Gearheads

Me and the Boss went out to the stores this weekend to check out some gear she was interested in. The plan is to have the first draft of AT gear in place for Killarney. Killarney will be a practice hike as everything is put through the "is it tough enough?" and "is it worth the weight?" tests.

Anyways, we took a look at Trailhead, Bushtuka and MEC for bear barrels. In the end we decided on the Backpacker's Cache model from MEC. It was $4 more expensive than the one at Bushtuka but we preferred this barrel:

Pretty cool eh. The lid mechanism seemed the best and the barrel is smaller and feels sturdier. BTW the coffee you see in there is excellent. Much better than what you are drinking now.

Another piece of gear in consideration is the UV pen light. It`s $97 but it`s small and lightweight and ``cleans`` 2000 liters of water! All of which destroys my pump filter and in terms of volume comes out cheaper than the tablets.

Among some other odds and ends she needed the Boss also found a new stove. It weighs one ounce and runs on methylated alcohol (paint thinner). Yes a mere 28 grams of stove!

It claims to boil 2 cups of water in 6 minutes. I will be testing the veracity of these claims on the weekend.

Speaking of the weekend, the forecast for Saturday is 7 degrees Celsius. Saturday is the Mad Trapper finale. I don't see myself breaking 1:20 in warm weather. Mostly because by the end I'll be carrying and extra 15 pounds of water in my clothes. I checked out the trail runners in the stores as well. the new models don't have the plastic tabs of my shoes so I guess I'm not the only one to have this problem.