Blood and alcohol mix just fine

On the Appalachian Trail, I hiked without a stove for 1800 miles. I had been conditioned to fear stoves, to dread their finickiness, by seven years of hiking with dilapidated, old-school backpacking stoves that almost never worked properly (most of which rhymed with Thisperlite). Every C.A.N.O.E. Club trip I ever went on in college, the stove broke down at least once, and someone had to do field surgery on it, and that person was never me because I am a mechanical retard. I figured that having a perpetually malfunctioning stove just came with the territory of backpacking, and I didn't want to deal with the hassle on the AT. I survived just fine, but also realized that having the ability to boil water really opens up your food options.

I hadn't really done much gear research in those naïve days, so I hadn't realized that you can have a featherweight, failsafe stove for about $3 if you limit your cooking needs to "boil water"—i.e. no simmering, sauteing, etc. Very few long-distance hikers have the patience to do anything besides boil water anyway. So yesterday I made an alcohol stove, the variety that's called the Fancy Feast or the Super Cat stove because they're usually made from tins of cat food.

The concept is devastatingly simple, but I was still having trouble explaining it to my college buddy Jordan over the phone the other day. Jordan is a software engineer living in a Pacific Heights penthouse who is generally quick on the uptake, but even he had been so conditioned by the traditional idea of backpacking stoves (he was an Eagle Scout) that he couldn't understand what I was saying: "You pour denatured alcohol into an empty cat food tin, you light it on fire, you put your pot on top, you set up a windscreen, and 6-8 minutes later your water is boiling." Below is a brief photo record of my efforts in building this stove.

The materials: a tin of Fancy Feast cat food (the food itself is going to Little Jerry Seinfeld, one of my friend's cats, for his birthday tonight); denatured alcohol; a normal old hole-punch; paperclips; a pot; a pot-grip; and some dropper bottles for the alcohol. Aluminum foil should also be in the picture but isn't. Shades optional. First step is to punch 1 1/2 rows of holes around the cat food can.

Next step is, apparently, to slice both your thumb and forefinger open from the dangling chads of aluminum and spill blood all over your new stove.

The gist of the setup (minus the windscreen). I ended up punching more holes in the second row after my first test run, during which I got a hella slow boil time (11 minutes).

The aluminum-foil windscreen. I use one paperclip at the top to clip the ends together and keep the whole thing tight around the pot, about a half-inch off of it around the entire circumference. I use three or four paperclips on the bottom to stand it up a half-inch off the ground so that there's an inflow of air from below the stove to create a more efficient burn, but not so much air that it gets windy and moves the flame around. I've read that, without paperclips, you can use twigs to the same effect in the backcountry.

A lousy picture of the stove boiling water on our porch. You can see the blue flame in the bottom left, warning of the presence of Orcs. On my second trial run, I started with 2 cups of cold water from the faucet and put in about 1 fluid ounce of alcohol into the stove (turned out to be too much ... when this happens, you can't really turn off the stove, so the extra fuel just burns off). The outside air temperature was about 38 degrees. I lit the fuel with a match and got a rolling boil in 7 minutes, 20 seconds. Not bad for a cool night with cool water.

The entire kitchen setup, including pot, pot gripper, stove, matches, windscreen and fuel for 5-6 days, weighs 10oz. It won't malfunction—the potential problems lie in stepping on the tin, mis-rationing the fuel, or having it blow over full of flaming alcohol and start a wildfire (PCT thru-hikers have done all of these before). You can buy denatured alcohol, Everclear or HEET, which is some kind of antifreeze, in almost every trail town, and Yogi's guidebook makes it stupidly easy to ration fuel by saying, "Your next chance to buy alchy fuel is in X miles in X town." Basically, this is about as simple, cheap, light and convenient as you can possibly get regarding backpacking stoves. I no longer walk in fear of being able to boil water for my next meal.

p.s. For an example of an extremely well-thought-out variation on the simple alcohol stove, check out the Caldera Cone Keg-F system from Trail Designs. There is a certain amount of genius in what they've managed to come up with using a beer can and some aluminum sheeting. I wanted to buy one of these because the idea and the execution is so cool, but my girlfriend, ever with my best interests in mind, convinced me that it probably wasn't worth $60 (for comparison: including the pot, my setup cost $20).

Hiking in drought conditions

The New York times had this article slapped on their front page today about low snowpack all over the West. The gist of it is: it's too early to know for sure what the snow situation will be come summertime, because heavy spring storms could come along and make up the current deficit, but for now all signs point to a second consecutive year of low spring snowmelt, and hence very dry conditions. The article is of course focused on crops and the economy (pah!), but all I really care about is the snowpack's implications on the fantasy-world of thru-hiking.

Last year was extremely dry over the entire area that the PCT covers. Here where I live in Oregon, there was measurable precipitation on only two days between July 1 and October 10. Almost everyone who's ever thru-hiked the PCT northbound has had to hike in significant stretches of snow in California's High Sierra, but last year, no one did. I ran into one of the earliest NOBO thru-hikers last year and he said that the biggest patch of snow he had to cross in California was a hundred yards or so on the approach to Forester Pass, the PCT's high point at 13,153ft. Later thru-hikers last year, like my friend Spins, literally did not have to hike over snow once in the Sierra, which must be unfathomable to the people who have done it in high snow years and spent days without setting foot on solid ground.

