaclava' above, the ridiculously large balaclava (90 g), and attached to it by velcro wings, the face mask with polyurethane ventilator (50 g).

It doesn't have so many decent competitors, although the insane helmet/goggles/face mask/Stormtrooper getup from Ruroc stands out. The ColdAvenger has its kinky surgical rubber, air warming and moistening niche pretty much to itself.

The good points about the mask are that it does everything it claims to. When sitting on your face, moist and tight like a facehugger from 'Aliens', it doesn't matter if the temperature is -10 °C, or -30 °C, you get to breath comfortably and easily as your exhalations warm and moisten the incoming air. There is an adjustable ventilator in the facemask that can be rotated to change the amount of outside air that comes in, although it's something I've never played with. Even when boot packing up steep snow-covered hills, with burning lungs gasping for air, the mask feels open and easy to breath through. It gets wet and drippy, but mostly on the rubber part itself, so it's not as disgustingly soggy as you might think.

The softshell balaclava keeps your head warm, and is windproof enough that you rarely feel a draught. It has a long flowing neck that can sit snugly under your jacket. Velcro is something I try to avoid (short lifespan, easily clogged with hair and dirt, annoyingly catch on other gear and rip it up, etc), the velcro attachments to fix the mask to the balaclava work pretty well though. Together with the usual winter gear (base layers and insulated jacket/mittens), the ColdAvenger with some goggles forms a perfect cocoon around you. It feels a little like being in a biohazard suit, safe and armored against the outer environment. It's nice to be able to just lounge around in killer weather without a care in the world, and without getting horrible dry skin that really cold air always brings.

There are two major flaws, the fogging and the fit. Fogging is caused by the mask part of the ColdAvenger allowing a little moist air to blow up from where the top of the mask meets your nose, this moist air condenses/freezes onto the goggles/glasses/eyelashes. This is infinitely frustrating, constantly having to stop and try to fine-tune your goggles with freezing digits, invariably with little success. Once the fogging starts, it never fucking ends, and the bastard ColdAvenger loves nothing more than fogging up your goggles.

It comes with a little piece of foam that if fixed on the inside of the mask will reduce the air leaking out, but it didn't work and got lost fast.

The fit of the balaclava is also so woeful that it's almost comic. I have a large head, 61 cm, and the top of the balaclava sits relatively well. It then billows out to the long, droopy sides, and the part under the chin was obviously designed for bloodhounds. The neck part would probably double as a sleeping bag for the ultra-obese, and the fit around the eyes was apparently cut for rabbits, or some kind of animal with eyes on opposite sides of its skull. When putting it all together the mask-part can pull the balaclava tightly around my face, but what inevitably happens is that folds of the balaclava material get mushed around my eyes/mouth, or else causes a long gap between the bottom of the mask and the beginning of the chin of the balaclava. The fit is shit.

That all sounds a little negative, but I meant what I said about how well it works. The fit doesn't matter so much, my winter clothes are often hooded over the ColdAvenger, keeping that misshapen abortion under wraps. The fogging is a pain in the ass, but has now been cured.

I work around the shortcomings, and despite these niggles the ColdAvenger is just indispensable. I remember thinking it was expensive when I bought it, but if I look back at how often I use and appreciate it, and how during Winter trips it gets put on as I leave the car park and stays on until I arrive home, the cost seems absolutely negligible.
I use it when cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, long skating, or just for wandering walks in Winter when the wind is blowing, and even sleep with it on during skiigloo trips (it works perfectly with a quilt). So great value for money despite the flaws.

Fixing the fogging
Ignoring the fit is relatively easy, however the fogging is a pain in the ass. And unlike the fit of the balaclava, you can't adjust during a trip to stop fogging. Once the goggles get fogged, it's a nightmare to get them totally clear again. So I decided to try and mod the facemask a little to prevent this problem.

I spend a lot of time in a lab wearing face masks. There's no fogging in the lab, but I get really annoyed by the feeling of vented air blowing up into my eyes, so I've become very good at bending the little wire piece in the mask to make an airtight seal. To fix the ColdAvenger, I took out one of those little metal pieces and threaded it into the mask.

The stitches on the mark were simple to pop out, it was a very heavy thread and only around three loops needed to be pulled out.

Then a metal piece from a face mask was cut out and slid into the ColdAvenger. I think it's basically the same metal piece that you get in freezer bag ties (two malleable metal wires on either side of a stiff white plastic piece), so that could be used instead. I just used one from this mask because it was a nice width.

That was it! I was expecting it to be more difficult. The stitching was clumsily redone, and the wire bent savagely as a test.

This was done before the Easter ski touring, and over that trip the ColdAvenger was as indispensable as ever. For the first time ever though, there was no fogging at all. I bent the mask into a decent fit on day one, and that was it. As underwhelmingly easy as the modding itself. I am just back from another ski trip to Norrland, and on that trip I noticed the little metal strip was sliding along the seam, so the final edit involved putting little 'stop' sewing pieces on the seam on either side of the strip to keep it in place.

On this second ski tour the weather was abysmal, and I've never been so happy with the ColdAvenger. While other people shielded their faces from the screaming wind cutting across the mountaintop, I felt comfortable without ever having the slightest hint of fogging. Beautiful.

The next job is to work on sewing the balaclava to have a little more form. Or I might just start a deep fat fried lard and mayo diet to get the necessary jowls to fill it out a little. If I was buying a ColdAvenger today I might just grab the mask part (which is sold separately) and use it with one of those much better fitting Röjk 'Coolclavas' instead.

The ColdAvenger facemask is highly recommended to any dear readers who dig winter camping, and hopefully there will soon be a version 2.0 of the balaclava that isn't modelled to fit Easter island statues.

Ski touring in Norway & Sweden, and my first gear list/avalanche.

2012-04-10T19:22:00.000+02:00

Just back from a ski touring trip in North Sweden and Norway. It was a fantastic, I went downhill skiing for the fifth time in my life, and realised that getting OK at piste skiing and thinking you can handle the downhill part of ski touring is like getting good at indoor/gym climbing and thinking that transfers to rock climbing (it doesn't).

On the first day I was unlucky/stupid/inept enough to ram into a tree at speed, and felt/heard a pop from the ligament on the right side of my left knee. Both of my knees have had torn ligaments in the past from BJJ competitions (nothing like adrenaline to keep you from tapping out due to a foot lock, with painful consequences), and the feeling of instability and weakness was a familiar and dispiriting blow. I almost cancelled the planned ski-tours, but decided to give it a go and see how it went. Happily it turns out nothing helps your knee regain its strength and confidence like climbing a mountain or two.

Before the trip I read Bruce Temper's excellent "Staying alive in avalanche country" (Amazon, or Adlibris for we Scandinavians), determined to know as much as possible about the number one killer of backcountry skiers. Getting out in the mountains with the book fresh in my mind was delightful, every crag a homework lesson in avalanche spotting. Was the angle dangerous? How was the wind here? Could the slope be cross loaded? Was there evidence of an old runout path? On the first big tour (Spanstinden, 1457 m) one particular slope set all the danger signals off at once. I even paused and took a few pictures of it.
Our excellent guide Oscar (above, breaking trail like a trooper) stopped when he saw a crack run out ahead of him, and motioned me to back up. I had been snapping pictures because I thought the slope looked loaded and the cornice above shows it was on the lee side, but I hadn't really thought that it seriously could be a real, actual avalanche. I'd seen avalanches before in Norway, on distant slopes, booming theatrically as they swan-dived out over cliffs to turn into long drifting tendrils of silver, shimmering their way to the valley floor. Avalanches like that are as impotent and abstract as they are on TV. To think that I could have a real one happen just metres in front of me seemed as remote a possibility as having a lion wander into my bedroom (which reminds me dear readers, my lioness is pregnant!). So I hadn't even thought to voice a warning. When he spotted the danger too it made everything feel much more real, and I fumbled my phone into a pocket and backed up.

A moment later, as he kick-turned to head away from the loaded slope, the avalanche ran out as violently, rapidly and silently as a thousand ninjas attacking an army of mimes. In Space.

This was a moderately small avalanche, but also a perfect example of what to look for. Around a metre of fresh and wet snow, on a hoar-frost base, with a coastal pack, on the lee side of the slope. It was fascinating to see all those details come together. And it served as stark warning. Small as it was, this must have been at least (and very conservatively at that) 80 tonnes of snow, in seconds, and absolutely silently, flowing like water to then set like concrete at the bottom of the slope. Sobering stuff.

I crashed on the floor a couple of times, but happily spent one night in an amazingly well-crafted snow cave, made by one of our group who had spent a night in it before his hotel room became available. I fell for that classic igloo/snow cave trick, carelessly sipping on tea and reading a book in the hushed morning calm, reasoning I had plenty of time before needing to pack up and head back to civilisation to meet up with everyone for the days skiing. When I eventually dug my way out of the snowed up entrance, I was punished with a roaring blizzard in the face, near zero visibility, and that peculiar nausea-inducing optical illusion when featureless snowy ground melts into featureless snowy sky.
Black lines floating in front of me would as often turn out to be twigs in the foreground, as they would turn out to be trees miles distant. I would throw on my skins to ascend what looked like a long slope rising before me, and then walk confidently into what turned out to be a vertical wall of snow instead. It took almost an hour of careful compass reading to navigate back to the marked winter-trail.

One thing was obvious this time, I finally have a gear setup that works like clockwork. There were a few flies in the ointment, the Petzl Myo died so I had to use the backup E+lite which worked great. And in order to test that "the best camera is the one you have with you", I left my D80 at home and relied on the iPhone 4S camera instead. However the iPhone 4S is a near total disappointment, and the camera in it is no exception. If any of the pics from this trip don't look like dirty grainy blurry stinky pus, they were probably taken with the GoPro Hero2, which was fun, if a little tricky to manage. It is true that the best camera is the one you have with you, but if it's a 4S, you might be better off trying to draw what you're seeing by pissing in the snow, instead of taking pictures with this overhyped piece of shit. At least the battery life is so terrible it will put the phone out of your misery in no time.
The rest of the gear has been well used by now, I know all their ins and outs, and almost everything worked perfectly. I was so enthused by this that I made an almost proper gear-list for the first time ever.

This was the gear that was worn (3.1 kg, but the Dynafit TLT5 boots (2.5 kg with liners) should be in here and bring it up to 5.6 kg). The ColdAvenger will be praised and bitched about in a future post. It's a flawed masterpiece, like the English dubbed version of Das Boot. The Finisterre boxers I impulse bought after reading Hendriks great review were comfy and lightweight. The Houdini Airborn base layer is just fantastic, silk and merino were made for each other. The Alpina Grap helmet was the only helmet to pass the latest stringent German safety tests, and warm/comfortable was it too. And the Klättermusen Brokk trousers were superb, perfect for use with the Dynafit boots. Dynafit boots have a latch that has to be open to have the boots in walk-mode, so that sticks out a few centimetres from the top outside of each boot. The Brokk trousers seemed almost made for that, with a zip that could open around the boot cuff, while being held closed at the base by buttons and an elastic line.

This was the gear being carried (12.1 kg, mostly the skis). There is some first aid in the cooking pot, and there was also a Laufbursche pack sack with some dehydrated food. The comfortable and warm Exped downmat was as easy to pack away as ever, even with frozen fingers. The Gipron 797 poles were superb, they are easily adjusted to suit crossing steep slopes, running downhill or doing crosscountry. The Klättermusen Irving was the envy of others touring when we took food breaks, it's a bitch to pack away though. Apparently it can be packed into one of the pockets but I tried that once and almost got killed. The Huckepack has a MYOG quick ski-holster attached, part of which is the Petzl Caritool you can see lying on top.

The Huckepack just blew me away this trip. It's been on a ton of trips now, hiking, kayaking, climbing and skiing. I thought this trip would be too much for it and had planned to bring the Klättermusen Mjölner, almost three times the weight but much more sturdy. However I just kept thinking how nice it would be if the Huckepack managed to take all the abuse. And it did, it was amazing, carried everything like a champ, and made me really appreciate just how much thought and effort has gone into every detail of this rucksack. The day before the trip I jerry-rigged together a ski-holster which worked incredibly well, and will now redo it a little better and neater and then write up how to make it. Ripping the skis off and stashing them in the holster could be done easily within 30 seconds (without removing the Huckepack), and then they were held vice-tight during the long, bumpy hill climbs.

All in all, this was one of the most fun experiences I've ever had. Hurray for mountains, skis and lightweight gear! And three cheers for Norway and Sweden.

En route to the Amundsen diet, recipes for jerky & zweiback.

2012-03-07T20:36:00.001+01:00

Adopting principals from the ultralight ethos has cut my packweight massively over the last two years. Some from lighter gear replacing heavy gear. Light (and often delicate/expensive) gear is not all the UL philosophy has to offer though, despite the gear obsession that's endemic amongst its followers (myself included). Trying to "go ultralight" guided only by a weighting scales is unimaginatively literal thinking which ignores the beautiful core of ultralight, minimalism. Minimalism is dear to my Arvo Pärt, Ritchie Hawtin, Philip Glass, Alva Noto loving heart. I embody minimalism in other parts of my life, like at work (much to the frustration of my boss) and in bed (poor wife). Adopting minimalism in hiking gives much greater rewards than buying light, expensive paraphernalia. Saving a few hundred grammes with replacement gear doesn't save as much frustration as saving a few hundred grammes from eliminating superfluous junk. The easy way to hack away at the extra dross is to make a trip, make a list of all the gear you actually used, and from then on only take things that are on the list. Then constantly hack away at that list by always asking the question, 'Do I really need this?'.

Do I really need this?

One area that always circumnavigates my strict list-keeping is food. The rucksack gets packed up super-efficiently a day before the trip starts, but food is usually picked up in a supermarket and chucked in willy-nilly. And who in the last few hurried minutes in the supermarket can show the Herculean willpower needed to say no to bacon, eggs, marshmallows, hot chocolate, salami, fresh baguettes, or kilogram blocks of cheese? Not me, that's who. To keep food weight down, I turned to the excellent teachings of Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen, the most efficient and effective explorer of all time. If you don't know Amundsen, he's the guy who first made it to the South pole 100 years ago today, and was probably also first to the North pole (Peary, Cook and Byrd famously having taken turns in faking it before him). There are four very famous Arctic explorers from the early twentieth century, Nansen, Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton, and Amundsen is the most skilful and successful one. (Nansen is the ground-breaking giant who lead the way, Shackleton is the gutsy never-say-die hero who always had the most exciting adventures, and Scott is the tragic hero/dithering fool who killed himself and his men but is forgiven because he died).

In his incredible raid on the South pole Amundsen had sleighing diets made up of only four ingredients, pemmican, chocolate, biscuits and powdered milk (and dog, I guess). This might sound a little monotonous, but I think we all know how good any hot food is after a day of cross-country skiing. It's a hundred year old diet, lacking in plenty of essential nutrients, but I still thought it would be fun to try out. Each of the foodstuffs is completely durable, requires no special storage over the short-term and if stored in a cool and dry spot can last for months, if not years. You can eat them all hot or cold, so fuel is not needed. Sounds good, let's try it.

Milk powder is no problem, and I managed somehow to find a source for chocolate too. Biscuits are basically double-baked bread (Zweiback), and vary, depending on which explorer you read. Amundsen had a wholemeal, rolled oat, yeast-raised biscuit. Scott used white flour biscuits, raised with baking powder (and died of malnutrition). Cook, the American who famously faked climbing Mt. Denali (then Mt. McKinley) and faked reaching the North pole (before being ridiculed as a faker by fellow North pole faker Peary), lived on double-baked bread biscuits during the wander around the approach to Mt. Denali. Making double-baked bread sounds easy, and is easy, and the biscuits taste fantastic. Swedes call them skorpor, and if a Swede sees a bag of skorpor in your house they will eat it all up in around 10 seconds!

Pemmican is a little more complex, meat is jerked, ground into a fine powder and mixed with rendered animal fats. I get as far as making the jerky before getting distracted and eating it all. Finding a good animal fat is also pretty difficult, different fats have different water contents and using bad fat means bad pemmican, leading to a case of 'hot chocolate bottom', a big problem to deal with during a hike. Finishing off the quest for a good pemmican can wait until I finish the quest for the perfect beef jerky.

Quick recipes for zweiback biscuits and something that is getting close to good jerky are shown below.

Biscuits
I try to knock out a couple of loaves of bread before a trip. The recipe I use is dead simple and easy to play around with.

Around 850 gr flour (25% white, 75% wholemeal), brought up to 1 kg with sunflower seeds, carrot flesh (see below), oatflakes, rolled oats and flax seeds.
1 tablespoon of salt
1 packet of yeast (50 gr) (the Swedish packets of Kronjäst contain around 3 tablespoons of sugar, so maybe add some sugar if you are using dry yeast).

This is all mixed with 600 ml of 37 °C water, into which you have dissolved the yeast. I like to add carrots to the bread, they give it a nice colour, so I juice a few and use their juice to make up the 600 ml.

I peel them first because then I can just dig out all the dried minced flesh and chuck it in the bread-mix. If you don't own a juicer then this might be a pain in the ass so just grate them and add in some extra flour to compensate for their liquid.

Delicious carrot juice! Full of β-carotene, fibre, sugar and Vitamin C!

The dry ingredients weight a kilo. Liquids come to around 600 ml, are warmed to 37 °C and mixed with the yeast.

A well in the centre of the dry ingredients is formed, the yeast soup poured in. It's slowly mixed and allowed to rise for around 45 minutes somewhere warm.

After the first rise, it's kneaded again and put into slightly oiled forms, and allowed to rise again for another 45 minutes, (or longer if it needs time to fill out the forms).

Then they are powdered with a little flour and ~~chucked~~ carefully placed in the oven for around 40 minutes, at 200 °C. (Seriously, carefully placed, nothing's more annoying than seeing the dough collapse as you slide it into the oven because it got a little knock).

Voilà! To turn it into a biscuit, we just slice and stick it in the dehydrator for a couple of hours.

The slices take around an hour or two to fully dry out in the dehydrator (depending on thickness). Doing them in the oven instead is easy, just slice and bake at a low heat for a couple of hours.

The carrot flesh really helps to keep the bread moist, and for the zweiback it sweetens the biscuit a lot, which succesfully turns the taste away from 'stale bread' and towards 'biscotti'. It also turns the bread orange, so you can fuck around with this if you want to be creative and impress the ladies.

Two juices (beetroot and carrot), but only the carrot flesh I stick in the bread.

Two separate doughs, one beetroot and one carrot flavour. Knead and flatten them after the first rise, then lay them over one another and roll them back and forth to merge them a little.

Too good to eat, nearly.

Jerky

The path to consistently good beef jerky has been a long, rocky, salty and crunchy one. When I try something I tend to have beginners luck. I don't realise it's beginners luck until the honeymoon period ends and I spend a long time trying to recapture the initial success. That's how the beef jerky went, the first batch I made haphazardly turned out to be the most perfect beef jerky I ever had. It was a little soft, very chewy, tangy, salty and very very meaty. After that first batch the quality plummeted, every batch came out with the consistency of deep fat fried cardboard. I stopped randomly launching meat into the dehydrator, and attacked the problem with some experimentation.

Acid is needed in a marinade to break down the meat a little and allow the marinade to penetrate. I've tried a lot of different acid bases to the marinade, and am currently kind of happy with oranges.

Delicious sweet blood oranges, ready to be juiced up.

No point playing with delicate flavours here, only the strong survive hours and hours of dehydrating. I want a hot spicy tang to the jerky so I add a good percentage of tabasco sauce. The meat is rolled out, slathered in tabasco and layered with slices of orange.
This is sealed up with no air, chucked in the fridge and left overnight.

The meat is laid out on the dehydrator shelves and lightly sprinkled with salt. I ran through a lot of meat trying to optimise the time for dehydration. Too long and the meat turned to crinkly splintery shit, too short and it felt unreliably wet. You can see in the photos above and below that where the oranges were touching the meat the marinade didn't soak in so well. These spots also have a bitter taste, so I will modify this a little.

Slices were put in at staggered intervals, time spent dehydrating ranged from 4 to 12 hours. I can tell you right now 12 hours was waaaaaaaaay too long, the jerky came out like black glass.

Some five, six and seven hour samples.

