After my (mis)adventure with the sudden arrival of winter and dehydration up on Gothics I began a series of short equipment 'shakedown' efforts. This is following a week of deep freezing temperatures ( -16 degrees Farenheit(-26 degrees Celsius),snow and wind. Beyond good clothing three things keep you alive:
The Tent: This is Mountain Hardware's Trango 4. These are used by many of the guide services on Mounts Everest and Denali. After 2 hours putting one of these together you can see why. Anchors and cross linkages abound.
The Sleeping Bag(s): So far the -30 degree rated bag from Western Mountaineering is working fine! I use two pads underneath the bag- a closed cell foam pad and a down insulated inflatable one on top. It feels like you are floating on a life raft at night which is something of a nuisance but mostly it is fine.
The Liquid Fuel Stove: This one has to fire up quickly each and every time you start up because this is where your water supply (and you need several liters a day) is going to come from. Clean water can be produced from melted snow or gotten from a stream- but it all must be boiled to eliminate pathogens. Iodine and Chlorine work well but take a long time when the water is cold. And a UV sterilizer pen works too but the water can't have a lot of particles in it. On mountain expeditions these small liquid fuel stoves are the preferred method. I can dig this out of the snow at 10 below zero, light it up and have 1.5 Liters of boiling water from snow in a bit less than 20 minutes.
Or I can make some lentil dahl with a bit of Vietnamese Cinnamon on top :) The cinnamon is mostly to make the tent smell better from the smoke I put through earlier in the day after burning a pot...
(please click on the photo for a larger image)
To my Steemit explorer friends,
I have probably taken over a million photographs of the natural world since childhood; this is a daily series of some of those I most treasure.
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*This photo was taken with the Canon EOS 70D, 18-55 mm lens