Is it easier to thru-hike the PCT in a low snow year? I guess I don't really know, having not thru-hiked it in any type of year. I admit that the thing that instinctively scares me most about the PCT is traversing the Sierra in snow. From everything I've read, the mental and physical effort expended is incredible: the trail is invisible, requiring you to have strong map-reading and navigation skills (which I don't); stream crossings are flooded with snowmelt every afternoon; mosquitoes are breeding in impossible quantities on the melting snow; and postholing for miles on end is a massive undertaking that slows your pace, increases your calorie consumption, and drives you insane.

So let's say it's another dry year, and I get off easy and don't have to hike on snow very much or at all in the Sierra. Unfortunately, the tradeoff is the potentially more life-threatening problem of waterlessness. This doesn't instinctively intimidate me the way the prospect of a snowy Sierra does—but it should. In wet years on the PCT, such as 2011, I've heard that there are enough seasonal water sources flowing in the desert that one rarely has to walk more than 10 miles without seeing a source—it's almost like the AT. On the other end of the spectrum, I've read Scott Williamson mention packing 15 liters of water for a 65-mile stretch without reliable water sources in SoCal in 1992, which was a drought year. That's 33 pounds of water (1L=1kg=2.2lb). These days, volunteers leave water caches for thru-hikers in the desert, but those don't count as "reliable sources," as they can't be restocked as often as hikers drink them up. Nobody wants to show up empty to a water cache, and find that it's empty too. I'm a pretty heavy drinker (of water), so I bet I will be staring at situations in the desert, and possibly NorCal and Oregon, where I need to pack 8 liters of water or more.

Wildfires are also an issue in drought years, although as far as I know they don't threaten the physical survival of thru-hikers the way that dehydration does. What they do do is mess up hiking schedules and routes. By mid-August last year, 13 separate sections of the PCT were closed due to wildfire, which meant that there was an official re-route for every one of those places, and most of the time, the re-route was walking down a road, which is a lot shittier than walking through the woods. Hikers converge on towns waiting out fires, which honestly sounds miserable to me. I would have too much energy and too little patience with crowds of people to make that a happy situation.

Basically, I have to keep reminding myself that even though it appears I'm facing a dry, low-snow year, this doesn't mean that I'm getting an easier trail experience overall. Looong waterless stretches are tough, and wildfires are tough, and I have to be mentally ready to confront those challenges the same way I'd be ready to face deep snow and bad early-season weather.

In Pursuit of the Hirsute: Part one in the Trail Love series

Part one of a three-part series on sex, love, romance and everything in between on the trail. In this part, I'm covering the lay of the land regarding the physical appeal (or lack thereof) of hikers and the age/gender ratios one comes across in the woods. Part two will be about hiking with a significant other—whether they're with you or at home. And part three will cover the rest: the not-so-committed trail relationships that spring up, the need for occasional self-appreciation, and LGBT issues on the trail.

Attractiveness

The common perception of and among thru-hikers is that the women look closer to men, and the men look closer to wild animals. It's true that standards of physical upkeep necessarily decline when you spend 4-6 months in the woods. Almost all the men grow beards without trimming them (see my friend Soulslosher in part three for an exception), because hey when are you going to get to do that again? Some people start six months early on the beard and have some truly impressive growth by the time they're in Maine. I didn't cut my hair once on the AT, which I regretted because it was stinking hot most of the time.

Magnum slug

As a recent arrival to the Northwest, I have no way of knowing if this is a normal size for a gastropod in these parts. I should ask Kristin, who probably used to befriend hell-beasts like this in the family garden in Portland when she was a little tyke.

But speaking for myself, I can say with conviction that this is the largest slug I've ever seen in my life. I hope my training hikes continue to provide such rich wildlife interactions.

UPDATE: My girlfriend, as predicted, turned out to be a fount of information about slugs. She says that this is a banana slug, that yes this is a normal size, that you can tell it's moving because its antennae are out, and that these are an "integral part of Northwest forest ecosystems."

And lest anyone be tempted to crack wise about my foot size, I'll have you know that's a size 10 for scale.

Hello, world!

"Well, bout time for me to be hittin' the ol' dusty trail ..."

Hello, hello. Welcome to my first attempt at blogging since I kept up a LiveJournal back in those angsty high school years.* Since graduating college and hiking most of the Appalachian Trail in 2011, I have developed a deep obsession, not with Furries as is commonly rumored, but with long-distance hiking. This site aims to be the outlet for the strange body of knowledge and philosophy that I have lately been acquiring.

In May, I will start my attempt to thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail, and this will be the home for all my journaling and pictures. Before that, I plan to post random and possibly quite dull ruminations on the preparation process. And in the meantime, there is the FAQ, my 95%-complete gear list on GearGrams.com, and the video page to check out. My girlfriend, Kristin, has a nascent food blog (read: there are no posts up yet) on her tangles with our new food dehydrator. It's all linked to at the top of the page. 

Have a look around, and subscribe so that when the good stuff comes along, you'll be reminded that this blog exists and hopefully be able to read along with interest. Pip pip.

*Which did not under any circumstances also include my college years ............. Shut up, okay?