Six to seven hours seemed like the sweet spot to me, the meat was definitely dry, but had a slight malleability to it. It tore instead of cracking, in the mouth it didn't break into shards like glass, but was easily chewed, and seemed to grow into a spicy hot, slightly salty mouthful without too much effort. This can be modified as you like, for jerky that you intend to use directly, even five hours is fine, the meat will not last so long but will be relatively soft and tender. Longer dehydration is needed for jerky that will be stored or carried in warm temperatures.
The result from this juice-jerky is hard to describe. The jerky goes in, crunchy chewing begins, and as the meat softens and moistens a little, a spicy, smoky taste of oranges starts to grow. DAMN spicy actually, I really like that spicy flavour in combination with the sweet skorpor. Jerky and biscuits are seriously scrumptious together, my only problem so far has been that I've been experimenting with them so much that I always make many small batches, and they disappear in no time (I have no shortage of people willing to try them out).

Dehydrated meat and carrot stew with some melted snow, delicious!

I should really point out before I wrap this post up, that if you're a connoisseur of food, you should maybe take all this with a pinch of salt. I do like good food, but I don't care too much about it, and if it's going to save me pack-weight and time and fuel, I can eat anything. I see food as just a load of chemical fuel to keep me moving. So if you're the kind of guy that can't stomach the same flavour dry-freeze ready-meals twice in a row, then jerky and biscuits might shock you with new levels of blandness.

Nordic skating, long skating, backcountry skating, wild skating, långfärdsskridsko...

2012-02-19T11:59:00.000+01:00

Skip to; Safety gear, Skates, bindings and boots or Technique.
Writing about cross country skiing, I said that the feeling of cross-country skiing was like walking on a moving-walkway at an airport, a feeling of speed that is totally disproportionate to the amount of effort you're putting into the activity. And it's great, I love it! What could be better?
Well, how about, instead of the heady thrill of walking on a walkway at the airport, and enjoying the slightly heightened speed, imagine instead having the hoverboard from 'Back to the Future II'. Imagine just effortlessly swooping over the ground, the wind whistling in your ears, the landscape blurring by, the slightest shift in your bodyweight sending you swerving away on a new path. Imagine being able to cover 50 km a day, or up to a 100 if you're good and conditions are right. Does that sound like a dream? It should, because nordic skating is like a dream. (Nordic-skating, long-skating or tour-skating, I'll just refer to it as skating from now on, secure in the knowledge that you people reading this blog are a little more into wild-ice rather than rink-ice, unless you're Veronica who's mental about ice hockey, Hi Veronica!).

If that video above from the Stockholm skating club(SSSK) doesn't fire you up to try skating then you might be a terminally boring person. They look kind of intimidating as they rocket across the lake with their big needle sharp spikes under their arms, like some kind of Lord of the Rings ice warriors or something. SSSK aren't actually ice warriors, they are the largest nordic skating club and organise big tours out on the Stockholm ice every week during skate season.

Let's talk safety (I have very few blog readers, if one of the 54 of you dies my ad revenue will take a 1.85% hit and I might have to get a job, so lets think safety first). If you are new to skating, you should never go skating alone. Even if ice is very thick, weak spots from currents or freeze/thaw cycles can break and drop you in it. If you skate along you will probably die and your grieving widow/widower will find this page in your web-history and blame me for your death, and then stalk and kidnap and kill me like in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. You either find someone who has experience and tag along, or just head to ice that is checked by some people that know ice, or go where a million other people are already on the ice.

Maybe none of them have checked the ice either but at least you won't die alone.

Safety Gear (in decreasing order of importance);
Another person:

Never go alone, even on bomber ice you could slip and bang your head. Have someone with you and keep some distance in case the ice gives way. Tell people where you've gone and when you expect to be back, and have your phone accessible and in a waterproof pocket/ziploc bag.

Isdubbar (ice spikes):

Two spikes that are attached by thin string to a band which hangs around your neck. If you go in, you grab the handles, turn to face back the way you came, and start stab-dragging yourself out of the ice with the spikes.

The spikes are tied to the neck lanyard so you can't lose them, and they almost always have a pea-less (freeze proof) whistle attached.

A roll-top bag:

There are special skating rucksacks to buy, they have roll-top enclosures to keep the contents dry and to act as a flotation device if you fall in, and they have a strap that goes under the crotch so the bag doesn't just float up over your head and leave you behind, drowning. Instead the crotch strap will drag you up. Many skaters use a normal rucksack with plastic bags inside to keep their gear dry/float. I use my kayaking roll-top backpack, and pass the hip-belt under my crotch, poor unfortunate hip-belt.

A really warm jacket in a waterproof bag:

If you do go take a dip, you will probably be quite cold after you get out. And who knows how badly injured you might be from the fall, or how far from help you might be. So it's absolutely imperative to have a very warm jacket available in case you take a dip. If you're going far from civilisation then a full change of clothes might also be a good idea. The jacket is also great for the inevitable hot-chocolate breaks.

A throw-line:
This is around 15 metres of thin but strong line in a weighted bag, that is somewhere very accesible. Someone falls in, you grab one end and throw the bag of rope at them, and hopefully they grab on, you drag them out and save them and then everyone treats you as a hero for the day. And then you kind of 'own' that person forever. Here's a great link about how to make your own.

An ice-spike/Ice-poles

An ice-spike is a stick with a spike on it, you stab the ice with it and see how solid it is. Ice-poles are the skating equivalent of ski-poles, used to propel you forward. The difference is in the lack of a basket, the massive steel spikes on the end for biting into/testing the ice, and the balance. Ice-poles have most of the weight in the tip, so you can easily flick it forward and stab heavily into the ice to get a good purchase.

You might want to add knee and elbow pads to the list for the first few trips anyway, and perhaps a helmet.

Apart from the safety gear you also need some skates/bindings and boots.
This is as much an area of mixed up contention as anything else involving bindings.
Bindings:
You could get those shitty strap on kind of ratchet-bindings, that work with normal hiking boots. I'm a little against them as I'm always the guy who packs down a swiss-army knife and so I'm always the guy kneeling on the freezing ice adjusting the sodding bindings after your boot has popped out of them for the Nth fucking time. It's cheaper than other kinds of bindings, but you won't have any fucking fun on these fucking bindings.

Fixed heel bindings for duck-billed Telemark boots are also available. Personally I prefer NNN bindings, because it's modern and clean and cool and easy to put on and take off. However you will quickly notice that all the people on these retro bindings are either really old or really viking looking, and you will only be able to get quick glimpses of them as they rocket past you with minimal effort. I don't think it's any superiority of the bindings, on paper NNN is superior, it's probably just that the people on 700 year old bindings have probably been skating for 700 years. At least that's what I tell myself.

NNN BC bindings are the most modern option, they are also the only binding of the three that leaves the heel free, which apparently allows for a longer, more powerful kick. Relatively lightweight, very simple and quick to put on/remove, tons of decent boots available.

Those are the 'Available to buy' options, but buying skates without a binding and sticking on an SNS binding is certainly possible. What's not possible these days? There are robots driving around on Mars damnit.

Boots:
The bindings dictate the boots, for the NNN-BC there are many options around, they tend to be a little lighter than the millions of duckbill boots available for the fixed-heel bindings. It makes sense to match the bindings with whatever bindings your cross-country skis have, and then use the same boots. Ankle support is absolutely key, without good ankle support you will spend as much energy balancing on the skates as you will skating, and that gets frustrating fast. The old duck-bill boots are often stiff and support the ankle well, and the newer BC-NNN boots have plastic cuffs that wrap tightly around the ankle and keep it supported.

Also important is decent waterproofing, even on the coldest days there's usually some water involved.

Skates:
The two largest Nordic skate manufacturers are Zandstra (Dutch) and Lundhags (Swedish). They both offer a classic 'T' shaped skate, where an aluminium platform has a steel blade stuck on the bottom.

Lundhags have a newer design where the entire skate is just stamped out of a piece of stainless steel, which is what I have, because it was the shiniest and newest and shiny newness appeals to me. Apparently having it all one piece makes it more vibration resistant and durable, I can't vouch for that, but so far at least they haven't blown up or gone on fire or whatever. And they look sexy.

Technique:
You go to your local lake, which has been ISO certified as frozen. You have an experienced skating friend with you. You put on your boots, attach your skates, hang your ice-spikes around your neck, stick your rucksack on your back and step out onto the ice with quivering legs and all the grace and stability of a drunken Russian. How exactly do you skate?

First off make it easy for yourself, go with the wind. There's a reason all the pro-skaters get in a kind of conga line/train when they rocket across the ice, as in Formula 1 the lead guy breaks wind (ooer!) and everyone else follows in his lee. It's such a factor that if the wind is blowing strongly in the wrong direction the annual 80 km Vikingarännet skate race from Uppsala to Stockholm gets turned into a race from Stockholm to Uppsala.
The technique is nearly identical to ski-skating, so if you can do that skating will be easy, and if you can't then learning to skate will make it easier to ski-skate on your skis. You want to keep your upper body steady, while your legs swing from side to side. You kick out with one foot, standing straight on your other leg, bringing your kicking leg back to centre, then transfer your weight to that foot, kicking off with the other leg and repeat. Sofie, my skating and skiing instructor, demonstrates below. It's a very easy, pendulum-like motion.

It's one of those motions that you just have to force yourself through a thousand times, continually feeling like total failure until it suddenly clicks and you find yourself doing it without any effort or thought. In the beginning the length of each glide will be very short, as your balance builds up you can lengthen these strides which speeds everything up considerably. One key step to lengthen your glide is to bring your feet close together as you transfer the weight over and kick. You can see in this GIF below how Sofie transfers her weight seamlessly as the returning skate comes in, the force as she kicks outwards is away from the toes, more at the centre or back of the blade. The more power and better timing on the outward kick, the faster and steadier your glide will be.

Sticks are good to have for balance, early on you might find your arms windmilling around trying to find some kind of equilibrium, and with sticks you can instead jab at the ice and try to stay steady. Once you have some ice-legs, you can start to use them properly, as Sofie demonstrates perfectly below. You use them to push off your dominant leg as it kicks outwards, with your weight all balanced on the recessive leg.

This is a high level of skating, and you can see the key is to save energy, the upper body barely moves, the skates are never more than a centimetre above the ice, the movements are conservative and efficient. Really good skaters can just move like greased lightening with just one lazy kick every now and again, and for beginners it's disheartening to have to work so damn hard just to get a little momentum up. Once you pick up a little balance you can start to get into a groove, after only a few kilometres you'll start to have occasional flashes of mindless rhythm, and once you experience just a little taste of the fast effortless gliding that Nordic skating offers, you'll be on your way to becoming a real ice junky.
There are downsides to being a junky though, the main problem is how sensitive skating is to the condition of the ice. On freshly frozen black ice there is just nothing better.

A little snow later, the ice turns whitish and weak, the speeds drop, noise increases and it gets a little tougher to control the skates. Old snow melts into the ice surface and makes a weak layer, which cracks under the blades and slows down your progress, as well as sometimes catching a skate and causing a tumble. A little more snow and the game is over, you may as well try skating at the beach.

So that's the big downside, you get a few weeks of good conditions a year, more if you're lucky enough to have a track ploughed nearby. The best conditions are right at the beginning of the season, so you can either play it safe and skip the perfect newly frozen ice, or risk taking a dip and start skating early in the season. If that sounds like an acceptable risk to you, you should think about taking an ice-safety course before diving into it.

That's it! Pick out some blades, grab a friend and give it a shot! Much love to Liam and Sofie for the feedback on this post, and for all the skating lessons :)

Gear porn; Röjk, MSR, Klättermusen.

2012-02-09T08:17:00.000+01:00

I like most of my gear, because I try to buy only decent gear, no cash gets ripped from my tight fist until days and weeks and months have been spent reading reviews and drooling over spec sheets. So most of the gear performs well, and I'm just way too busy writing infinitely long posts about igloos or VBLs to spend time writing about shit that just does its job well. Some gear performs amazingly well though. Some gear actually lives up to the claims of the manufacturers, and is always taken on a trip, and never gives you up/lets you down/runs around and deserts you, and you just want to get married to that gear and do dirty things to it in the shower and then have babies with that gear and grow old in a house in the country with that gear and get buried wearing that gear. Here are three pieces of that kind of gear.

Röjk Tvister

The day after I bought my first Tvister I bought my second one. And around a week later I bought the Tvister zipper. Right from the first time I tried it on I figured it was the kind of hoody I had been waiting for. It has a much lighter fabric than the popular Houdini hoodies, with a very soft interior that wicks moisture away quickly. Perfect form for my lanky build, tight fitting but very stretchy. The fabric is relatively tough, there are a few grazes from climbing falls or whatever, but considering how much I wear the blue Tvister it's still in immaculate condition. The hood is supremely versatile, sitting low around the neck like a buff when not in use, then covering the head with the face open in colder weather, or even pulled up like a balaclava, just leaving the eyes free, in eXtreme conditions.

The main strength of the Tvister is its versatility. In Winter it makes a wonderful mid-layer, if the wind is low it can even make a respectable outer layer. In the picture above I'm wearing the Röjk over a woollen base and mid layer, the tvister fabric shedding snow easily in the dry -17°C conditions. In warmer weather the Tvister alone is all you need, it keeps you comfortably cozy and protects from sun/rock-burn but the fabric is light enough that you don't get cooked.

The fabric is treated with an anti-smell chemical, which in my experience tend to suck. I have a collection of 'smell-proof' synthetic t-shirts that are exiled to my BJJ-clothes pile, damned to eternal stinkitude there for the crime of not losing the horrible stench of stale sweat after getting washed. There is a special level of disgusting reek generated by sweat and synthetic fabric, and my experience up until the Tvister was that anti-smell treatments were a useless marketing gimmick. The tvister uses 'Polygiene' (along with some Houdini and Haglöfs gear). I noticed after the first time I used it for a trip that it retained a fresh smell, so I decided to keep wearing it until I defeated the polygiene smell defence. It took almost two months of long trips, sleeping in a clammy VBL, and dozens of sweaty climbing days to get the Tvister to smell a little. That's when I got nervous, because at that point I had formed a deep, loving bond with the Tvister and I got scared that maybe the smell was there for good, even after washing, and that the Tvister might have to be burnt on a pyre. However a quick wash restored it to its smellproof glory, and even after a whole year of just abusing the shit out of it hasn't managed to taint it with a whiff. Polygiene uses silver salts to give an anti-bacterial protection, and apparently will last well beyond the lifetime of the garment.

The sizing seems a little mental, I had to buy the XL to get a decent fit, although I guess that's because the Tvister (and all Röjk gear?) is unisex. And there are no thumb-loops, I have no idea if that's good or bad, I don't have any gear with thumb-loops. Some people need thumb-loops like Germans need sausage, so those kind of people should consider themselves warned.

Finally Röjk got a glowing review when I wrote about ethical manufacture a while back. Good ethics is important, but it would be pretty useless without good products. Fortunately so far all the Röjk gear I've bought has been fantastic, but the Tvisters in particular have just been so great that I had to write about them.

Klättermusen Mithril pants.

I delay with things, a bad habit I know. The Mithril pants are the latest victim of my procrastination. I finally get around to telling the world about the perfect hiking, climbing, kayaking, skating, skiing pants, and they've been out of production for over two years. Sorry everyone! Tune in next week for my article on preparing Quagga meat and a warning about how cigarette smoke might not be as healthy for you as doctors claim.

Still, this is how you do pants, stretchy material, wind and water resistant while breathing well, dries ridiculously fast, knees are generously coated in Kevlar, and a zip that opens from the top or bottom for days you're wearing a harness. I said I wore the Tvister a lot, and it's true, but I think I have worn no single item of clothes in my life more than the Mithril pants. I liked the first pair so much I ran out and bought a second pair when I heard they were being discontinued, to be stored safely away for the day when the first pair wear totally out. Is this totally mental of me? I did it with the Tvister as well, I bought one that I wear all the time and I bought a second one that got stored away in pristine condition.

The red Tvister and red Mithril pants are locked away in a top secret warehouse alongside the ark of the covenant, while the blue Tvister and black Mithrils get worked to death like Boxer the horse in Animal farm. There ain't no justice!

Years of use have yielded a few spark-holes, thin spots and rips. The pants thought it was time for retirement, but the supremely wonderful people at Klättermusen were kind enough to send me a strip of the cool Schoeller kevlar fabric used on the knees to patch them up, so it looks like the backup pants will have another few years storage to enjoy.

As versatile as benzene, they go climbing (the stretchiness and kevlar knees are great there), kayaking (drying quick as hell) and hiking (although the plastic fabric doesn't like sparking fires). They get used under shell pants as a mid-layer in winter Nordic-skating trips, where the thickly padded knees are great for cushioning falls on the frozen lake surface, or in sweltering Summer heat.

If I could change anything about these pants I would add a second zipped pocket on the left side (there is one unzipped pocket on each side, and one large zipped pocket on the right leg), and oh yeah, I guess I would also start making them again. The closest thing to the Mithrils these days seem to be the Mountain equipment's Liskamm pants. They get rave reviews from users, but I can't really vouch for them personally. The Liskamm's are made in Hungary, have Kevlar knees, reinforcements at the cuffs and a nanosphere coating which should make them easier to keep clean and more hard-wearing than the Mithrils, a little pricey though.

MSR Packtowl.

The MSR Packtowl came out of the packaging looking like a piece of blue fibreboard, stiff and rough and about as appealing to rub all over your body as a vegan's toilet brush. The instructions made it clear that the more it got used, the softer it would become, and after a full year of heavy use it's now as soft and comforting as a bag of kittens. I bought the XL, which is absolutely massive, but my Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy-esque love of towels outmatches my urge to be more ultralight.

A towel though, it's a square of fabric that many hikers don't even bother with, how amazing can it be? Pretty amazing actually. For a start my previous synthetic towels tended to get stinky and dirty after a few days use, which kind of went away after a rinse in a stream or lake. The MSR gets totally rejuvenated after a soak and squeeze. The towel thirstily soaks up litres of water when it gets dipped, but it can be wrung out to a nearly totally dry state with just a few twists. It also has a handy little buttoned loop to allow it to be securely hung up for drying.

That's it, there's not much more to it. It just does what a towel is supposed to do, but most hiking towels have a hard time doing that. Very soft, very absorbent, easily cleaned, easily dried, packs down small, extremely rip resistant, and the XL can be used as a tarp in an emergency. My last hiking towel also clung to every piece of moss or grass it touched like velcro, it had some strange microfibre surface that felt quite uncomfortable, especially on the rough skin on my hands. The MSR is much more pleasant to handle and doesn't stick to dirt in the same way. The fabric is made in Germany and the towel is 'assembled' in Ireland. We Irish can just about manage to cut a roll of fabric into squares and put them into boxes.

Was this not so hardcore gear porn? I think most people (myself included) prefer to read about the cooler, flashier gear that has lots of specs and capabilities or whatever, like headlamps or quickdraws or watches or at least some kind of breathable waterproof shell jacket or something. I just find that the gear that really makes me happy is usually the really simple gear that doesn't have so many knobs on, but just focuses on doing what it does extremely well.

Fucking finally

2012-02-04T18:45:00.000+01:00

Trad-climbing with Toby

2012-01-05T00:19:00.001+01:00

Last year Toby of Northern lights blog made a trip over to Stockholm, and we met up for a brief climb at Münchenbryggeriet. Shitty cold weather made it less than pleasant, although the reward of a few Guinness afterwards compensated. For Summer Michi, Marty (two German climbers), Toby and I decided to make a four-day trip to Bohuslän in southwest Sweden for some trad-climbing (Toby's writeup of the trip is here).

I'm a newcomer to climbing, having just started a year and a half ago (originally to increase my grip strength for Brazilian Ju-Jitsu, and boy has that worked out well). I did as I always do, like a little Stalin, to single-mindedly cajole, bully and blackmail everyone I know into climbing with me. You too, dear reader, should start climbing. Anything I enjoy I cannot help but think you too would enjoy (at parties most conversations I have with people end up with them nervously promising me that they will indeed try BJJ, or climbing, or kayaking or snorkelling or moving to Sweden and marrying a blonde nymph, usually while slowly backing away towards the door). In case you know as little about climbing as I did a year ago, I will briefly explain what trad-climbing is, and why it's a terrible idea.

Top rope

The easy way to start climbing is with a 'top rope', a rope goes from your climbing partner, through a secure anchor at the top of the wall, and then back down to you, to be tied into your harness. As you climb up the wall, your partner pulls in the rope through a brake (called a belay device), and if you fall, the belayer catches the rope with the brake and you fall no more than a few decimetres. Safe as houses!

Top-roping is as close to being perfectly safe as it is possible to get when climbing. Climbing above your skill level has no penalties, apart from looking like a mong when you can't even get off the ground. The difficulty is purely physical, can you manage to pull yourself up the wall? The feeling of being constantly secured with a top rope allows you to take bigger risks than if you are leading, and also you either carry very little of the ropes weight, or if the belayer is really keeping the rope tight it might even be pulling you up the wall a little. (God knows it can get tough when there is a little too much slack in the rope...)

Sport leading

You tie into the rope, and you climb up a wall that someone has previously drilled and set bolts into, and every now and again you reach a bolt and you clip your rope onto that bolt with your quickdraws. If you fall, your belayer catches you with the brake and you only fall as far as the last bolt you clipped. Safe as a moderately solid tent in a storm!

Sport lead-climbing increases the difficulty, now you have to manage to pull yourself up the wall, haul up the weight of the rope and quickdraws as you climb, as well as occasionally hanging on with one hand while you clip in. That's not the hard part though, the real reason it makes top-roping look like child's play is the fear. In top roping you have almost nothing to fear, as long as your belayer doesn't fall asleep. Leading (sport or trad) means climbing over your nice safe protection, and knowing that every move you make upwards towards the next piece of protection means a potential fall of double that distance downwards. This fear of falling is the real challenge. And that hammering to your confidence means (at least for me) that you will climb badly, and be less fluid and daring than you would be with a top rope, increasing your fatigue and the risk of falling. (The guy taking the horrible fall in the video below, Dave Macleod, is one of the best trad-climbers in the world and has an excellent book on climbing that I hope to write a little about soon).

Trad

Finally if you're out for full independence and freedom, you can trad-lead. You head to a cliff, and place your own protection as you climb. You put little bits of metal-onna-string into cracks and hope they are stuck in there, and then clip into that. If you fall, and your protection doesn't just pop out, you only fall as far as your last piece of protection! Safe as a yarmulke in 1930's Berlin!

Now you have the pressure of worrying how well the protection is placed. Will it take a fall? If it has to take a fall, will the rock it is jammed into take the force? And on top of that, while the top roper concentrates entirely on holding onto the wall, and the sports climber just has to slap a quickdraw onto the bolt, the trad climber must fiddle around with masses of gear, finding the right size nut or cam to squish into the cliff, and all of this usually with one hand, the other of course holding him onto the wall with a sweaty, white knuckled grip of death. Trad-climbing gives you all the physical demands, as well as the mental demands on your ability to climb well over protection, and on top of that has one more demand, skill. You could go up a route placing protection in every nook and cranny on your way, but if you don't know what you're doing (or if the rock is flakey) then all it will do is give you something to watch as you fall to your death, you can enjoy the sight of all this expensive aluminium rocketing out of the wall as the rope yanks downwards.

This increasing difficulty is reflected in the amount of gear you need on your rack. A top rope climb requires nothing, a lead climber requires a load of quickdraws, and a few carabiners and slings to make an anchor with. And the trad climber is weighted down by a load of quickdraws of different lengths, tons of slings and carabiners, dozens of nuts, hexes, cams and two big brass balls.

The difference in difficulty between top-roping and leading is very apparent in the grades I can handle. Top roped I can grin my way up a 6b, swear my way up a 6C and hang-dog my way up a 7a. (Hang-dogging is just one of the thousands of sometimes clever, sometimes excruciating terrible climbing slang words and phrases, in this case it means you climb a route with many falls or rests on the way). When leading though, suddenly the helmet appears on my head and the grades drop, I can grunt up a 6a and just recently shat myself up a 6b+ with a metric ton of swearing and sweating and crying.

Trad is irresistible to me. It appeals to me in the same way cross country skiing appeals to me over tracked skiing, or long-skating over lakes and rivers appeals to me over rink skating. It allows total freedom, you bring your gear and your skills and nothing limits where you can go except yourself. Nobody needs to set up anchor spots for you, or drill and glue bolts into the wall for you. In all the books about mountaineering I read as I became interested in climbing, it was the pages about how to place trad gear that ended up having the most toast crumbs and tea stains in them.

Trad is not something to just brazenly attempt out of curiosity though. I might have read plenty about it and poured over lots of figures of stickmen showing a 'How to' in 4 easy steps, but I would have a hard time literally trusting my life to something I'd never tried before. Tuition is the name of the game, I would need someone experienced in the ways of trad to guide me, and so when Toby proposed the idea of a road trip to Scandinavian trad hotspot, Bohuslän, I jumped at the offer.

Bohuslän

Toby is ridiculously experienced, he has a detailed logbook of his climbs over at UKclimbing, from which it's clear he tries his hand at every and any possible way to get up cliffs. Happily for me he also has a ton of patience, I'm not known for my ability to be a good student but Toby has two sons and has that 'Dad' aura of assured composure. Which is maybe why trad appeals to him, it's definitely not a sport for the jittery.

We drove for the whole day, stopping briefly for a quick sport climb at Ågelsjön. The change in landscape as we approached Bohuslän was fascinating, the flat plains of South Sweden were at first infrequently, and then more and more periodically interrupted by high jagged granite crags bursting out from the earth. The climbing guides for Bohuslän list a huge number of routes, but there must still be many thousands of routes yet to be discovered amongst all those cliffs.

We start out with a long, sweaty, terrible slog through the forest to find Flaket (55m 4+ **) , an easy climb up the slabby Möhättan. Toby leads, and I follow cleaning up the gear. I learned a lot during this trip from chatting to Toby about the gear, but almost equally much from following his lead and seeing how he had placed the gear. It felt like a good start, safe and easy.

We also tried out a nasty sports route on the same crag, Oddny (15 m 5). Very slabby (leaning inward), smooth climbing that totally relied on slow careful movement and good climbing shoe rubber. I got the first (and only) bolt clipped but had to give up at that point. It felt distinctly cartoonish as I stood in one position and took steps upwards, but had my feet just slip and slide over the same ground. The sun was beating down so hard it felt like the stone itself was sweating. Toby assaulted the route with superior technique and finished it in style.

Next we drove to Välseröd, where Toby and I attacked Jungfrun (30 m 4 **). I lead the first part of the climb (20 m 2+), and then belayed Toby up the second half (20m 4). Difficulty-wise the split was not quite 50:50, my part was a wide and gently sloping pathway ending in a wide, sun-warmed seat. Toby's part was a much more serious crack cutting straight up the corner of the cliff.

I felt a little ridiculous in my helmet, placing gear along my little pathway, I kept expecting some mum with a buggy to trundle past me, or some kids to fly past on bikes. When Toby met me at the belay spot though, he had plenty of feedback about how I placed the gear. Then I belayed him to the top, and followed him on what was one of the first cracks I had ever climbed. Jamming one hand into a long vertical crack, tensing it and putting your whole bodyweight on it while you reach up with your other hand to repeat the process, all this under a relentlessly hot Swedish summer sun, it was intense. We also ran up the second half of Torsketaket (10 m 6).

Relief to the abraded hands, sunburnt skin and broiled muscles came in the evening when we swam in one of the many beautiful lakes. We kept up the daily swim for the whole trip, every day was filled with tense, strained climbing on baking-hot granite walls, under the pounding sledgehammer midsummer heat, and yet after one dive into the icey waters all that washed away and left one feeling refreshed and revitalised.

The next day we checked out Brappersberget, a beautiful cliff by the coast, behind a graveyard. The climbing was fantastic, lovely long routes with plenty of cracks running up and across the face. Toby lead St. Pauls (30 m 5+) and Big Ben (25 m 5 *). I followed and cleaned and later lead Kyrkråttan (25 m 3+ *), and Toby cleaned and gave me feedback on how each piece was placed.

The sea breeze was delicious, especially once we'd reached the top and had the the view to enjoy while the sweat was blown off us.

The routes we did weren't very difficult, Toby took it easy on us because we were so new to trad climbing and we could handle all the climbing relatively well. However it was still exhausting. I think the mental strain when dealing with trad gear is just massive compared to sports or top rope climbing. Even with comfortable holds for hand and feet, the placement of gear can take so long every placement puts a lot of pressure on the body and drains the stamina, and I for one slept like a dead baby every night. Which was convenient, because I was sleeping with a pretty bizarre set-up.

The day before we headed to Bohuslän I had grabbed some leftover si-nylon and mosquito netting from my MYOG bin, and decided to whip up a quick'n'dirty tarp for the weekend. And as well as that I had decided to try using a VBL (vapour barrier liner) with a silk liner to sleep in. The idea is that even though the temperature dropped to a chilly 12 °C at night, with a watertight liner I could skip having a sleeping bag or quilt and save a half kilo or so.

It wasn't about saving weight (this time at least), as we slept at a campsite only minutes from the car park. It was more about seeing if it was possible to be comfortable sleeping in what is essentially a plastic bag. I had already used in Winter to protect my down quilt from icing up, and now I wanted to try it in Summer. Since this trip I have had all my Summer trips in this set-up, and would continue to use a VBL without a quilt/sleeping bag until late Autumn.

The tarp was about what you could expect from too little material and too little time, but it managed to keep the mosquitos out and in order to learn as much as possible from the mockup, I have been sleeping under this tiny tarp since then. It's MYOG done wrong in almost every way possible.

Toby's had a more professional and luxurious set-up, as well as having the skills to pitch the thing well.

The last crag we assaulted in Bohuslän was Fedjan, where the Toby/Tomás team got split up and I managed to lead Greasepit (10 m 4+ ) with Michi seconding. It felt a lot easier than the climbs at Brappersberget, the shortness of the route took a lot of the pressure off. The next morning we left early, driving past Ågelsjön again and doing a few more routes. Toby led Divaleden (11 m 5 **), and I lead Raggiga Rune (11m 5-). Toby cleaned the route and this time around the feedback on the gear placement felt a lot more positive, and the corrections were a little more anticipated.

It was a great trip, with a lot of fun climbing and swimming. The thing I recall best was the educational aspect of the trip, it felt a bit like going on some kind of course. Anyone who's ever tried to learn any skill from a book might know how it is, to spend hours pouring over grayscale figures and detailed step-by-step guides, and then the massive difference in understanding once you find someone who can take you through it practically. Before this trip buying trad-gear would have felt like buying a set of juggling swords, gear that without the appropriate skillset is basically asking for a messy suicide. After the trip I felt gently confident buying a pack of DMM wallnuts, I won't be climbing anything even remotely near my sports/top-rope limit, but for some mixed routes or easy trads I can begin to build up the skills in order to add one more tool to my climbing knowledge base.

Made in wherever, The ethics of outsourcing (II/II)

2011-10-15T22:44:00.000+02:00

PART II

The first part of this post took a look at outsourcing in developing countries. Outsourcing makes the world economy more efficient, brings cheap goods to consumers and drives up the GDP of developing nations. However outsourcing has a dark side of exploitation, abuse and oppression. It's a complex issue, and one that everyone should try and educate themselves on.

For this second part I want to focus on the responses from various hiking/climbing companies about the issue. I only contacted companies that I buy from (so there are many companies that are not in the mix here). However this post is not meant to be a summary of findings about specific companies. Instead what I picked up from all of this research is that the really important detail isn't where the gear is made, but the why behind the where.

A higher standard

It has to be said that hiking/outdoors companies have generally high standards, relative to the brands that usually get linked to in sweatshop exposés (Nike, WalMart, Timberland, The Gap, Disney, etc.). Perhaps it's because the gear is usually a lot more high-tech and of higher quality than high-street brands, or because the hiking companies are generally smaller companies with a correspondingly more humane code of ethics. Having said that, there's no reason why we can't demand ever higher standards from the companies we buy from. If any one company can be profitable and strictly ethical, why not the rest?

The humble homepage.

Gathering information from the company webpage is the easiest way to get a general idea of how the company handles manufacture, either from information presented or information lacking. Osprey packs, for example, go into detail about their choice to move manufacture to Vietnam in order to remain competitive, and their journey in making sure the workers were fairly treated.

Patagonia also have an interesting and honest homepage. They are well known as a company that have a near-autistic focus on the environment. Their corporate responsibility page goes into admirable depth about how they got in 'too deep' with outsourcing and found some unwelcome disconnect between them and the people that had been multiply subcontracted into making their clothes.

The number of factories we came to work with ballooned, and some of these subcontracted work to other factories we knew nothing about. We lost track of who we were doing business with and what working conditions were like in many of our factories. For a while we dropped out of the Fair Labour Association.

They cut down the number of subcontractors they used, and began to run audits not just on their cut'n'sew suppliers but even on the raw material suppliers. There are many companies that have a better ethical system in place than Patagonia, but their honesty is admirable and shows that they do have a focus on ethics.

Edit: 2012-Apr-10

Patagonia put up this really interesting piece about their views on outsourcing.

Fjällräven take another tack, the employee training page details the hiking adventures the Swedish employees get to enjoy. You would definitely be forgiven for thinking it was an all Swedish production. The website does coyly proclaim that care is taken for its employees 'in every corner of the world'. I find it pretty disingenuous to use such careful phrasing in what is so obviously a gambit to make it appear that the gear is still made in Sweden (as far as I know it is mostly made in Vietnam). It obviously works though, most people I know think their Kånken was made here. It also freaks me out a little that Haglöfs (owned by Asics), and Fjällräven (owned by Fenix Outdoors, who also own Primus, Tierra, HanWag and the Swedish retail chain Naturkompaniet) have nearly identically worded codes of conduct (Haglöfs & Fjällräven's). I guess it's just shared legalese, but the similarity makes it feels like a 'cover your ass' template. Haglöfs said it was a coincidence, Fjällräven failed to reply.

Companies respond, or not.

The problem with homepages is that they only present information that the company wants to present. In the last few months I stepped it up a notch and contacted a lot of companies about how they handle their manufacture. It's been very revealing. Most fascinating was the inadvertent transparency of the responses, replies from companies that had subpar behaviour (for example, outsourcing the manufacture without any code of conduct for contractors) were terse and defensive, if they replied at all. Replies from companies that didn't outsource or had systems in place to ensure fair labour were generally long, detailed and friendly.

The little guys

One final detail I picked up on was that small companies generally rocked. A small manufacturer has a small select group of focused and passionate people working for it. The people are not cruel assholes (most individual people generally aren't). So the work is often done with a focus on fairness and sustainability.

The bigger the company gets, the more disconnected the people become, the more the asshole behaviour comes to the fore. When a company gets bought up by a big conglomerate, then you usually get dictated cost-cutting moves handed down that have to be followed, without any thoughts of humanity. Once a company gets big enough to profitably sell shares it usually does in order to raise capital, and then it has the need to financially satisfy shareholders and the company conscience gets a little more diluted.

When a company outsources, they can skip out on the worry of having to make sure things are fair and safe. It can be someone else's problem. And if the outsourcer then subcontracts the work, then you are heading into really dangerous territory.

Do all the successful little cottage guys inevitably become big outsourcing guys? Osprey used to be cottage gear, got big and moved production to Asia because all their competitors did. Will it eventually go the same way for Laufbursche?

A complicated stratification

The companies can be roughly broken into various categories.

Almost entirely based in developed countries

Röjk make their gear in Sweden and Portugal.
DMM make all their gear in Llanberis, Wales
Genelec design and make all their not-at-all-related-to-hiking gear in Finland
Woolpower sew all their (amazing) garments in Östersund, Sweden
Owners of Woolpower, Gränsfors Bruks, make their axes in Sweden
Hilleberg are run from Sweden and have made their tents in their own factory in Estonia for the last twelve years
KED make all their bike helmets in Germany
Rock Exotica make all their (crazy!) gear in the U.S.
Mora make all their gear in Sweden
Tendon make all their ropes, slings and harnesses in the Czech Republic
Trangia make all their hardware in Sweden (although the multi-fuel burner is made by Primus and the bags are made in China)
Laufbursche makes his (superb) gear in Cologne, Germany

Make most gear in a developed country, but run manufacturing plants in Asia

Petzl make most gear in France, but some gear is made in Malaysia or China (such as the Meteor helmet)
Black Diamond run their own factories in China as well as the U.S.
Hestra make most gear in their own factories in Asia, some dress gloves are made in Sweden or Eastern Europe
La Sportiva make their premium gear in Italy, cheaper gear in China

Outsource all or most manufacturing to independent plants in Asia

Wild-country assemble some gear in Wales, make most stuff in China and Taiwan
Haglöfs make 80% in Vietnam and China, have around 20% in EU
Exped design their gear in Zurich, make it in China and Taiwan
C.A.M.P. design in Italy, make some gear there and most in China

~~Didn't reply to me~~ Make their gear out of minced baby owls and tiger cubs

Fjällräven
Primus
Houdini
Lundhags
Klättermusen

This still oversimplifies the shit out of everything. Woolpower or Trangia have a limited, specialised product and can make a ton of gear in Sweden with a small specialised staff and make a profit. Exped make a load of different kinds of gear, making it in Switzerland just wouldn't be an option. They kick out killer products that have few peers, even if they occasionally have quality control problems with the outsourced manufacture. (Below is a picture an almost brand-new Exped Downmat 7, suffering from the now infamous blown baffle problem. A friend bought it on my recommendation and had this happen after a few trips. My own Downmat is still going strong after innumerable trips though).

Páramo

Dividing companies by the location of their manufacturing base is an oversimplification. The perfect counterpoint to the idea raised in Part I, that it is wrong to manufacture in an oppressive regime, is demonstrated by Páramo. I had never heard of Páramo before I started to write this article. The company was started by the same guy that started up Nikwax. They manufacture in Vietnam and Columbia, both listed as oppressive regimes. However they consistently get listed as the absolutely most ethical brand, and you can see why when you read their story. Long story short, they work with at-risk women, offering good jobs and wages, putting profits back into the community, building kindergartens and housing.

I still wanted to throw a tricky question at them, and asked how they can justify working in an oppressive regime at all. The reply from the company founder was impressively informed, and spoke to how focused Páramo was on the ethical aspect of manufacture. He pointed out the problem with basing where you manufacture on a criteria of whether countries are oppressive or not, it ignores where the oppression originates from. In Chile (under Pinochet) or Apartheid-era South Africa, oppression originated with the government and so 'business as usual' was the goal of the oppressive regimes, and so sanctions and boycotts were an appropriate solution. In Columbia, the situation is complicated, with the oppression ultimately sourced in the lucrative drug trade.

In the case of Colombia, the situation is very different and complex. The primary source of oppression in Colombia is more difficult to track down; it is often hidden. There is no overt government policy, for example, that supports the persecution of trades unionists and journalists - in fact, high profile people may receive police protection, ineffective though it may be. Usually after a certain number of death threats, they either leave the country, or end up murdered.

In my opinion, in Colombia, the primary source of oppression is the corruption that is rife in the country, which in turn, is supported and fed by the drugs trade, which in turn is financed by consumers in Europe and North America. I often think that the most politically effective act in Europe, which would help the Andean countries, would be to name and shame cocaine consumers. They effectively snort blood.

The less we engage with Colombia in terms of offering legitimate trade, the stronger the drug-financed business becomes. The children of the people we employ in Colombia get a decent start in life. As children of prostitutes, without the help that we offer, the boys would be destined to crime and the girls to prostitution. At the same time, we support the Colombian legitimate economy. So am I worried about the ethics of that decision? Not at all.

Poverty is a huge oppressor, and to offer a legitimate route out of it, which in turn is self-sustaining through education, cannot be seen as an oppressive act.

Stunning stuff, and it shows clearly that Páramo are not your average company.

Cost cutting

"Made in China" is not (yet) a sexy label. Most companies try to hide Chinese manufacturing, from leaving the tags off (like Tierra do, the sister company to Fjällräven) or assembling/packaging the gear in a Western country and tagging the manufacture as coming from there. And despite all the positive aspects to outsourcing we covered in Part I, it's important to remember companies also don't go to developing countries to raise their GDP, they don't do it to bring people out of poverty, they don't do it to make the world better. They do it to make more money. The cost-savings are obviously extremely important, as there are plenty of downsides to outsourcing;

Quality - Having manufacture on the other side of the globe means not having the same level of quality control
Consistency - Variation in some of the outsourced gear can be very high
IP theft - Having ideas stolen and sold to other companies, or having 'off clock' batches or overproduction runs made for black-market sale
Lags and minimums - Small runs can't be made easily, and the shipping time means it can take a long time for gear to get to the market

Does it matter that outsourcing is done in order to make more profit? Aren't all companies out to make a profit?

You got the money, I got the soul!

Jan, the guy behind Röjk (who make, in my humble opinion, the most versatile hoody of all time), sent me a big mail about why he hadn't considered outsourcing. And one paragraph just lit a lightbulb over my head,

It's very expensive to manufacture in Sweden and within Europe, but we can still earn money and have a normal life and for us that's the most important, not to be too eager and just want to make a lot of money with the cost of other peoples lives.

Were there companies that had something else prioritised besides profit?

I have always avoided Black Diamond stuff because so much was made in China. Then after I researched the company I realised that actually they are the kind of company that should have 'Made Fairly in China' on their gear. They do outsourcing right and if every company took the responsibility for outsourcing like that the world would be a pretty amazing place. However, when you look at DMM and compare them to BD or Wild Country, and see which one made the choice to outsource, and which one decided to just put every penny they had into their factory and to just focus on the gear, it seems clear that DMM didn't put profit on the top of the list. Climbers first, businessmen second.

DMM were full of info when I got in touch with them, and said they looked into outsourcing back in 2004 when everyone was doing it, but decided against it. They wanted a tighter control on manufacturing quality and they wanted the people making the gear to be the people that also used the gear. Staying in Wales and fighting their budget-competitors by out-innovating them was a crazy move, but today as costs of manufacture in Asia rise the choice seems to have paid off. Last year was DMMs most profitable year ever.

This is not to say that 'not outsourcing' ≣ 'soulful'. Even a glance at Patagonia is enough to make you realise they are passionate about what they do. There are really clear examples though, where two similar companies take startlingly different decisions about outsourcing. DMM kept all the work in Wales, Wild Country moved the smithing to Asia. These are two very similar companies whose sole purpose is to make climbing gear. Did WC, by getting rid of the actual gear making, lose a little of the soul? Is the DMM factory, because it's one big amalgamated group of people doing all the work together, like a family, is that a more passionate environment to be in?

Does any of that matter? When it's more or less the same little block of aluminium on a wire, except one is half price, and the other is made by a more fired-up group of people, does that matter?

It matters to me. I started all of this research to find which companies made gear fairly and ethically. I found out that most decent companies do have a focus on the ethics and fairness of their labour. However I also found that some companies were less about being a company, out to grow and expand and send dividends to shareholders, but instead were a bunch of people with a core focus, a central ideology that they orbited around. No surprise that these were usually small companies, where the teams of people involved could work together rather than being broken up into departments and divisions, fragmenting their humanity and leading them away from their origins, to eventual faceless corporatism. Small, focused and passionate companies making cool as hell gear.

(edit 1: Rock exotica contacted me after I had written this post, and replied to my question about why they don't outsource their production with a line that fits perfectly here, "It is such a part of our identity, to make everything ourselves".)

(edit 2: My good pal Liam had a browse through this post and pointed me in the direction of this TED talk, which goes into some lovely detail on companies that keep it real, and also the interesting case study of small ethical companies losing their way as they get bought up by larger companies.)

At the end of the day...

There are a ton of outdoors companies that make a ton of different stuff. Clothing, packs, tents, stoves, ropes, slings, sporks, filters, etc. Every possible piece of gear, made all over the world, in every possible way. We consumers drive that production, choosing the gear we buy based on price and style and fit and finish and weight and a hundred other qualities. After all this research I have two more qualities to give a shit about.

Firstly I want to buy shit from, and thereby support, the most fanatical group of people making that shit. I don't want my gear made by a low cost vendor, manufacturing it to some spec without a clue what it's for. I want it made by someone who has lunch in the same canteen as the CEO of the company, and then goes out and uses the gear after work is over. Secondly I want gear that was made ethically, either in the developed world, in a company owned factory in the developing world, or by a strictly monitored vendor with a decent code of conduct.

No doubt the gear made by ethical companies is more expensive than the alternatives. For the price of one Hilleberg tent you could buy enough cheap hiking gear to hike every route in the Alps. There are hundreds of dirt-cheap brands (and even expensive cheap brands, such as The North Face), regularly and heavily implicated in sweatshop labour abuses, offering gear for half the price (or less) of a competing ethical manufacturer, but it's important to look past the price tag and look at the human cost.

You're not just 'voting with your wallet', you are also revealing your true character.

Mushrooms

2011-09-30T12:43:00.002+02:00

The window for mushroom picking in Sweden seems to be quite narrow, every year I go out in the woods and get surprised by the dozens of different types of beautiful fungi that erupt out of the ground and trees, turning the forests into something from a fairy-tale. And by the time I head out with the intent of picking some or taking some good pictures, they have all disappeared or dried up into little shrivelled rubbery things. This year I managed to head out at the right time with Liam and Sofie, and under their guidance my wife and I picked a ton. Because I normally take a month to write a(n overly long, pedantic) post, which would mean missing the tail-end of mushroom season, I will just publish this as a beta-post, ready to be updated and perfected live in anticipation of next years mushroom season. If you like mushrooms feel free to read on, if not, enjoy the bonus picture of a tired little Murphy riding my Huckepack.

Shown above are the basic types of mushrooms in Sweden; Fingersvamp, which look like a load of vertical tubes, Soppsvamp have a spongey structure, Taggsvamp which have spiky underparts, and Skivlingsvamp have gills. For the Swedish speakers this site is a great resource for finding out the basic edible Swedish mushrooms. For the rest, I will list out a few of the most common edible mushrooms below. It's not in-depth, maybe has many (lethal) mistakes, be cynical.

Some kind of Champignon, tasty and common and lovely, although it might be a Snöballchampignon. Can be mistaken for the poisonous Vitflugsvamp, which has white fleshy underparts, instead of the pinkish brown as shown here.

Skäggriska, edible after treatment, an acquired taste! Has to be soaked for many days, pickled or boiled in a lot of water which is then thrown out. Can look similar to the Blodriska, which turns wine red after drying. Has a strong peppery taste.

A Kantkremla. Can be eaten raw and has a nutty taste.

A Grönkremla, wikipedia says it's inedible, Svampguiden says it's delicious!

A Brunsopp, all sopps are edible, this one is extra tasty.

A Tegelsopp, it characteristically turns black when cooked and when the flesh is exposed.

On the left are tasty Kantarellas, on the right are also some white Taggsvamp. You can see on also how chanterelles are harder than most mushrooms to find, hiding their bright yellow heads under the moss and grass.

Left false Chanterelle , right real Chanterelles! The real ones have a slope from stem to head, while the fake ones do not, this is easy to see in the picture on the right.

A poisonous blödkremla, and on the right are two Bockspindling!

Lömsk or gul fingersvamp. Poisonous!

Flygsvamp, can be lightly cooked and eaten to produce psychedelic effects.

Röksvamp, fun to walk on, edible when young.

Eldspindling, poisonous, but pretty.

Fårticka , edible and good for stews.

Taggsvamp, edible with a nutty taste.

Pluggskivling, deathly poisonous! Check out the toxicology section of the wikipedia article, fascinating stuff.

Citrongulslemskivling, an acquired taste. The slimy cap should be removed as you pick it.

Björksopp, or Birch bolete. Tasty, edible, brown with a relatively flat cap. Might be a Carl Johan.

Fjällig taggsvamp, typically it's a delicacy to some and barely edible to others.

Lingon berries, not technically mushrooms, but they usually hang out together.

The mushrooms below are all 'Fucked if I know' mushrooms. If you have any clues drop a comment.

Remember, if in doubt, spit it out! Eating the wrong mushroom could have you bent over with excruciating stomach cramps on the toilet for hours before projectile vomiting a frankly astonishingly powerful spray of chunky mushroom soup-puke all over the bathroom floor, which is what happened to me, which is why I never eat the little fuckers.

Made in wherever: ethical hiking gear (I/II)

2011-09-25T22:28:00.000+02:00

PART I : Looking at the labels

I avoid buying goods made with exploited labour, and have investigated various hiking/climbing companies in order to find out who has a focus on ethical manufacture. This has been hugely informative not only in revealing to me the horrifying and depressing human rights transgressions made in the quest for cheap clothing and gear, but also in showing the gear companies in a new light. It's interesting to wander through Addnature and see which brands must be making ridiculous profits with premium priced gear subcontracted out at arm's length to the cheapest cut'n'sew factories, and to see which brands manage to sell competitively priced gear despite manufacturing out of their own factories in high-cost developed countries.

This started five years ago when I had an argument with a friend. He said it was literally impossible to avoid purchases that were 'Made in China'. I disagreed out of contrariness, started checking tags when buying clothes, and found there were some brands still manufacturing outside of South-East Asia. I began to buy Scandinavian stuff as much as possible, and thereafter European or other developed countries, figuring it would mean less shipping and a higher chance of having your goods made by someone with a decent wage and with decent healthcare. Since then I have spent a lot of time reading up on fair labour and contacting companies, and realised it's not as simple as I thought. So now I want to write down my results and complicated conclusions.

Welsh climbing company DMM were hugely informative in their feedback

What are sweatshops, and how do we influence them?

The worst sweatshops offer long hours, low wages, physical, mental and sexual abuse, discrimination, dangerous work environments and near-slavery conditions when passports are confiscated and workers are forced to pay back job-placement loans or squalid on-site housing rents at exorbitant rates. Yet there seems to be no shortage of people willing to work in these conditions. Coercion to work cannot explain the queues of people trying to find work in these factories. Jeffrey Sachs, noted economist, says it is the lure of getting away from back-breaking physical labour on a farm that attracts so many to every newly opened factory.

The definition of a sweatshop is a factory which breaks labour rules (too low wages, forced overtime, or a dangerous work environment, for example). Judging from the literature on the subject, the most abusive workplaces in less developed countries (LDCs) are domestic. Export focused factories are generally better places to work at with higher wages. Higher tech factories pay better than lower tech (so metal working pays more than textile work). Some economists dismiss those that protest large multinationals setting up factories in LDCs because the more abusive domestic factories are being ignored, but obviously it is difficult to influence these factories, whereas every time we buy some piece of hiking gear made in a developing country, we are essentially voting with our money. We can influence how companies act in the developing world by rewarding those that act well, and boycotting those that don't.

However well meant actions in the first world can have devastating unintended consequences in the developing world. For example panicking garment factories in Bangladesh dismissed an estimated 50,000 child workers, most of them girls, when in the US the Harkin bill was introduced, outlawing the import of goods made with child labour. UNICEF led investigations into the fates of these children, discovering many had ended up in more hazardous workplaces, on the streets or even in prostitution.

Are sweatshops so bad?

I don't avoid 'Made in China' because of anything negative about China, development in China is a global miracle that everyone benefits from. China has gone through an incredible boom, and despite the exploitative labour practices and horrifying environmental damage, it has managed to follow the route taken by India, South Korea, and Taiwan and ridden the capitalist locomotive out of the ghetto, moving a billion people out of poverty in the last three decades. I argue with my belayer Jenny S a lot about this, she thinks first world companies manufacturing in developing countries is exploitation and any kind of exploitation is unforgivable no matter the eventual upsides, whereas I think you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and that economic growth will do more than charity and subsidies for improving living standards. Relatively shitty worker care and pollution now, developed country status later.

Red bars shows nations with less economic freedom, the green bars those with more.

Sweden, England, the US and Japan all had sweatshops with exploited workers during their development, why should Vietnam, Bangladesh or China be denied sweatshops as a stepping stone to prosperity now? (I'll leave the 'But are we in the West with our high GDP, cutting-edge healthcare, universal education and open society really happy?' argument for others to pick apart.)

A figure from Free the Worlds 2011 report (pdf)

Hopefully wealth will not bloom alone in China, (shared) wealth brings freedom, and poverty goes hand in hand with oppression. The order of countries in the world, as ranked by freedom, are roughly in the same order as when ranked by GDP. To buy products made fairly in a developing country will help economically and in the long term might bring about greater social change in the form of a more open society. Glibly put; exploited today, empowered tomorrow. Swedish writer Johan Norberg states;

(sweatshop critics) say that we shouldn't buy from countries like Vietnam because of its labor standards, they've got it all wrong. They're saying: "Look, you are too poor to trade with us. And that means that we won't trade with you. We won't buy your goods until you're as rich as we are." That's totally backwards. These countries won't get rich without being able to export goods.

It's not as simple as the quote insinuates, sweatshops by definition are exploitative, and it's not necessary to exploit developing countries in order to manufacture cheap goods there (many of the companies I contacted has admirable manufacturing policies in China that ensured well-paid and protected workers while still taking advantage of the lower costs of living to make cheap goods). It is an infinitely debatable point as to where the line between exploitation and fair outsourcing lies, although I am sure everyone can get behind outsourcing when basic safety standards and worker protections are in force.

Skipping over the painful transition from subsidence farming, poverty and the occasional spectre of famine to running water, literate populace and free education is a literally Utopian idea. Making sure the companies that manufacture in the developing world use ethical labour, have a code of conduct and perform audits on vendors would give us as close to that Utopian ideal as we can have, fairly treated workers, higher GDP and cheaper goods for us lucky consumers.

Right?

Can there ever be fair labour in an oppressive regime?

Exploitative labour practices exist everywhere, even seasonally in Sweden (the link is in Swedish and is about exploitation of berry pickers). And there are plenty of factories in China which are very well run with strict codes of conducts and where the workers are paid very well. However, it is still far more common to find exploitative labour practices in South East Asia than in the West. It is estimated that 75% of the World's estimated 12 million exploited workers are in Asia, and just 3% are in the EU and the US. UNICEF estimate that there are 210 million child workers in Asia, and in China child labour is becoming increasingly common.

The state of the world’s children: UNICEF

If you invest time in finding which companies 'do it right' in China then you can buy non-exploitative Chinese gear, but if you aren't bothered researching then generally gear made in the West is far more likely to be made fairly. And of course the company that 'does it right' in Asia might look after its workers well, but what about the vendors for that company? Can any manufacturer fully control working conditions in the companies supplying raw materials, machine parts, electricity, services and so on? In western countries there is already a massive state bureaucracy in place to monitor workplace safety in every facet of the economy, this is not true in many South-East Asian states. In fact it's not uncommon for unionised strikes to be broken by state police, often with the use of fierce brutality. Again, the risk of having malpractice and abuse in the supply chain in China or Vietnam is much higher than it would be in the West.

From the vast amount of gear that bears the 'Made in China' label, there is a massive variance in how fair the labour behind the gear was. Avoiding Chinese-made products means avoiding both goods that have run through the chain of fly-by-night outsourced and subcontracted cut'n'sew agents, as well as goods made in carefully vetted, brand-owned factories. There is a world of difference between the nightmarish stories of beatings, virtual imprisonment and abuse from the sweatshops, and the well paid, safe and empowering jobs available with companies that take fair labour seriously.

However even if the company, and the vendors, and every part of the infrastructure surrounding the manufacture is carefully vetted, is it still wrong to purchase goods made in an oppressive regime? The definition of an oppressive regime can vary wildly, ethiscore.org give a score for oppression, depending on eight factors, including whether the country has the death penalty, has taken prisoners of conscience, how free it is rated by Freedom House and so on (although by their rationale the US is a proposed oppressive regime, with a score equal to that of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is nonsensical to the point of raising a question mark over the worth of the study). Transparency international publish the excellent corruption perception index, which rates nations on their abuse of public power for private good. Reporters without borders have their press freedom index. The (wonderful) Economist has their Democracy index. There are a wealth of freedom indices, and without fail it is the bottom half of table where China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and the many other common outsourcing countries reside.

Various freedom indices
Is it right then, even with the most careful controls for fair labour, to support regimes that consistently get labelled as being oppressive?

A lot of questions, not a lot of answers...

I had some preconceptions about outsourcing before I began to research in depth, and as I picked up more information I changed my mind about a lot of things. And then I read more and changed my mind again. And now in the last month I have contacted dozens and dozens of companies about how they manufacture ethically, and again I have had to reassess everything I thought I knew about ethics and outsourcing.

There are some companies that just don't seem to give a shit about the idea of ethical labour. There are many that do, and there are a select few that really stunned me with fantastic, deeply passionate and well informed responses to my questions. I am currently to form all this response into a manageable post about how these hiking/climbing companies try to ensure their goods are made ethically.

Please feel free to throw in your thoughts on this subject.
Part two is now available here.

(Relatively) Ultralight quickdraws - Petzl Ange & DMM Shield

2011-08-25T21:51:00.000+02:00

Henrik did a great post about ultralight climbing a few days ago, and I love most of the gear he lists (the rest I haven't tried, but damn I want to try that CAMP harness). However the gear I love most are quickdraws, which didn't get a look-in! Saving weight on QDs is great, by getting QDs that are 30/40 g lighter means you can save maybe half a kilo on a nice long 10 clip route like those at Ekoberget.

Sometimes the finicky details in gear reviews that get noted seem ridiculously over the top, stuff like how stiff the straps are on a rucksack, or what shade of orange a fuel bottle is painted. I have however realised that when it comes to climbing gear that there is a reason for the anal attention to detail. For example, when I bought my first QDs I thought the cost of snag-free noses was too high and bought the relatively light and cheap Wild Country Wild Wires. The notch in the nose ended up annoying me as I learnt how to lead climb. I would be well over the last bolt, feet on slippery sloped smooth granite, one sweaty hand sucking onto a shitty grip, the other slowly, oh-so-slowly reaching back to my gear loops to grab a QD, and then as I thumb it open and draw it out from the gear loop it would invariably and frustratingly snag, causing terrible curses to come out of my mouth and streams of sweat to break out from my forehead.

I sold most of mine to Michi, he doesn't mind them because he can actually climb properly and doesn't shit himself when leading. Here he is leading and not shitting himself at the super-nice, super-overhanging Finnsvedsberget.

These snaggy noses are on all except the premium QDs, so I guess most people don't mind them as much as I do, even the big gear carabiner from Petzl (the caritool, below) has a grabby nose. It's the kind of thing I blame for my failures instead of blaming my lack of technique. When failing at something, buy more expensive tools!

The Wild Wire is still a great quickdraw though, and is lighter than most of the usual competition (the QD I see most often at cliffs around here is the BD Positron, 107 g each). I bought a few different QDs to compare with the Wild Wires and to lose a little weight. Below, from left to right, you can see what I have been playing with. Some DMM Revolvers (51 g just for the carabiner), one of the Wild Wires (93 g), a Kong Frog (125 g... I'll explain later), some DMM Shields (76 g), which are superbly crafted QDs with massive carabiners from DMM, a few famously durable Petzl Spirits (104 g), which are regularly lauded as the definitive quickdraw and finally some of the new Petzl Anges (66 g!). The more I climb, and the more experience I get under my belt, the more I am starting to try and lead as much as possible, rather than top-rope, and lately this A-team have been my tools all over the Stockholm crags.

The Ange is so new there are almost no reviews for it yet. Climbing circles seem to be reluctant to accept new gear, which makes sense, when it's your life on the line you don't want to be in that early adopter, beta-testing group. I'm a sucker for beta-testing, hence the brand new Grigri2 I just got sent from Petzl to replace the beta one I bought (Petzl recalled it for a design flaw which made it more likely to catch fire and explode during rear-impact accidents).

Climbing circles also seem to be notoriously cynical to new gear, which is very easy to see with the Kong Frog. It gets treated as a kind of running joke, ripped apart on its arrival by people that hadn't even tried it, and accepted by people that don't seem to get what it's for. (Seriously, check the last picture in that latter link, he clips the frog into the gear loop of his ATC... That's a shitty situation waiting to happen right there).

The Frog is a bizarre contraption that I bought completely out of curiosity. The idea is that you lead a route and when it comes to that bolt, the fucker that you cannot make, you reach past your normal draws, grab the frog and push it at the bolt to clip in. Once it's "armed" it just needs to have the bolt enter its jaws to have the spring-loaded mechanism snap closed.

By holding the lovely thick and stiff sling you can clip a bolt a good decimetre further away than you could with a normal QD. I thought it was a just a novelty until two nights ago, when I ended up a few metres up and to the right of my last clipped bolt on a route here in Stockholm, at the beautiful Kanalklippan.

I had fuck all to stand on or hold onto, and was shitting bricks. No matter how much I stared at the bolt, it stubbornly remained out of reach. I started thinking about down-climbing, when I slipped a little and smashed my teeth onto a rock projecting out from the wall (my mouth was open and turning the air blue with a steady stream of curses at the time). That freaked me out, in desperation I grabbed the Frog, muttered a prayer, leaned over and poked it in the general direction of the bolt. A few seconds later I was clipped in, and as usual with leading, as soon as the bolt was clipped all the tension melted away and I suddenly found a lot more holds. The Frog got kissed like crazy once I got my feet back on the ground, and I sincerely approve of its place in the toolkit. You could argue that if you need to use something like this on a route then the route is beyond your skillset, but what do you gain by staying on challenges you can deal with? Leading a route that is just a little beyond me is terrifying, every single time I do one I start to think What the fuck am I doing here?, I could be doing something less dangerous, like going hunting with Dick Cheney. It is the exact same terror, intensity and eventual feeling of accomplishment as I get doing submission wrestling competitions.

Awful tension beforehand. Alarming, near uncontrollable adrenaline during. And a totally unbeatable feeling of triumph afterwards. The best possible way to challenge yourself. The funny thing is this is only true of lead-climbing outdoors. Leading indoors I can fall all day long without any fear or giving too much of a shit. If it's outdoors I desperately fear falling and just don't consider it an option. I am currently reading Dave MacLeod's '9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes', a fantastic book about the most common problems climbers have, the major one of which he thinks is falling above protection. His answer? Fall hundreds of times to unlearn the fear. Thanks for the tip Dave!

The Shield and Ange are both the premium QDs from two leading climbing companies, both with their own take on making a shrouded, notch-free nose. The hot-forged Shield has a strange twisted wire-gate that allows for an enclosed nose, and the cold-forged Ange has a novel mono-filament gate that some lambast as Petzls way of making a wire-gate they can patent. The Anges are unbelievably light and beautiful to play with. The criticism from the climbing community is that their crazy low weight comes from using small carabiners. This is obvious when you compare them to the Shields, which are 10 g heavier, due to the larger crab. The criticism is that the smaller size means less pleasant handling. I found it to be the opposite, the Shields are lovely to use, but feel the upper part of the twisted wire gate is a little finicky to handle, sometimes the changing angle of the gate twists the crab in my hand, which is a pain in the ass when you're clipping at the crux. It's the most tiny diminutive of criticisms though, they are supremely nice to use and the untwisted base of the wire-gate is comfortable to squeeze on.

The Anges fit neatly in my hands, the little black block of plastic on the pin makes it easy to pop the gate open, and the gate opens wide, almost as much as the shields in fact (23 mm versus 24 mm). The size makes it nice to clip with, the sling is also decent, quite thin but very rigid. The Shield is superb, but not superb enough to justify its weight penalty over the Ange (they both cost roughly the same). The Shield is definitely sexier though.

They both have perfect noses, rounded and smooth, as gently inquisitive and velvety smooth as a high-class sex toy. Eagerly and effortlessly sliding into loops or slings like the lubed fingers of a masterful prostate specialist. This is really noticeable compared to the Spirits, which are great and chunky and solid, but feel clunky and awkward once you get used to the Anges.

I also gave the DMM revolver a go, they are quite heavy, have a hooked nose and aren't particularly handy, but they have the attraction of having a built-in pulley wheel.

The idea is that they will reduce friction in the rope system. Maybe they do but I don't dig the weight and snagging issues. Good to have some pulleys in the tool box though, who knows when they might come in handy, self-rescuing from one of the many crevasses around Stockholm. I am reasonably sure they are aimed more at the trad-scene, I remember when trad climbing with Toby from Northern light blog, that he had a few and they looked liked they had been through a couple of wars. With trad-climbing protection is not in a nice neat line and friction is inevitably higher than in a sports route.

There are other factors, the gate-closed, cross loaded and gate-open strengths for example (in kN);

Petzl Spirit ↔23 ↕10 ⦦9
Petzl Ange ↔20 ↕7 ⦦9
DMM Shield ↔24 ↕7 ⦦10
Wild Country Wild Wire ↔24 ↕9 ⦦9
Kong Frog ↔29 ↕10 ⦦12 on the crab, 22 on the frog
DMM Revolver ↔24 ↕7 ⦦9

And there are some other neat details, like the external rubber strings the Petzl QDs have compared to the slightly shittier and less durable internal ones on the rest (patents I guess?). The Anges also have little holes in the socket for the gate, which Petzl say aid in ejecting debris from the socket (compared to the closed socket on the DMM Shields).

I guess that could be useful, considering if there was some shit in the nose it would drop the strength from 20 to 9 kn, which is well within the range of forces you might get in a long fall. Or a short fall if you're fat.

Those details don't sway me much though, mostly I care about the weight and the handiness of the QDs. At just 66 grammes, with perfect handling, the Ange easily is my favourite quickdraw so far, despite the cost. This is my only problem with climbing actually, the amazing, superbly designed but pricey gear is like pure crack to my shamefully gear-addicted soul. I despise myself lusting after lovely shiny toys but the attraction is too strong. For me the local climbing shop is like a kindergarten to a pedo, dangerously irresistible.

Honeymoon From Hell!

2011-08-02T21:20:00.002+02:00

I got married a little while ago. I can't imagine it was similar to many other marriages, which appear to be planned and organised events. Ours occurred because Jenny (my delectable Swede) and I have been daring each other further and further out on the tight-rope of commitment for over a decade, culminating in a surprise proposal on a frozen lake in Östa.

Then through a series of last minute scrambling and nerve-wracking improvisation, we managed to pull off a pretty fantastic wedding on Djurgården, one of the prettier islands that make up Stockholm city.

I think most of the guys reading this post will belong to one of two groups, the guys that are already married, and guys who are only vaguely half-aware of marriage as some kind of abstract semi-possible future concept, something that might conceivably happen to them in the mists of time yet-to-come, like getting cancer or travelling to Iceland or having kids. I transitioned from the latter to the former group during the ceremony without any gap in between. One second I am a slightly confused guy who is doing his best to get through a stressful situation, the next second I'm a husband. Tungsten wedding rings aren't in keeping with the ultralight philosophy either. The one pictured below was my second one and I've already gone and lost that one as well.

The wedding was great, despite having become massive and costly. 100 people came and Stockholm is crazy expensive and I'm technically still a student (24 years in education and counting!), so the extravagant cost of the wedding would be matched perfectly oppositely by the homeliness of the honeymoon. C'est la vie! Who needs month-long trips to Greece when you have love, right? We decided to rent a pair of kayaks and head out to the beautiful Norrköping archipelago. Yr.no said it was going to be calm, a little cloudy and no wind. Looking back on the weather we had, I think Yr.no should lay off injecting crack cocaine and battery acid into its stupid eyeballs for a while.

We left land and headed out against the slight breeze, heading West, and passed by the island Kupa-Klint, which had a high black cairn on its peak, offering a great view over that area of the archipelago. We picked the island directly west of its southern tip, which was an unnamed island in a bird sanctuary. The bird mating season was over and it was now OK to camp there. Seeing the high black cairn reminded me that a year ago I had been to the same island with friends. It had been a pretty stormy adventure.

We had headed out amongst the islands in perfect weather, relatively blue skies and no wind.

There were eight of us, with no plans except to eat food lazily and lie around in the sun. I was playing a lot with Cokin filters at the time, hence the occasional strange colouring and vignetting on these pictures.

That night we camped out on a little island, and had a little rain, all the better for my ski-instructor and wedding master-of-ceremonies Sofie to test out her all new Klättermusen kit.

I was in for a long night, about to learn the idiocy of sleeping under a tarp without a bug net in mosquito season.

A few ominously dark clouds towered over our island in the morning, and the wind started to pick up with a mean intent.

We tried to outrun the worsening weather by heading straight back to port, which was around two hours away in good conditions. Once we were out away from the islands I distinctly remember getting the feeling that I was kayaking under a bridge, because it felt like there was some roof just over our heads, but it was the very low and horribly threatening black clouds. Rain began to bucket down and the wind grew more viscous. The storm intensified, and during our dash across a large open body of water, the rudder on Sofie's kayak gave way. Two of our party were in fibreglass kayaks, which are faster, but much less durable and stable than the plastic kayaks the rest of us were in. You can see the fibreglass kayaks in the background of the picture below (taken a day before this storm), with the plastic in the foreground. Plastic kayaks stick in the water, while the fibreglass kayaks easily slide, and in rough weather can flip without much warning.

The fibreglass kayaks led the way south-east, back to the port, but Sofie was blown further and further off course, directly East towards more open waters. Our group of eight kayaks was now spread over the entire strait, Michi and I were staying with Sofie to try and help her get to land. Without her rudder she had little control over the craft and the intense wind constantly altered her course, heading her straight past the few islands that were between us and the mainland. Paddling on one side only, she just managed to beach the kayak on the most northerly tip of the last island, and Michi and I pulled in beside her to help.

The rudder was trashed, the shitty old lines used to control it, previously broken and tied in a dozen places, had given way entirely. We managed to make contact with the two friends in fibreglass boats, they had also landed on an island and called for help from a local they knew, who would be able to come out and ferry them back to land. The problem was his boat had room only for two kayaks. Sofie wasn't totally sure about continuing, but I had fortunately packed down around fifteen metres of 2mm dyneema cord. I figured we could double it from my kayak to hers, and if she started to have her course altered the cord would jerk her back into line.

It took a little persuading, but in the end we headed back out onto the water, my kayak following Martins, Sofie behind me, connected by the 7 metres of doubled cord, and then Michi. Most of the time Sofie was well able to paddle along with us, I didn't notice her there and the cord trailed in the water. When she was blown off course though, and the cord pulled taut and my kayak juddered under the tug and pulled her back in line, it felt so frustrating to lose momentum. The whole kayak shuddered to a halt and I had to grit my teeth and start digging deep to get it up to speed again.

It took a few hours, but in the end we made it back, with considerably better weather than earlier. A great adventure, but horribly undocumented, nobody had had a moment to snap a picture during the rough journey. I did learn some lessons, one was to always have dyneema cord with me. Th is kind of cord can take huge loads compared to its trivial weight. The one I had was Exped tent cord, 40 g for 15 m. So useful to have in an emergency, as well as coming in handy for many duties around the campsite.

Back to the honeymoon! My wife and I (it still gives me a kick to say that) pulled our kayaks up and had a wander around the island we had picked. It was small, but most of the larger islands have sheep on them, which are nice to look at but a pain in the ass to pull bits of your tent out of. It was large enough to have a few trees in the centre, but there was no real soil anywhere, so we'd have to put the tent up by tying the two tie-outs needed to trees or rocks.

I put the tent where it was sheltered from the slight northerly breeze. Later when the wind picked up I took one of these handy Exped tie-out bags (which have a lighter cord than the tent-line from Exped) and used it to reinforce the north-facing tip of the tent. The south-facing tip was tied out with one of these dyneema cords to a peg, shallowly dipped into the meagre soil and held down with a large rock.
We had mainly fruit and vegetables to eat, which is totally unlike what I normally bring (dehydrated or tinned food), and I remembered why I don't bring fruit and vegetables once an army of ants and wasps and flies and weird caterpillars (see below) arrived to assault our food bag.

At least we had champagne! I figured the champagne was allowed because I'd done some more weight-cutting. The 2.5 kg Klättermusen Mjölner was resting at home, while a 556 g Huckepacke was taking its first trip with me.

I'm sure I'll talk about this bag later, but just in case anyone is on the fence about this pack from Laufbursche, I have mention this thing is so supremely well made, so beautifully designed, and so admirably minimal.

I had two identical bags made in red VX-21 with nice open mesh outer pockets.

One for me, and one for my protégé in ultra-light, Jenny S.

I also had left my Exped downmat at home. I use it all year around normally, but whenever I go kayaking I find everyone steals my mat so they can lie comfortably on the rocks and read books. I'm sure it can take it, the downmats have such a tough exterior compared to most airmats, but I don't want to fuck it up needlessly. So a hopefully tougher CCF Therm-a-Rest Z Lite Mattress is here for summer-duty, 390 g compared to the Exped downmats 860 g. Definitely not as comfy, but comfort is low on the list for me.

Now and again I checked Yr.no because I didn't yet realise Yr.no was a congenital liar who hates me and wanted me to die. It had a big picture of a smiley giving a thumbs up with the text 'Everything is going to be fine!'. I would look at the cheery forecast, and then look at the darkening skies, at the surface of the black sea beginning to be ripped up into foamy confusion by gusts of the ever-strengthening wind, and get a little nervous. I had a short snorkelling session in my new wetsuit, the water was a toasty 19.2 °C, but gave up once the weather started to deteriorate even further.

We ate and watched from our relatively high vantage point, and saw thick black clouds gather out to sea, coalescing into a black ribbon moving from the far North-west to the North-east. We could hear distant rumblings, echoing their way to us, but couldn't see any flashes. The storm grumbled its way West. Night came on and we breathed a sigh of relief as the storm disappeared inland. I tensioned the tent to snare-drum tightness, carefully stored all our gear in the vestibule and went to bed. I have to admit that I had a tiny sliver of disappointment in my breast, seeing a thunderstorm up-close has always been something I have wanted to experience, and cruel Mother nature was not going to treat me.

Although it turns out, Mother nature was going to treat me, she was going to treat me like a Berlin dominatrix treating the first customer of the day and shove treats down my throat until I gagged. At around nine we realised the storm was still in the area, and rain started to fall as a little lightening flashed. We counted between flashes and thunder; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and then a distant rumble. Ten seconds meant the storm was around three and half kilometres away. We chatted and read our books by torchlight, but the lightening came more often, and brighter too, and the thunder had a little more volume, and soon the time between flashes and thunder was only 5 seconds. And a little later it was only 3 seconds. At this point the thunder was visceral, it was a physical blow that jiggled our organs inside us. The flashes lit up the inside of the tent, green plastic backlit in the vestibule, bright yellow inside the inner tent, a big black shadow highlighting where the tent pole was. For some reason I started to wonder how attractive aluminium is to lightening, and tried to distract myself by counting the number of flashes in one minute (thirty-three). Then the rain intensified, as if on some invisible cue it doubled and redoubled its force, blasting the tent so hard even between the rolls of thunder we had to shout to be heard. It was hitting the ground so hard it blasted the lichen off the rock and rebounded it under the tent edges onto all of our gear. Now the lightening was coming so often it was impossible to discern which thunder went with which lightening. The wind was so strong it whipped the rain under the fly and through the mosquito mesh panel on the top of the inner-tent door, soaking us. I started to think about a few things now. Were the kayaks pulled up high enough to escape the waves. How strong were the tie-outs securing the north-side of the tent? Why had I put the tent up on top of a fucking hill? And just what kind of monkeys were hammering away at the Yr.no weather-predicting typewriters?

Above you can see a lightening-illuminated video-still from the storm. The time was midnight, I sneaked out of the tent one time to take the large ten litre water-bag and place it over the North-east corner tie-out, and then came back in, soaked to the bone. There was nothing visible at all beyond two or three metres, since we were in the cloud itself, the flashes of lightening glowed indistinctly in the fog, to the North, South, East and West of us. I tried to video the storm from the vestibule of the tent, pointing the camera in all directions, but the result is not so clear. Below is an edit from three minutes of original footage, I took out all the boring black bits and just left in the lightening.

I wanted to run over to the other side of the island and check the kayaks, but figured it would be a potentially lethal trip. Going down around the shore would mean risking a slip on the wet rock, and being carried off by the roaring, surging sea. Going over the top of the island with lightening flashing every few seconds was maybe even more dangerous. Fuck the kayaks, they were only rented anyway. I headed back inside, crawled under the down, and stunningly enough, we both drifted off to sleep despite the continuing storm. Afterwards we found this storm had been reported by SMHI as having caused over 40,000 lightening strikes.

We woke up to relatively blue skies. Everything was soaked, and lots of bits of lichen had been smashed through the various mesh panels of the inner-tent and covered everything in squishy grey mulch. It took a few hours to get all of the food and gear reorganised, but at least the storm had passed. Like a big dumb eejit I even checked Yr.no again! It predicted no wind, nor precipitation and only slight clouds for that night, which I stupidly believed.

I went over to check the kayaks. I was striding over the grass, when in one instant I realised I was striding over a snake, in the same moment of realisation I leaped up high in the air and shouted 'oh SHIIIIT!', and the snake curled up and swung its head around to face me and hissed loudly. We backed away from each other, and as the snake slunk away into the undergrowth I kicked myself for not having a camera with me.

The kayaks were fine, and we decided to take them across the narrow strait to Kupa-klint. From there we would get a nice view of our own little island.

As we walked up to the high spot on that island, Jenny led the way, striding over the wet green grass. Suddenly she jumped up in the air and shouted 'oh SHIIIIT', and below her a dark green snake curled up and hissed. This time I had the damn camera ready. Both snakes were common European vipers, not terribly poisonous but enough to give you a bad day.

He too slunk off pretty quickly, and we continued up to take a look from the peak, happily unbitten.

The weather looked decent, and we headed back for some vegetable stew. This time we took the kayaks to a ridiculously high spot for the night, it felt a little silly but I was not taking any risks after the previous night.

I took the opportunity to realign the tent, pointing more North-west, out to the open water, just in case by some unimaginable twist the magic-8-ball that powers Yr.no was not going to be correct about the lack of wind.

I checked all the tie-outs and flaps and carabiners to make sure there was no damage. The carabiners on the tent are the worst part of it, cheap shitty shoddy crap that should shame Exped. I deeply dig the Vela 1, it's a super tent, very light, pops up in seconds, only needs two tie-outs, full of the useful and unusual details that Exped manage to squeeze into their gear (like the excellent no-zip fly). These fucking little carabiners suck shit though, I can literally bend them with my bare hands.

I have replaced all but one of them with lovely little Edelrid crabs instead, the remaining one was the least fucked up one (above) in a not very stressful position, although you can see the gate no longer catches on the nose and it will soon be as stretched out and useless as the rest of them.

The replacement crabs are from extremtextil.de, and are super little things, they weight 3.7 g and can take up to 150 kg, compared to 2.6 g each for the Exped carabiners which can take around half a wet fart before breaking. I once again pulled every strap, tensioned every line, and secured three more tie-outs on the north side of the tent. We head to bed, totally exhausted from the previous nights adventure.

We were woken early by the screaming of the wind. It was unreal, the previous night had been dominated by thunder and lightening and the incredibly heavy driving rain, but it seems the wind had been an unhappy second-fiddle. He wanted top billing. I was just thankful the kayaks were pulled up so high. The tent was flapping a little, so I decided to pop out and check everything was OK. Outside, the wind was so powerful it was whipping spray off the wave tops and throwing it up on land, salty splatters mixed with the biting rain. It was difficult to walk, so I nearly crawled downhill to the kayaks and pulled them a little further out of the wind. Then I realised it was blowing from the South! I went back up to the tent and could see that the little bump I had sheltered the tent behind was now useless, the wind was blowing from the open South and tearing at the fly, secured only by a single thin cord on that side. I crawled back in to the tent and before I could say a word the cord gave, and the tent flew up wildly, flapping itself around us like an angry wet plastic ghost.

Above you can see the thicker Exped tent cord on the bottom, and the thinner cord they supply with their tents on top (both shown here), complete with the yellow stuff sack and little grey cord-tensioner. You might secure your tent with only one piece of this thin cord if you are camping somewhere very sheltered. If you trust your tent to one piece of cord while camped on the peak of a low-slung island that lies on the edge of an archipelago in the Baltic in storm season, you may be an idiot. Pictured below is the point of failure, probably from a combination of the force of the wind catching under the fly, and abrasion on the cord as it rubbed on the rocks. There was no damage to the tent at all.

I crawled out of the collapsed tent, bollock-naked. Jenny stayed inside and the tent flew up around her. A few plastic fold-a-cups and sporks and some dishes that had been in the vestibule flew off in the gale-force wind, flying away to have an adventure together in a cheerful day-glo green, blue and yellow group like some demented Pixar movie. I grabbed the south-side carabiner and held it down, re-erecting the tent and preventing the wind from catching under the fly, the wind contented itself with blowing rain and sea spray up my arse instead. Nothing like a forced sea-water enema at the crack of dawn to really wake you up.

It was a little bit much, and I wasn't sure what to do. I asked Jenny to come and sit in the southernmost tip of the tent, so I could let go of the carabiner, and then I started to shove all the gear willy-nilly into my rucksack and Jenny's big roll-top dry-bag. Then I grabbed my clothes and dragged them on, all I had were my Klättermusen pants, a Röjk Tvister and a woollen jumper. It was all soaked instantly. Annoyingly I could't find one of my socks and that foot started to freeze. Jenny came out then, she had all her clothes on but the jacket was quite short and she got soaked in minutes. I rolled up the tent with the quilt still in it and stuffed it into another dry-bag. We managed to get everything loaded into the kayaks within around fifteen minutes, but at the end of it we were drenched.

The wind never let up, and one look at the stormy seas was enough to make me realise the only logical explanation was that Yr.no had become sentient and was trying to kill us. The waves were high, surging to the North, whipped into a disorganised foamy frenzy by the wind. We had to scream at each other to be heard, so we left the kayaks and moved to the pitiful shelter offered by a short cliff-wall on the top of the island. This area was swamped, but at least we were out of the wind. I was totally unsure what to do, it was around 07:00, and there was no way in hell I would be happy letting Jenny kayak back if the weather was even remotely likely to stay this rough.

I stood there, a little shocked, soaking wet, Jenny was crouching down hugging her beautiful little knees, also soaking wet, and shivering in a very cute and sexy way. That image kicked my ass a little and shook me out of inaction. I called Michi, he was working early shift at the hospital and might be up already. He answered and I asked if he knew who it was that had rescued the two friends in fibreglass kayaks a year ago. He gave me a number and I hung up quickly, my battery was almost dead. We called the number, but no answer. We could ring the coast guard ... but the situation was not really an emergency, just very uncomfortable. I went back to the kayaks, the wind spraying me with salty wave-tops, and I dug the tent out of the dry bag. Back in the shelter of the little cliff I rolled it out and stabbed two pegs into the flooded boggy ground, and erected it again. During this time we saw the coast-guard boat fly out from behind Kupa-klint, heading South-East in a hurry, I guess some people in the archipelago were having it worse than we were. Jenny crawled in to the tent and got under the quilt, and I tightened the lines up as much as I could and joined her.

Inside the wind was still howling, but we were both exhausted from the previous nights adventure and within ten minutes we were asleep, curled up together under the down like two half-drowned rats.

We were woken up by the phone ringing at 10:00, the would-be rescuer was up and ready for action. We told him the situation and gave him our co-ordinates. He told us to get the kayaks to a sheltered side of the island and he would be there in thirty minutes. We packed up the tent again, packed the kayaks and carried them to the sheltered North side, and in no time at all the boat roared into view, rammed its rubber-shielded nose into the stony shore and a grinning tanned face beamed at us from behind the cabin-glass. We heaved the kayaks onboard, I jumped on and secured them with some line, and Jenny shouted at the captain if she should push the boat out.

"I have a hundred horses pushing the boat in", he shouted back, "It might be a little tough for you".

A few minutes later we were zipping back to land, the small boat leap over the top of the heavy swell, smashing down into the valleys, both of us so relieved that we hadn't tried kayaking back. The waves in the more open parts of the sea were huge, and the wind never let up, streams of tears rolled down our faces as it screamed around us.

All in all it was a little bit of a strange honeymoon. The nicest thing about it was that one of the vows we had had in our wedding had been to be each others "partner in adventure", which I'm pretty sure was put in as a nod to my tendency to go on hiking trips. Now Jenny had truly held up her end of the bargain, a good omen for our future together.

Climbing at Ågelsjön

2011-07-25T13:07:00.000+02:00

It's been a hell of a long time since I wrote something here. Not so much due to the fact that I'm a lazy bastard, (although I am still that despite my efforts to better myself), but more so that I have been in the enviable position of having so many trips ongoing that I had no time to write about them. Normally the camping and kayaking and climbing trips are so seldom and special that in between them I have plenty of time to organise the photos, write up the hijinks and scrub the soot off my Trangia kettle. Lately I haven't even bothered emptying out the gear from my rucksack, because it seems every weekend I get to galavant around the countryside with some lucky group of friends.

The trips have changed a lot this Summer. Summer hiking for me is usually a goal in itself. The aim is to head to some beautiful, remote spot and set up a nice little tent and cook some food and stretch out on the grass to lazily enjoy the sunset, before finally retiring to bed before the mosquitos eat you alive. However this year hiking has become a tool that gets me to a climbing spot. We head to the cliff, find a nearby spot to throw up the tents and tarps, grab a fast bite to eat and climb all day. It's been very interesting to experience how different this feels, the minutiae of the gear or intricacies of the hike cease to have so much importance and instead they just become a means to an end.

That sounds a little negative though, I found that with the added bonus of climbing, all the joys of hiking get accentuated. Previously I wolfed down whatever food I made, and it tasted incredible even when it's just dehydrated potato powder with some powdered soup and a can of tuna mixed in (my normal hiking dish, and I have received a lot of shit about it from people less frugal or concerned about pack-weight than I am).

And previously at night I collapsed into bed, zombie-tired and so happy to be getting some sleep that I could have sung about it. After a day of climbing though, it would be paradise itself to eat dusty stones and sleep on an anthill. Exhausting, rewarding effort is the order of the day.

One amazing trip has already been written up by Toby (whom I met ages ago on a super-brief, super-dark, super-cold climbing taster on Södermalm), of the Northern light blog. I will also give that trip a write-up later as I had a lot of fun new experiences on that trip, trad-climbing with Toby as (a very patient and forgiving) guru, as well as sleeping in VBLs as a test to see how they work in Summer, and also sleeping under a very rushed MYOG tarp that I wanted to experiment with.

First I wanted to write a quick summary of a trip to Ågelsjön in Norrköping (where all the pictures above are from), with stalwart climbing companions Michi and Martin. We picked up eight people (and one dog) for this trip, all of us enthusiastic climbers, so our busy little base camp had a truly expedition atmosphere.

This trip was remarkable for a few good reasons, the then novel focus on climbing and the ridiculously fun evenings with ten good friends around a roaring campfire, but this trip was also the trip on which I had seen the most incredibly beautiful sight I have ever seen (I just got married last weekend so I better qualify that statement, it was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen not involving naked Swedish women).

On the first night we were exhausted, and after a quick meal everyone raced into their tents. I was bivy sleeping under the stars, so I was last to retire. I went to the edge of the lake to brush my teeth, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I saw that the entire surface of the lake was covered in writhing wreaths of thick mist. The mist formed at the very edge of the lake and then slowly moved away from the shore, gathering speed as it went until it seemed to flow like a turbulent river of frothed milk over the lake towards the horizon. The mist was only a decimetre or so thick, and this is where it gets crazy. Bats were flying across the surface of the lake, and they would swoop down into the mist and fly through that layer, wherever they went they cut through the mist and left swirling eddies of vapour behind them, and their progress was marked out by long channels of black water that they had cleared the mist away from. These trails themselves were then flowing with the mist out to the centre of the lake. Three bats dived in and out of the mist, the whole while ignoring my camera-work. Flashes, long exposures and high ISOs did nothing, I could not capture even the most remote, fleeting semblance of what I saw.

It was without a doubt the most frustrating experience I have ever had with a camera. Any kind of flash ruined the substance of the mist, and long exposures captured grainy nothingness. Hang your head in shame, Nikon D80! Time for a bigger sensor!

The lakes around Norrköping are stunningly beautiful, and they with patient and cold-resistant feet can even sometimes get a little pedicure from the local fish, who after a few minutes of cautious approach will get busy nibbling away some dead skin.

I was a little dictator when it came to fire-lighting, pressurising everyone to use a magnesium sparker with some tinder instead of the usual lighters-with-a-splash-of-petrol. It's a tad archaic, I'm sure, but I do kind of think that doing a little practise with basic fire lighting pays dividends after a while. Successfully lighting a fire with those fucking sparkers does entail organising a properly ordered pyre with the lightest tinder setting fire to the smallest little twigs, and so on to the larger and larger sticks, and learning how to set up a good little pyre like that is a skill that is worth having. Cotton-wool soaked in Vaseline does a better job, for sure, but we can't always take the easy way, can we?

Before the trip my gear list had been gutted on the surgical table as usual, and my scalpel knows no pity. This time around I had a pack weight of under eight kilos (excluding the climbing gear). This was even including the heavy petrol-driven omnifuel stove and a massive Trangia billy pot (so totally necessary with our large group).

It was hard to ignore that my rucksack (the Klättermusen Mjölner) was now over a quarter of my pack weight. It had to bear the fifteen kilos of climbing gear as well, but for future non-climbing trips I think this monster will have to sit at home. A shiny new red Huckepack will be the lightweight replacement.

Years ago I spent ages tracking down a waterproof thermometer with a max/min function that had a decent temperature range. I ended up buying a Deltatrak dishwasher thermometer, which is designed for use for HACCP kitchen regulations. I figure it's as important as any piece of equipment for someone that wants to optimise their gear. It's very useful seeing what the minimum overnight temperature was when trying to figure out a good sleeping system, for example.

This time around the min was 0.0 °C, surprisingly low for Spring. It was the last trip I took my Warbonnet black mambo on so far this year, and that with the usual exped downmat and a thin cotton Haglöfs cover was perfectly comfortable during the night. Definitely on the warm side of comfortable though. Since this trip I have been using only my VBL with a silk liner, the total weight is around 250 grammes.

Like a proud father I got to see my child making its impact on the world, as Michi had the MYOG rope-tarp I had made with him.

It's a little redder, and a little taller and wider, and so it forms a longer, thinner sausage shape when rolled up, compared to mine, and that makes it very easy to drape over a shoulder. The material is a little tougher as well, VX-21 instead of VX-07. As with most ultralight gear, it can also be used as a tarp. This is something I joked about with Michi when I gave him the tarp, but it came in use when we got a surprise hailstorm during our climbs of Valhallväggen.

The first few days were stunningly warm, but the hail was typical for the final day, freezing sleet and hail meant it was fairy agonising to climb the aggressive granite of Valhallväggen. The poor dog (a beautiful Lapponian Herder) got abused as a hand warmer in between climbs.

The cold spell was a bitch on the hands. I had planned to give trad climbing a go on a 5+ crack, and rigged up a top-rope to make it a little less suicidal, but the cold conditions and my inexperience at placing protection made the 5 feel like a 7. Trad-climbing is definitely not for the faint of heart.

Since this trip I have been back climbing at Ågelsjön twice already, but this was the first time we had such a long tour with so many people all just totally focused on climbing.

And maybe also a little focused on fishing.

Climbing at Death's head mountain

2011-05-04T22:48:00.000+02:00

Problem number one with Tomás is procrastination. My dad's nickname from me is mañana, Spanish for tomorrow, because that's when I do things. I start a lot of projects and they all reach around 70% completion before being put on the long finger. Cursory self-psychoanalysis says that I hate to complete tasks as it ends any chance of working on them, and I prefer to eternally contemplate and meddle with a partially complete project that has the potential to be perfect, rather than complete a project and make permanent its flaws.

For example my MYOG bivy-bag has been used in rain and shine, snow and ice, igloos and mountains, but is still not finished, the head-end is still open, ending with long excesses of fabric (I've started to dual-use it as a pack-liner as shown above so I can leave the Klättermusen Mjölner liner at home, another hundred grammes saved). This procrastination is also why I was typing posts about ski tours and snow-tracks with fingers that were red-raw from a weeks rock climbing in boiling Swedish summer weather. The trips were long over but my lazy ass kept putting off the write-ups. Help is at hand though, and the first few spring-trips are being written up.

I and some friends headed out to the Gritstone cliffs near Dödskalleberget (Death's head mountain). We decided to camp in the area and try and get the first outdoor climbing of the year on. It was partially driven by my recent purchase of the prestigious Stockholmförare climbing book. This ancient and legendary climbing bible has been sold-out for time immemorial, those lucky enough to have dog-eared, yellowed copies would treasure and guard them carefully, lending them selectively among their closest inner circles of friends. Recently it was updated and reprinted so I picked up a copy. It was an eye-opener to me about just how many beautiful climbing spots there are within a half-hours drive from Stockholm city centre. It has all the best good outdoor bolted and trad routes laid out, directions to and from the cliffs, as well as lots of information about camping possibilities or potential friction between the climbers and local property owners. Dödskalleberget is highly recommended in the book, along with the neighbouring cliff, Gritstone.

Dödskalleberget lies a little south of Stockholm city, in Tyresö. Two months ago I was skiing over the frozen sea in the Tyresö archipelago, checking out old cold war harbours made for American destroyers. Now I was getting fried by the sun and watching heat waves boil through the air above the cliff face.

The problem with Dödskalleberget and the Gritstone cliffs is access, both have a lot of summer-house owners in the area that are sick of climbers wandering around their local forests. Camping was heavily regulated and a small strip of beach was marked for tent use.

Personally I dislike these prepared camping spots, it feels so forced and rigid to set up camp in this posted off area. The main attraction of hiking for me is to have that feeling of independence, to know that I can decide when and where I sit down and set up my little tent. But when there seems to be so much animosity between the home-owners and the climbers, there is no option but to suck it up and stay in the little tent-prison. Plus it had a fantastic fireplace right beside a sandy beach, so what more could we have wanted?

The Griststone cliff had a route we wanted to try, but it turned out to be a bitch to find. We spent hours trying to match a bolted cliff-face to the route-map in the book, before realising we were nowhere near the right spot.

The right cliff found, I headed up to the top with Mikey and set up an anchor around a decidedly frail looking tree. The first tree I picked was even more pathetic, and Mikey asked me 'Do you really want to trust your life to that tree?'. No, not when the question was phrased like that I didn't.

I approached climbing as I did skiing, by trying to get as advice when possible from people that know how, but also turning to amazon.com and getting a few books to flick through. One of these, Freedom of the Hills, is a stunningly in-depth encyclopaedia of climbing knowledge and is where all the techniques I have of setting up anchors came from.

This was just two slings, around the tree, and a locking steel carabiner to put the rope through. I got more advanced on a different route and tried two slings around a tree and one looped over a rock spur, but got a lot of grief from my climbing partner Jenny because the rock spur part looked 'very creative'. On this trip I had just one tree as an anchor and one locking carabiner, but have since been told it's always best with two trees and two opposite-facing locking carabiners. My problem is a lack of long slings, only one tree was close enough to the cliff edge to be useable as an anchor. Next time I will have a few 4 metre slings with me. And more carabiners, it seems the number of carabiners you need is N+1, where N equals the number of carabiners you have.

There's a big difference between reading up about anchors and double-fisherman's and Prusiks and Bachmann's and all that shit, and actually trusting your life to it all. I fuck things up a lot, so when death is on the line I force myself to pedantically check everything three or four times, but still, when I finally lean back over the edge of a cliff I do tend to get a little nervous about how little climbing experience I possess. Having said all that, there are few thrills in life as electrifying as that first rappel down a cliff off your own anchor.

We'd wasted a lot of time finding the place, so only got a few climbs in before it got dark. Nothing to be sad about though, the setting sun was still powerful enough to warm us, the cliff-face felt alive with the stored heat of the day, and the budding trees and twittering birds and smells of Spring on the air were enough to exhilarate us all, setting us smiling at each other like we couldn't quite believe life was being so generous to us. I hate Spring because the pollen rapes my nose, but at times like this I can see its attractions.

I belayed with a Petzl gri-gri 2 (185 g). We previously had just an ATC (Petzl verso, 57 g), but at an outdoor fair in Stockholm I picked up the gri-gri at a bargain price to check it out. I heard a good horror story from a friend on why he changed from an ATC to an automatic belay device. He was belaying a heavier partner, who was lead climbing. The first bolt was kind of low, and the climber took a long fall, his fall pulled the belayer straight into the wall (instead of up off his feet if the first bolt had been higher), and the belayer took his hands off the rope instinctively to protect his face. The climber started to drop like a stone to the ground, but the belayer managed to grab the rope and slow the fall enough that the climber wasn't hurt. The belayers palms were burnt to shit though. Falling rocks or a bee attack, dust in your eyes, itchy balls, ennui, receiving a text message, or remembering a funny joke from the night before, all of these things can cause you to involuntarily let go of the rope and endanger your climbing partners life. And hence the gri-gri.

It felt more finicky to lead climb with though, hard to feed rope through rapidly when clipping, although it looks so easy when others do it. Nothing a little practice won't cure.

As the dusk came on and stars began to appear in the night sky, I climbed up one last time and did a quick deconstruction of the anchor, an exhilarating abseil down in the dark and a tired, satisfied walk back to the tents.

Later that night we had a beautiful sunset and some fantastic Chili sin Carne, made in the loveable Trangia 4.5 litre 'Billy'. It's obviously a ridiculous piece of equipment for one or two-man trips, but once you start having four or more, nothing is easier or more fun than a big group-made stew or chili in one of these cavernous pots.

Dödskalleberget was too big to scale on this trip, with only novice climbers and a single 50 m rope to play with, but it's carefully noted down in the yearly planner as an attractive place to return to and conquer at a later date. Mañana mañana!

Skinning up for Norway

2011-04-29T16:26:00.001+02:00

Last year I went to Norway without skis in early March. It was a humiliating experience, sinking in up to my waist in deep, wet, soft, sticky, spring snow. It was back-breaking labour that was totally unnecessary considering how long I've been living in Scandinavia, the birthplace of skiing. My fear in bringing skis on high altitude trips has been this; when trudging up and down those gorgeous mountains in Norway, with ridiculous steep slopes, I get nervous as hell I will slide off the edge of the slope and land a minute later and a few hundred metres further down. This is what I fear when wearing hiking boots and sunk up to my hips in snow, which is fairly irrational when you think about how hard it is to move in those conditions.

Considering how often I fall when on skis, even when sober and stationary on totally flat ground, I worry that if I was on skis and on a steep slope, I would last just seconds before losing control, sliding uncontrollably off the edge of a cliff into space, performing a beautiful screaming arc towards the ground, before finally being smashed into Irish stew on the rocks of the valley floor a kilometre below. The other problem with skis on slopes is getting the grip to travel uphill, wax only works to a certain degree before you have to start fish-tailing or switchbacking. One solution to both of these problems is to add skins to the skis. Skins are directional lengths of fabric or animal skin, lined with glue on the ski side, and usually hooked onto the top of the ski. They allow you to slide the move the ski forward, but lock up when you kick off. They also cut back on the glide a lot, so uncontrollable slipping and sliding is less of a worry. My problem was that my monster skis are 220 cm long, and the longest skins I could find are 210 cm. I figured I could make them work somehow and picked up a pair.

The skins carry the Åsnes brand but are made by Colltex. They are fully synthetic nylon, with a small metal bracket for the rear of the ski (above on the right), and the idea is you loop the skin through a steel bracket on a rubber brace (above on the left) which is hooked onto the ski tip. The skin loops through and folds back, and you glue it glue-surface to glue-surface, which holds the skin tightly in place.

The problem for my overly long skis is clear above, if the metal bracket is in place at the rear of the ski, the tip only has a single centimetre overlapping, not enough to hold at all. The minimum recommended overlap is 5 cm. I could cut the metal loop of the back, and get a nice overlap on the front of the ski, and just have the last 20 cm of ski unskinned. But I like the idea that the metal bracket on the rear of the ski holding the skin in place rather than just glue alone. So instead I tried a little modding on the front bracket.

I took some rivets and webbing (both from the fantastic extremtextil.de, and cut a piece of webbing as long as the skin width (60 mm).

The webbing can lie between the parts of the skin that should overlap, in order to give something for the rivets to bite into.

The rivets are easily hammered into place, three on each skin seem to very securely hold the skin in place. The little round metal slug pictured above is the punch used to hammer a hole through the skins for the rivets, it took a lot of hammering, the webbing and skins are both tough materials. The metal bracket slips onto the rear of the ski, the front stretches neatly over the tip, and the entire length of ski is perfectly covered. How did they work on snow? I have no idea, I went to Norway with my Berlin-buddy Danny, and the dude was worse on skis than even I. So he took the skinned beauties and I took Michi's grip-taped Rossignol BC 59s. They were thinner and shorter than my Fischers, but half the weight at around a kilo. The camber was also very deep compared to my flat planks.

I was hoping to ski up Gaustatoppen, in Telemark (above). But there are no cabins there, and bringing Danny on such a tough tour for his first winter ski trip felt a little selfish. Instead I dug out my DNT cabin key and we headed around an hour North-east of Gaustatoppen. The destination was the DNT cabin Daggrø.

The terrain was not so hardcore around Daggrø, the access road was inaccessible though, so we had a tough climb up the road to the start of the trail to the cabin.

Snow was on the way out, but there was still plenty left, enough to justify bringing skis. Actually when we left the car we didn't think it was enough for skis, so we left them in the car and spent a sweaty hour pot-holing through thigh-deep snow before realising how fucking stupid we both were and going back for them.

The incredible effort it takes to cross this shitty spring snow is so much that even when it was just a ten metre stretch of snow it took less time to throw down the skis, step into the bindings and plod across than to try and continue without skis. I am now a completely converted ski-believer, I swore on this trip to never go anywhere without them ever again. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Indoors, outdoors, driving a car, riding a horse, having a bath. My skis will always be on me forevermore.

We arrived late, the sun set and the trail was impossible to follow. A lot of very patient compass and map reading got us almost the whole way but we decided to rest for a while rather than ploughing on in the dark. We spent an uncomfortable few hours leaning against each other in a pile of heather, catching a few snatches of sleep now and again, sheltered from the worst violence of the storm by the narrow ravine we had stopped in. The noise of the wind was truly terrific, it never let down the entire night. Once dawn broke we continued on our way and found Daggrø soon after. It's a gorgeous little cabin by a beautiful lake. A small stream behind the cabin provides drinking water, and my exorbitant DNT membership fees provide fuel for the wonderfully hot cast iron stove. Money well spent.

These DNT cabins are so incredible, beautifully made, well cared for and wonderfully situated. It feels unreal to wander into them and be able to warm up and shelter in comfort, even way out in the middle of stunning Norwegian nature. Typically Scandinavian, to have such excellent public services available to everyone. The weather was seriously insane though, the cabin screeched and groaned as the wind tore at its walls, it felt at times like it was going to take off with us inside it.

The entire weekend the weather was incredibly violent, winds were blowing so hard that any exposed areas on the mountains became really challenging to move across. Yr.no (easily the best weather website ever) had given gale warnings for the area.

Trying to stand up on the edge of a cliff overlooking the valley was great fun, it was like trying to swim upstream in a river of molasses. We could toss up a rock and watch it fly back over the hill like it was made of papier-mâché. The only problem is that the violence and power of the wind is impossible to convey in pictures, the weather looks idyllic in these photos.

The skins had worked out really well for Danny, he plodded along safely even on the narrow access road, which was covered in icy skarsnö and had a sheer drop along one side.

There was little glide, but this was clearly a big advantage for novice skiers like us on the mountain. The steel edges aren't covered up so it was still possible to edge along the really vertical icy slopes.

The modded tips worked out very well, and took all the teutonic abuse Danny could mete out. He thought I might be a little disappointed in having worked on the skins so much and not having had a chance to try them out, so he offered to swap, but found Michi's grip-taped skis way too slippy to control, so I am afraid I had little first-hand experience of how the skin experience was.

But this picture speaks for the skins, on slopes where I was forced to make switchback after switchback, Danny just walked directly up sheer slopes without any problem. When the downhill slope was too hardcore for me (and I sat down on my ass and butt-scooted down the hill), Danny could control his descent with ease. Skins and mountains go together like Germans and Jameson. We spent a pleasant few days skiing day-trips around the hills and enjoying the views, and the skis hardly ever left out feet.

For me, the experience of skiing with Michi's skis was difficult, but very educational. I was forced to apply all the shit I had so far only learnt about in the excellent Backcountry skiing and Freeheel Skiing books that I have been reading all Winter. And it was really fun to see how the techniques did work and allowed me to control the skis and perform ascents and descents that would have been laughably impossible to me last year. Next time I'm skiing in Norway I will certainly have the skins with me, but I now feel confident that I will still be able to backcountry ski without them if need be.

The only problem right now is that the temperatures are probably going to be hitting 30°C soon. Sweden's magical season change has steamrolled over the rotted corpse of Winter, and the skins are stored in the fridge until next season. Skis, poles and skates are packed away with the Icebox, and the climbing gear is already out and covered in fresh chalk and blood. Roll on Summer!

Lightening up again, more tracks in the last of the snow.

2011-04-25T20:47:00.006+02:00

My normal Swedish trips involve me chucking handfulls of gear into the back of the car while shouting goodbyes at my fiancé on Friday evening and tearing off down the road hoping there's nothing forgotten. For Norway I knew I might have to drive ten hours back if I did leave something important behind, like shoes or food, which acts as a solid incentive to make a list and check it twice. This unusual levl of preparation allows for a lot of analysis, especially regarding weight. Last time I cut weight with a nice titanium spork, which did leave me a few grams lighter, although I'm really not sure about the benefits of titanium over plastic. A plastic spork costs less and is surprisingly resilient, they come in a variety of nice bright primary colours (do they design them for kindergartens?) and if it breaks, it can be easily recycled and you could replace it ten times before coming close to the price of a titanium spork. I think the price difference is just due to peer perception, it's hard to flash our cash on the hiking trail so we buy titanium sporks and carbon-fibre pimp-canes. I like the size the foldable Ti-spork packs down to though, so my plastic sporks are only used by sporkless friends (should I even call them friends if they don't own a spork?), and the titanium one is packed down for every trip.

For this Norway trip I turned again to titanium, this time to replace some cooking gear. What I normally bring on a trip is shown below, an aluminium Trangia pot, kettle and lid, coming in at 250 g.

I usually have the little Trangia pot holder too, another 50 g. You might scoff at bringing along a kettle instead of just using the pan, but we Irish must have at least ten cups of tea a day - anything less and we begin to get cold sweats and blackouts.

Enter the replacement, a Primus titanium pot and lid, weighting in at 140 g.

It comes with a little light Ti-micron gas burner, which weights in at around 100 g and has a lovely little push-button igniter. I always have a firesteel along, so the igniter might seem superfluous, but actually it's so handy to have it's worth the few grammes. Gas can be stopped and started at will with no effort, rather than the usual kerfuffle with the firesteel.

So altogether my new kitchen weights less with the burner included than my old one did without. I took it for a test drive out in Dalarna. It's supposedly the Swedish redneck area, and the bullet-holed traffic signs backed that up.

The last heavy winter snow had recently fallen, and the access roads were not yet ploughed, so it was a long six hour ski to get in to the valley I wanted to camp at. Nothing to get me down though, I can never get enough of Winter and relished the idea of having to ski along a blocked road.

Road signs buried up to the arse, where's the plough-man at?

Excellent conditions for tracks, feel free to guess what the hell left these ones below. I'm guessing a turkey that had it's feet cuffed together and was trying to hop away from the turkey police. Maybe he had done something fowl! The basket on my poles is for scale and is 12.5 cm in diameter.

Adorably cute tracks of a vole or mouse or a tiny little hobbit.

Also fresh moose tracks. The snow was typical late Spring snow, super sticky and wet, perfect for tracks. A bitch to ski through though.

I have no idea what the hell this following print is. My fiancé said it was a bear, but I think she was just being nice to me.

Shitty spring snow was so sticky and disgustingly thick I had to ski along the edge of the road in the shade to get any kind of glide. I think this time of the year is the time of the year all the Swedes put klister (crazy sticky ski wax/glue) on their skis, but from what I've heard about the performance of klister, it's as useful and a lot cleaner to spread peanut butter all over yourself and your skis than to use klister, so I stuck to my grip tape and soon was carrying 10 kg blocks of sticky snow on the bottom of each ski.

Once I got off the road and headed across the valleys, I found some beautiful little burrows. Each one had a lovely track of a wing outside it.One of them even had a little shit inside the burrow! Naughty little bird couldn't hold it in. I have checked with some experts and gotten the verdict of Lagopus! What a lovely track they have left!

The snow was truly shit to ski in, but every track was perfect, this kind of soft sticky snow was a perfect canvas for animal feet.As I got closer to the forest a burst of sound hit me and a huge fat cock-pheasant flew up from my feet, but was lost in the trees before I could fumble my camera out from my jacket. He had left this amazingly telling track, which completely illustrates the delight tracks bring me. His fat little seat on the left, where he was resting, then his leap forward onto one foot, a smash of his powerful wings, and a final brush-goodbye of his wing-tips. A tale of departure reliefed in snow. I found a spot to play in, and took out my new toys. I had been inspired by this post from light as possible, in which the dude makes a supremely beautiful and minimal heat reflector for his stove, so I had hacked at a piece of tinfoil for a minute and squished it around my stove, you can see it below in all its beauty. Along with a sneaky bottle of Jameson. They say it's bad to drink alone, but what else can make instant coffee palatable I ask you?This was a really indulgent trip, I wanted to have one last ski tour in Sweden, the snow was going rapidly so I just fecked off and spent a lazy day reading about John Rae and having cups of tea. The new titanium gear was fun to use, but how different can one propane-valve be from another? The pot has some nice handles on it and a cute lid, the burner has extendable legs and is fairly quiet. I guess I can write a review of them when I get to know them better.I'm not one for learning lessons, so I tried again to make a snow cave with the Ice-box, and failed again, this time I took a hint from Korpijaakko and used my skis to make a better roof. It had mixed results. One neat snack I tried this time around, was dried biscuit. There are two types of dried biscuit that I have tried on camping trips, one is 'double baked bread' or zweibacke, and the other is the Italian biscotti, a double baked sweet biscuit. It was super easy to make and tasted amazing, and is perfect for hiking (relatively low weight, high calorie). Cannot recommend it enough, throw away your jaffa cakes and snickers, and enjoy some biscotti on your next expedition. The whole new titanium kitchen, including gas canister, cup and spork, wrapped up neatly in the primus sack, which is just about 1 litre in volume. Really a nice neat packet. Heading back in the morning revealed some lovely clear fox-tracks over my old ski tracks, he had followed them up to where I had stashed my rucksack, but hadn't screamed in my ear like his forest-mate the lynx had done last time. And further out by the edge of the forest I found these beauties, but I have no clue in the world what the hell made them, answers on the back of the postcard to the usual address please.

Reindeer, moose shit and ice-fishing in Norrland.

2011-04-11T21:49:00.001+02:00

Winter in south Sweden is well and truly over. That won't stop me from chasing it, this week with a trip to Norway, last week with a skiing trip to the edge of the Arctic circle. There was plenty of snow still in Norrland.

After a brief stop in Luleå, we headed North along the thawing river Luleälven, to a little stuga by a frozen lake in the middle of the forest, we being my dainty little fiancée and her parents.

The weekend was spent skiing across the frozen lakes from island to island, and even doing a little fishing. A whole lot of fishing actually without a fish to show for it, so it goes.

Beautiful sun halo, caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere apparently.

The weather was excellent, clear skies, low temperatures and no wind.

An inferior mirage on the lake, caused by a layer of hot air at the surface of the lake.

A hole had to be drilled into the lake not just for some ice-fishing, but also to supply the stuga with water.

A wickedly sharp Mora ice-screw cut through the ice with ease, but it still took a hell of a lot of work to get through to the water, the ice was well over 60cm deep. Periodically pulling the screw out cleaned the ice parings away.

After a good ten minutes we finally got a gusher.

The water was excellent, despite its long Winter spent in the dark.

Later we gave ice-fishing a try, it's a game of patience not well suited to my attention deficient personality.

Threading the maggots is always the worst bit, I was lucky and got to do mine and that of my fiancée, hurray for the unrealised ideal of sexual equality.

Dipping the poor little bastards down into the chilly waters felt a little cruel, the trick apparently is to lower them to the bottom and then bob them up and down over the lake floor.

After half an hour of bobbing I had a nice build-up of ice on my line.

It was very meditative to stand in the freezing air and just bob the line over and over. Probably not so comfortable for the maggots though.

During this time we also saw a load of Reindeer pass nearby, crossing from one patch of forest to another. They looked like lost camels crossing a desert in the evening shadow.

That night we headed out to the lake to see if there was any hint of the Aura borealis, the forecast indicated that there would be no show, and there wasn't. It turned out to be amazing to stand in the middle of the massive frozen lake, watching the stars so far from any light pollution. The most amazing part was hearing the incredible, massive groans and cracks from the ice as it settled. It's something I've read about often when indulging in my addiction to books about Arctic exploration, but I'd never heard before. Slow, stuttering creaks like a haunted ship, and then perhaps a sudden groan or a sharp crack that sounded like a shot. Sometimes it sounded like some just barely incomprehensible spoken words, it was eerie to stand in the middle of the star-studded blackness and hear these strange muffled words that seemed to come from nowhere, it must have been terrifying for the men of Shackleton and Nansen that had to live on ice. It was an amazing auditory show to compensate for the lack of a light show.

Around the stuga my soon-to-be parents in law had a million birdhouses and birdfeeders, so we not only had a lot of birdsong but also had visits from a pair of red squirrels.

Heading out to the river for some bird-watching, we saw more reindeer moving into the forest.

Lots of reindeer all over the place actually, but as usual we only saw signs of the moose, he himself was nowhere to be seen. Fresh tracks and shit were everywhere.

And even his dietary habits were on display, he's been eating the tops of all the small trees along his tracks.

Luleälven is a stunningly pretty river, especially at this time of year when it's just starting to break free of the winter ice.

We got to sit and fika while some dippers dived repeatedly into the freezing waters for worms and larvae. They have some very interesting adaptations to their aquatic lifestyle.

Some more reindeer were on display on the way home, grazing quietly in the woods.

A fun trip, it's always nice to see north Sweden, it's a shockingly different pace of life to that in Stockholm, so laid back and relaxed.

Ultralight tripping.

2011-04-01T00:01:00.006+02:00

When I come back from my trips and tell friends how they went, telling them about boiling the flesh off moose heads or building and living in an igloo or puking my guts up into a saucepan of snow at -30 ˚C, I usually get asked what drugs I was on. The question is asked rhetorically with a wink and a smile. However it does strike me that this a pertinent question, because what we decide to trip on can have deep implications for our pack-weight, our safety, and our trip experience. There are very few resources to aid our hiking fraternity in choosing what drugs to use, apart from some seriously insane stories on erowid. I will attempt to give a simple guide, to lay out a few alternatives, the classics and the new breeds, and take a look at their ups and downs, their highs and lows.

Beer

Beer is the faithful dog, the default drug, certainly the poison of choice for almost everyone in Sweden I have met out in the wild. No matter that it weights over a kilo per litre, or that it comes in heavy cans or bottles that have to be carted back to civilisation, people like it because it's legal and cheap. It can freeze up and crack open during a cold Winter, it can smash open during a storm and soak all the gear in your waterproof rucksack, it can cause you to puke all inside your sleeping bag and stab your best friend in the leg over a game of cards, sure, but nothing kills a hiking thirst like a nice black Guinness. Plus you can use the empties to make little alcohol stoves.

Don't keep your cans in the watertight section of your rucksack with clothes and sleeping bags, drying out beer soaked gear in a swamp is tough.

Disadvantages: We all know the biggest camping problem with beer. A great night spent knocking back cans around the campfire, bonding to your mates, slurring out eternal oaths of friendship, before finally crawling into your toasty warm sleeping bag and curling up and passing out. And then... a few hours later... the need to piss starts to grow and grow, at first soft and slow like a blind little worm crawling along your urethra. Then, like a hungry growling wolf prowling outside your tent, the urgent call of nature comes ever closer, ever more intrusive, ever more compelling. You wake (if you're lucky) and fight, fight against the pressure of the bladder, but there is no relief. Curled up in your warm womb you press your thighs together and try and drift off to sleep again, but the feeling grows only more and more intense, as outside, the wind begins to howl.

Cocaine

Cocaine, the only drug here with any decent prestige in the history of the great outdoors. In the diaries of the great explorers it might have been coyly referred to as 'stimulants', or more fittingly as 'forced march pills'. Taken in pill form to allay hunger and prolong the power of endurance, it was also used in eye drops to combat the painful itchy dryness of snow blindness.

You think that's snow in Shackleton's beard?

Disadvantages: Firstly, It's not too hazardous a guess to say the strong personalities of the men attracted to exploration might have had occasional clashes, carefully bleached out of diaries and left out of histories written at a cool distance from the heated passions of the events. Secondly, everyone knows cocaine is spelt A-S-S-H-O-L-E. Nothing can turn nice, friendly equitable guys into charmless bragging pricks quite like cocaine. And you have to wonder what this perfect storm of headstrong alpha males and cocaine-boosted confidences led to? Outside it's minus 40 and blowing an Antarctic storm, inside, Oates is sitting in a tiny freezing tent with cokeheads Scott and Wilson. Oates' diary reveals that "Myself, I dislike Scott intensely and would chuck the whole thing if it were not that we are a British expedition....He [Scott] is not straight, it is himself first, the rest nowhere...". This does make Scott sound like he's been dabbling in the charlie. Scott also forced Wilson, the Doctor, to hand over his stock of opium tablets in case anyone wanted to relieve the party of their burden, perhaps with plenty of noddings and winkings at Oates? Was it this kind of pressure that drove Oates to march out of shelter and into a blizzard to his death?...

Of course not, everyone knows Scott ate Oates.

Heroin

Heroin is the premium gear on offer here today. It has great advantages for those concerned with weight, a few grammes of weight invested in heroin saves a lot of weight on tents, tarps and raingear for example. Who can give a shit about the weather when you're strung out? Shooting up and lying down and just having the best time in rain, shine, snow or sleet. Yes it's expensive, hard to source, dangerously addictive and socially unacceptable. There are a lot of reasons to not bring heroin on your next family camping trip. What reasons are there to bring it? As they say in trainspotting, who needs reasons when you have heroin?

Hiking in Berlin on heroin, we didn't even make it out of the apartment.

Disadvantages: To cook your gear you'll need more gear; a spoon, some acid to dissolve it in, a trangia, some needles, a syringe and a belt. It's going to be a mess setting all that up in the middle of a mosquito tsunami, or a snowstorm, or whatever kind of weather you get in withdrawal hell. And what if you run out? Most of the other drugs in this article will just give you jagged nerves if you go cold turkey during a 5 day bender in the mountains, but running out of heroin in the middle of nowhere might result with you stripping to your underwear, dabbing honey under your armpits and slow-walking past the bear cave, trying to sell your ass for a quick hit. That certainly gives me paws for thought!

Ecstasy

Ecstasy isn't the first thing that springs to mind when thinking about hiking and nature. Glo-sticks and gas masks, huge trucks covered in speakers and tens of thousands of loved-up ravers dancing to repetitive beats, that's not what you expect to see in the middle of the pouring rain in the countryside. Well, except in the UK. Would E help out on a camping trip? It might give the endurance and energy of cocaine, the good atmosphere and relaxation of a few beers, the empathy and connection of mushrooms, and of course the cold sweats and grinding jaws of the electric chair. Sounds great! An 80 km trek through any kind of conditions will seem like a light stroll. And of course, perhaps you're one of those cunts who, when meeting others on the trail, just kind of pretend they aren't there, walking by silently without even a glance. You might look away at a suddenly interesting tree, or dig your phone out of your pocket to play with as we pass so you can avoid any kind of interaction at all! Well no more, on E you'll be giving firm handshakes, long sweaty hugs, and statements of deep love to total strangers, you might even get laid!

Disadavantages: Woohooo! Hug my rucksack, I love my rucksack! Hug my sleeping bag, I LOVE my sleeping bag! Hug the trees, I LOVE the trees! Hug the bear, I love the aaaaughhhh!

Psychedelics

We can skip over the exotic hallucinogenics here, and take stock of where we will be when we decide to have our vision-quest. We will be in the beautiful forests of Scandinavia, surrounded by their beautiful and unique flora and fauna. So why not partake of all that beautiful flora and fauna? The stunningly pretty Fly Agaric is native to Scandinavia, and has been a stalwart companion of the local vikings for thousands of years. After a little gentle cooking it's just as trippy as it looks. Why bother with years of fasting, chanting and meditation to achieve total relaxation and transcendental bliss when you can just eat some mushrooms instead? Natures shortcut to a higher state of spiritual awareness, in a small, protein rich package.

Super Mario must have been tripping balls.

Disadvantages: At least when you fuck up and take too much heroin you just die. On mushrooms you're more likely to be flooded and overwhelmed by a million racing thoughts and impressions for what feels like forever. The great thing about psychedelics is the way they remove the filters from our senses and allow us to see and feel all the things in the world that we normally filter out. The terrible thing about psychedelics is the way they remove the filters from our senses and allow us to see and feel all the things in the world that we normally filter out. Even at a normal dose you can forget about being able to make a decision, or implement some kind of plan, because you're probably going to end up staring at the inside of your tent and touching your face for the next 6 hours.

Whiskey

Easily beats beer in important potency-to-weight score, is legal, and possesses a certain outdoorsy charm. Is there any liquor more comforting, when in the neck of a storm, soaked to the bones, surrounded by scurrying clouds and wind-blown confusion? Golden ambrosia, warming the cockles, affirming the spirit and steeling the backbone. In Irish it is known as uisce beatha, meaning water of life, and well is it named.

Disadvantages: 'The dose makes the poison', they say. Nowhere is this more apparent than with whiskey. At a wake with two good friends, we decided that the litre of Jameson we had with us would be gone by midnight, in honour of the deceased. We sat together and animatedly chatted politics, economics, community, society. Suddenly a gasp, 'It's five minutes to twelve!'. We had but sipped politely at our glasses until then, so now, in order to make the deadline, the drinking began in earnest. We divided the bottle and gulped burning mouthfuls down, gasping, tears in our eyes. Then the bottle was empty, and silence, and then a few laughs as we revelled in our unity.
A moment later madness struck, hard and frenetic. Tables were flung about, the memories become like images flashed under a strobe light, blurry flickering pictures separated by shards of blackness. Confused shouting voices, twisting and turning hallways, floors rising to batter my shoulders.
I always hated the ridiculous overblown way people puked in movies, sticking their head down the toilet almost. What a laugh! If you had to puke in an icky poopy toilet you would do it from a distance right? That night I realised the reason you stick your endlessly vomiting head in the toilet and grab on to it with a bear-hug is because it's the only thing in the world not madly swinging around like dizzy drunken lopsided boats in an Atlantic storm. You press your cheeks into its cold enamel because the cool hard touch is the only thing in the world not made of pure unending nausea. I've had a three surgical operations in my life performed without anaesthesia, due to bizarre circumstances in all cases. And yet none of them compared to the horrible, eternal, relentless, unending retching nightmare that is a whiskey hangover.
Having said all that I've never had a hangover when whiskey-camping. It must be the fresh air.

Meth

Meth is a real backwoods kind of drug, but not in the fun, cute, 60's retro way that weed is, but in a more disgusting, debasing, awful, poverty-stricken, real sort of way. It has many 'legitimate' uses today, a hard-working stimulant for long distance truck drivers, tank drivers and American military pilots. You too can work incessantly, for days and days on end with no rest, travelling vast distances in insanely complex and expensive hardware and blowing up loads of canadians by accident when you get there. That's the glamorous side of meth though, the more mainstream portrait might be exploding turtles, squats full of toothless, desiccated acne-ridden dregs taking apart and rebuilding bicycles, and a massive library of 'would-be-comic-if-it-wasn't-so-tragic' before and after pictures.

Disadvantages: Mixing meth and camping doesn't seem right. Meth is such an intense, focused, energy kick. Meth and climbing, sure. Meth and Kayaking, I guess. You could climb non-stop for days with a diamond hard focus, you could kayak from Stockholm to Lisbon without a break. Hiking on meth kind of misses the point of hiking, you'd head off from parking lot, hike across Sarek and back again and then ask 'now what?' It would be like listening to ten albums at once so you can enjoy more music.

Weed

Weed, the original nature drug. The choice of the back-to-nature flower-power counter-culture group-sex-enthusiasts of the 60's and 70's, also known as your parents. It's potent, light, cheap and best of all is easy to grow in the very nature you are out enjoying. A renewable resource, it's most well known for causing it's users to lose all fashion sense and become extremely interested in carpentry. It can also be grown for its excellent and durable fibre, hemp, which can (and indeed is) used to make hiking shoes and clothes already, so this shit could not only get you high but also keep you dry. Weed is perhaps the most suitable drug for the serious hiker, as it gives very little physical impairment while allowing a deep and potentially meaningful appreciation of the total fucking awesomeness of nature, man. Not to mention you might suddenly have the calm and focus to finish all those MYOG projects you started.

Trippy.

Disadvantages: Additional gear you will need, a big blown glass bong in red, green and yellow, some rasta hats tastefully beaded in delightful red, green and yellow. Some nice tie-dye t-shirts and of course the collected works of the scientist. Not really disadvantages to be honest.

And the winner is...

Superglue! A tiny ultralight tube is all you need! You can use it to repair any kind of gear, you can use it to seal up small to medium sized cuts, you can mix it with baking powder to create a strong filler for sealing gaps, you can put drops on your fingertips if you overdo the rock-climbing to harden your skin, you can even start a fire with it if you dribble enough onto some cotton wool. And of course you can sniff it and enjoy the 'total loss of all basic motor skills, blurred vision and numb tongue' of a solvent trip. And how great does that sound?

It looks like Brian and I are shaking hands here, but we'd actually just superglued them together.

Actually...
I can't leave this post as it is, condoning solvent abuse. Solvent abuse is a terrible thing and ridiculously dangerous to your health. It was an April fools joke. The real winners are whiskey and weed.

Terror in the night, (And the Grand Shelters Icebox gets hacked)

2011-03-11T15:53:00.001+01:00

It was a fortuitous accident that I found this incredible place, "The valley of the three skulls", a long open valley smack bang in the middle of the secluded Malingsbo Klottern nature reserve. I was looking for a famous cave in the area, which is supposed to be full of ice all year round, it wasn't, it was full of faded, decade old beer cans drowning in dank water.

The co-ordinates for the cave were entered incorrectly into the GPS receiver, and instead of bringing us along the well travelled, well sign-posted paths to the ice-cave, we (I and 3 co-researchers) went completely off course and were forced to bushwhack through acres of heavily forested hills and valleys, before the GPS brought us precisely to the body of a half rotten moose.

This was very upsetting to some of my companions, one of whom wanted me to bury the moose. A live moose was only seen, as is the norm apparently, almost an hours drive away at the edge of the nature reserve.

Spot the moose, win a prize.

Curiosity drove me back to the valley a month later, with my best buddy and pal Brian. Curiosity in seeing what happens to 600 kg of maggoty moose in the forest after a month.

And curiosity paid off, the trip was exciting, we found three moose skulls, forever baptising the valley with its melodramatic name, we found five meaty moose legs, and we heard a whole lot of wolf howls, howls which seemed to surround us as we prepared to leave the valley.

We also found fresh moose tracks where there were none the night before, all through our campsite. This valley was a real find for nature enthusiasts.

I have wanted to go back all Winter, I was planning to ski through the forest and look for tracks, in snow I thought it would be easy to see what animals frequent the area, and I hoped that I might find wolf tracks. It was a long-shot but I decided it would be a fun trip anyway. When the date was picked it turned out all my most reliable and dependable hiking partners were out of action. I decided to go solo, but was now unsure about shelter. I had been planning to give the Grand Shelter's Icebox one last spin before reluctantly packing it carefully away in sawdust and tears for Summer. With two people I still found it tough to get an igloo done within a couple of hours, with just myself I think I would be working all night to get any shelter at all. And knowing how lazy I am, I'd probably just skive off and disappear, and I'd have to go off and look for myself and then find myself smoking a cigarette behind the bike shed. This got me thinking, why not use the Icebox to build another kind of shelter, a quick and dirty solo shelter? It's been preying on my mind since I got the Icebox, what happens if you get sabotaged by terrible weather, you won't have the time or calm needed to get a decent shelter made. Could a quick shelter be thrown up in an emergency? And if so, how long would it take?

I was going to bring my MYOG bivy, which perfectly matches my Exped downmat 7 in size. Careful measurements revealed it would take just 18 blocks to make a double row around the bivy bag. Then I could either rig a tarp over the top of this wall or try to angle them in and connect them in an arch as with an igloo. So I packed up my gear, carrying around 10 kilos, (the Icebox was sans poles for lightness, just the box and the U-bar were packed up). I drove out early in the morning and parked the car at the nearest available spot, which due to the insane amounts of snow blocking all the access roads, was a few km away. I skied out along an access road, passing the tips of traffic signs that rose just a few decimetres out of the snow, and then headed out into the forest, over a stream and into a valley that led to the target valley.

Stupid signs of stupid wet shitty Spring.

The weather was brilliant, the sun was out in force. Skiing was tough at first as I sank in even up to my knees in the soft snow, but after a while a strong cold wind began to blow and within minutes the surface of the snow had hardened and the skis flew over the top with no resistance. I'm a clumsy beginner but even with an occasional fall it was impossible not to enjoy the crisp clean air, beautiful surroundings and the gentle slopes that make back-country skiing so variable and fun.

One thing I hated though, was the optical illusion that is unfortunately so prevalent in skiing. It happened almost every kilometre, I would come to a steep, heavily wooded slope. The ground fell away at a dizzying angle, and a long long way below tiny toy-like trees could be seen bending in the wind. I would grit my teeth and start heading downhill, picking up speed at a sickening rate, the wind would tear at my face, forcing streams of tears from my eyes, my ears would pop as I dropped in altitude like a falcon dropping from the sky onto its prey, and in seconds I was flashing across the bottom of the hill, feeling completely exhilarated. And then, without fail, I would look back and see, instead of the massive shear cliff that I had just come down, just a tiny, near-imperceptible slope. Every goddamn time.

Triple diamond, 8C+ Black slope from the top, barely a slope from the bottom.

As I skied towards the valley, I came across some old tracks. The tracks were covered up with snow, so minutiae were impossible to spot, but the distinct detail was where the tracks went.

They wandered out of the forest, moved across the valley to a tree, circled it, moved to a rock, circled that, wandered into the centre of the valley, walked in a circle of perhaps two or three metres in diameter, before wandering back into the forest.

It was unusual. In the secluded forests I have seen only a few tracks (moose, deer, rabbit, hare, fox, rat/vole), and they always seem to go from cover to cover in a straight line. This seemed more predatorial.

It's also worth noting right now, that although I came out on this trip specifically to look for tracks, I had prepared for it as well as I do for anything, and hadn't even managed to google the subject for a minute. I now know a lot more, and apologise in advance for the terrible photos and lack of measurements.

The only picture where I managed to get something in frame in order to compare size, the length from the back-end of my ski to the tip of my toe is around 1.5 metres. The stride length appears to be around 30 cm.

The photos are tweaked to bring out the tracks as much as possible, but that has rendered them pretty fugly, so please forgive me.

I continued on my path to the spot where we had found the dead moose, and from there continued further up the side of the valley into a hill overlooking the entire area. The tracks had continued all along the valley, wandering in and out of the forest, quartering the entire area. I stopped to remove my rucksack in order to quickly scout about and find a good spot for to shelter in overnight. As I stood there enjoying the lack of weight on my shoulders, I heard a wolf-howl. A good omen I thought. I found a spot on the hillside for a shelter, and flattened out some snow to have it well sintered by the time I would be back with my rucksack.

The hill was fairly steep and heavily wooded at the base, so I decided to skip skiing down and slog through the snow instead, it was only a hundred metres to my pack. Big mistake, huge. It took around 50 million calories and what felt like a year of Sisyphean effort to get down and back up again. A 10 kilo pack-weight is light, but it's obviously not light enough yet. I dug out the icebox and started to pack in the snow. It was surprisingly fast, without the need to be careful, the blocks took only minutes to prepare, even working alone.

When building an igloo, the first layer of blocks is of prime importance as all subsequent work depends on their exact angle to work well. I didn't have that as a worry and so just threw in a shovel of snow, slapped it down, and repeated until the block was done. This turned out to be a mistake.

After the first row was done, I started to build the second row, now I realised that although an exacting angle on the first row was not needed, if I wanted to angle the wall in enough to create an arch over the top, I should have at least put some kind of inward angle on the first row. Live and learn!

Live and learn is something I say often to myself but never seem to be able to do, that's why I'm almost thirty and still in school. The temperature had dropped like a stone and now the blocks were hardening at a great rate, they came out of the Icebox already as solid as a rock. After a food break I completed the second row with some slight lean inwards, and then decided to throw a tarp over the top to complete it.

It got dark quick.

Delicious stew made from dehydrated carrots, extra spicy beef jerky and zweiback, all home-made.

I took apart the Icebox to pack it away, and then looking at the large, flat plastic sides, I thought perhaps the Icebox could help shelter me in another way. I placed the pieces across the wall, and covered them in a decimetre of snow.

The tarp covered the last metre of open roof, and after throwing some snow over the edges it was ready to sleep in. And I was ready to sleep, the wind had a knife edge and was cutting through my layers with ease.

The shelter was just the perfect size for my bivy bag, the head-end was still around 40 cm recessed from the entrance.

I find it interesting how fun it is to make shelters. It feels like being a kid again and playing in the sandbox in kindergarten, a relaxing busy attitude of being completely immersed in messing around. I had a huge feeling of nostalgia when I realised how similar it felt to scrabbling in the dirt aged three. My friend Liam thinks I have arrested development at age 15, but I'm starting to think it's earlier. That would also explain my breast fixation.

I got into all my sleeping gear, read some of my book (absolutely fantastic stuff), and drifted off to sleep. I normally sleep extremely well when camping, I wake a lot more than I do at home, but it's never a problem. It's not like that endless purgatory of being unable to sleep for some unknown reason, it feels more like the reawakening of a primitive instinct, the neanderthal need to sleep with one eye open and keep watchful throughout the night. I tend to drift from sleep into wakefulness, glance around, snuggle up and drift into sleep again. That night I woke up two or three times, just enough to glance out of the shelter at the stars, and listen to the screaming impotent wind, before drifting off again. Suddenly however, I awoke with a violent start. A terrifying scream had echoed through the forest, so close to me it seemed to be in the shelter with me, a drawn out, screeching banshee howl that instantly had cold sweat pouring out of my skin. I sat bolt upright and my heart froze in my chest, my breath was caught in my throat. I wanted to make a noise but all that came out was the most pathetic little groaning whimper. This whimper I made was actually so animal and pathetic that it shocked me, it had really been drawn out of me before I had any control of my actions. It was shocking to hear myself involuntarily whimper like a little dog, and that shock snapped me out of this paralysis and instantly my senses came flooding back to me and I haltingly yelled out, and then yelled again, yelled a big deep yell that echoed across the valley. There was no sound after the echoes died away. The wind still howled, the trees made creaks and soft swishing sounds and that was all.

The only other sound was the massive, booming drumbeat of my heart and the rushing sound of blood pulsing through my ears. I didn't move, I remained sitting up in my sleeping bag for maybe a minute or two, deadly still, before calming down a little. It had just been a nightmare, I realised. I lay there for a while longer, ears cocked, eyes staring out into the dark valley but seeing nothing. My heart slowed down, and in an instant everything was rationalised and I suddenly felt ridiculous, and decided to go back to sleep. It had just been a nightmare, a little intense but just a bad dream. Yes I felt ridiculous, but I did pull my rucksack in to the shelter, partly blocking the entrance. Yes it had just been a nightmare, but better to feel secure so as not to get another one I thought.

I got woken up by a woodpecker hammering right outside my shelter. I had seen a rotten birch nearby and thought that would be where he was, but instead it turned out he preferred nice healthy trees.

I was shocked by the depth of the hole he had drilled into the tree.

Once I had seen this hole, I started to see many of them all around the forest. I am reliably informed they are made by the Black woodpecker.

They were hungry birds, this damage looked like it had been done prior to the snowfall.

I had already resolved to keep my little nightmare to myself, I was mostly just surprised at myself, it's been a long few decades since I got woken up by a nightmare. I made a quick breakfast and started to pack up my gear with customarily freezing hands.

Cooking in winter is great, just dig out a kitchen at waist height and take the water from anywhere.

The shelter had hardened even more overnight, and now had the hardness of new concrete. I was glad I had it, the wind had been blowing hard all night and the temperature was a lot colder than the low minus tens that had been forecasted.

I pulled out the Icebox parts and wasn't too surprised that the roof of snow stayed in place, despite the flat angle. I'm starting to get more and more comfortable with the fun way snow can be used for building, next time I'm definitely going to try and get a full length tunnel built with more of an arch to complete the roof, and I'll try building it without any breaks and see if I can get it done in less than half an hour.

The snow roof was completely horizontal, but held its own weight easily. It was around a decimetre thick.

I decided to head back along the ridge of the hill I had stayed on in order to avoid some of the uphill/downhill. I skied back as far as where I had entered the valley before rejoining my tracks. And there I found new tracks, all over my tracks.

Rounded shape, large outer toes, no claw marks.

Sadly it had snowed a little that morning, so they were quite indistinct, and sadly I was too dumb to try and take any proper pictures or to try and measure the paw size, or stride, or anything. The only clear print mark I managed to find is the in the picture above, which was on my ski track and so the snow was compacted compared to the soft snow the rest of the tracks were made in. The tracks appeared to be the same as the older tracks I had examined, they came out of the forest, wandered along, walked over my tracks and then back into the forest. They continued the entire way back from where I had left the valley floor, all the way back out to the part of the forest nearest the access road I had skied in on.

A long, direct registered stride.

This picture from another set of tracks, maybe not from the same animal, they look a lot smaller.

If I had known then what I know now about tracks, I would have done so much differently. At the time I thought it was interesting, and could maybe be a fox, but was obviously not a wolf because the tracks were so small. Big for a fox, but that maybe was just the snow making them seem larger than they were. When I got back, I sent pictures of the tracks to a friend who is a little track crazy. He asked me for more details and I told him about the whole trip, and even threw in the embarrassing nightmare details. Then he sent me a link to these Lynx sounds. I was sitting on my couch with some headphones on, and when I heard the sound of the Lynx scream, I got a total flashback of the feeling I had when I woke up that night, the feeling of an animal primal terror running through me like cold fire. It was bizarre, the exact same scream, something by then I had rationalised into having come from a nightmare. I had had no idea that there were lynx in Swedish forests at all. I also listened to a lot of fox screams (they start to sound like an Aphex Twin track after a while), and while they certainly are freaky, they're not similar to what I heard.

When I came back from the moose skull trip, I was loathe to believe that the wolf-howls Brian and I had heard were really wolf howls. It seemed so much more obvious and normal that they were dogs, wolves seem so mythical almost. However I was convinced by people that knew the nature reserve, there are no homes in the nature reserve, no dogs, and plenty of wolves. It seemed absurd that we had been in the same forest as real, actual wolves, but the evidence was overwhelming when someone else impartially pointed it out, gnawed bones and all.

I felt the same way about this event, that despite the evidence it seems ridiculous to imagine an actual, real, live lynx had found my ski trail going through its territory and followed it curiously, and finding another animal sleeping on its turf had screamed its annoyance. It took me a few days of reading and questioning some experienced friends to realise that it's not actually that weird, there are a lot of lynxes in Sweden (the Swedish population estimated to be around 1200, constantly falling because of lax hunting regulations), mostly in the middle of Sweden. Looking into how lynx tracks are, compared to fox (the other likely suspect), reveals that they are indistinct in soft snow but clearer in impacted snow because of all the hair on the foot, and also the tracks are usually 'wandering', unlike fox tracks. I researched a little more and found that there are even Lynx-hunting holidays organised from the UK to Malingsbo-Kloten during mating season (hunting with cameras, not guns). I had travelled out to the valley in the beginning of March, which I now know is the middle of the Lynx mating season. I had just happened into the middle of a lynx-rich area in the middle of the best time of the year to encounter a lynx. Maybe the lynx might have been making a booty call, instead of trying to scare the living shit out of me, but I didn't mind that. What matters to me is the idea of going back soon, while the mating season is in full swing, and trying to get another, closer encounter.

..., That sounds a little like I am going back to get laid with a lynx, I am not going back to get laid with a lynx. That would be impossible, rohypnol doesn't work on felines. I do however want to go back to that area, built another snow-shelter, and spend a couple of days under the full moon, waiting for the slightest sign of a lynx.

The valley of the three skulls turned out to be a total gem. The relatively grassy, treeless valley cutting through the thick forest, with a small stream pouring through the valley floor, is an absolute honeypot for animals in this nature reserve.

I have yet to drink from the stream in the valley, still nervous about the corpse that was lying in it over Summer.

Herbivores use the valley for food and water, and as a means to cross from one area of forest to another, the carnivores use it to get at the herbivores. And next week Tomas will use it to get a few photos of the carnivores.