Small Sleeping bag, big guy, just fine

I am what they call a "hot" sleeper. This summer, when my wife and I were amassing camping gear, I tried out many sleeping bags. Right away I determined that I could not, would not ever be comfortable in a standard mummy-style sleeping bag. I'm just too chunky. We bought a couple of 20º "three season" sleeping bags (I actually wound up with a small collection) and took them camping.

The first lesson that I learned was that a bag rate to 20º is a pretty warm thing! I'm not sure what the third season was supposed to be, but summer was not one of them! I could sleep inside none of the bags that I had collected: they were simply much too warm! Of course the nights were too cold to sleep un-covered though. Luckily, one of my bags was a square one that you could un-zip and use as a quilt. Un-luckily, it was down and the feathers got scrunched and soaked from my perspiration and condensation inside the tent.

Lesson two: when one needs a sleeping bag (you know, when it's actually cold out side), the last thing one worries oneself with is how snug the bag fits them! The only thing the matters is how warm the thing is. Suddenly I was confronted with a collection of sleeping bags that, during the summer, I had become sure would perform to their rated temps and more. In the winter... not so much. I zipped, wrapped and wriggled into all of them in an effort to find the best one. None of them. Each had a "flaw". I settled on my GI surplus bivy-bag set up with a cheep fleece liner. I only had the patrol bag, not the intermittent cold bag. On a side note: the flap of the bivy that bothered me so much during summer testing was 100% un-noticable in December.

I had a great weekend and slept warm and comfortable but I learned my lesson about "sizing" sleeping bags: tight is right!

If a Bear leaves a paw-print in the woods...

... does it eat the pudgy Mountianbikers? I sure hope not! After an un-sucessfull attempt at the North Peak at Pawtuckaway (it was getting dar quickly so I bailed) I ran into a slightly pudgy, very nice and very white-bread pair of mountain bikers in the parking area. It seams that they had gone off on the far side of the road and found the trail too difficult. They wanted to know if the trail on my side might be easier. I answered them to the best of my ability and offered them what guidance and direction that I could. I even let them spray themselves with my Off before they went peddling into the twilight woods on their brand-new bikes with no lights on them. What I didn't tell them though, was the when I followed the trail into the forest, about an hour earlier, there were NO bear tracks on it. When I had just walked out of the forest there were bear tracks on it! I sure hope that they were either fast or tasty!

Tried to hike South Mt. at Pawtuckaway

we only made i half way up but the Boy is a natural rock climber and we had a great time.

Holt Hill Andover

creepiest
place
ever
solistice stones
big foot
bad vibes

Of course you CAN (kinda) see Boston from here:

Back Yard Camping

Yea, I know. It's lame. It didn't start out to be a camping excursion though. We were just supposed to be picking up our kid from Grammy and Grampie's house in Maine. We had just bought a big-assed tent that the whole family can fit into: parents kids and nephews. The kind with the door on the front instead of a zipper. It's a Coleman. It has a screen-house attached to it that zips up to make another room if you want. G7G have a huge back yard: just the place to set this thing up and try it out. Good idea Honey, I can set up my new Nemo Obi-1 and try that out too! So, set them up we did (and by "we" I mean "I"). Air mattresses inflated and sleeping bags were installed in the Tent-Mahal. There you go baby, if you and the kid need me, I'll be in the little green one over there on my Thermarest. Yea. Right. It seems that my wife's parent's yard is patrolled by Grizzly Bears, Hungry Wolves, Rabid Mose and all other manner of predatory, crazed and generally grumpy wild animals. I had no idea that the yard was such a dangerous place until she told me! Furthermore, it turns out that I, and I done was responsible for sleeping i  the Big Tent so that I could fend off the Wild Hoards when they attacked. Really?

Still, a night under the stars is a night under the stars and they were amazing up there! We got to sit around the campfire withe her parents (which we could probably never do in "real" camping) and sing camp fire songs. We roasted marshmallows and snuggled into our sleeping bags to enjoy the first really nice sleeping night of the summer. Sadly, having a nice sleeping night is a sure sign that the summer is slowly drawing to a close. Hopefully we will get a few more of those magical nights before the weather changes.

Trekking Poles are Boss!

The nerdiest peace of hiking equipment, by far, has to be the Pole. You know the ones, the thin aluminum or, gasp, carbon fiber tubes that resemble nothing more than the ski pole industry's lame and transparent attempt to boos market share and Sewell more crap that people don't need in the "off season" instead of focusing their attention on Mountain Biking, like the ski areas do. Anyway, I guess these things came out in the 80s when every one was too coked out to stand any way, but had LOTS of energy for hiking and stuff. To the people who had money to waste on things like cocaine and summer time ski poles, "Tercking" Poles must have sounded like a fantastic idea. I did most of my hiking back in the 80s with a machine gun in my hands, so they seamed a little gay to me. Of course, I don't mean to insinuate that all Gay people use Trekking poles or that the use of said poles, by default, makes one Gay. Sexual orientation had little, or even nothing, to do with the possession or use of ski poles in the summer time thus the small "g" in gay. 

They do, however, make you a complete and total nerd. They were never cool and were certainly never "combat" so I never even considered them for use. Then, last fathers day my daughter got me a set of cheep, WartMart poles. Honestly, I didn't know what to make of them. I stared at them for a long time. I spent several minuets extending and collapsing them. I pushed the little spring thingies on the bottom. "these thing are SO gay", thought I to myself, and into the closet they went (pun intended). 

Well, the other day was their Coming Out Party. I' m not sure what it was that possessed me to actually try these things out. I am quite sure that it was NOT the YouTube video of the hot blond chick showing us all how to look bigger than a bear by waving ski poles in the air to frighten one off. I think mostly I wanted the satisfaction of knowing how the pole mounts on my backpack worked. For whatever the reason, I dug them out, figured out how to adjust them and dragged them out into the woods.

Now, it's time for me to tell you a secrete. THEASE THINGS ARE FREAKIN' AWSOME!!!! You simply MUST try some, if you have the means. Of course, the cheepo ones, like I have only cost twenty bucks of so. You can't even get a descent snoot-full of blow for that kind of money these days. 

Seriously, they really work as advertised. If you ski at all, as opposed to snowboarding, you will take naturally to the swinging of the poles. They provide that all important Third Point of Contact that really, really, really helps your stability on uneven ground. You can use them to test the firmness of muddy spots and as plows to move pricer bushed out of the way that have overgrown the rail. Most importantly for me, they give my front paws something to DO while hiking other than flopping around at my sides. hiking Poles, while they might still be a gimmick, are not really all that nerdy and are defiantly NOT gay.

Pawtuckaway State Park: North Mountain

I needed to get away. I needed to walk off some stress and calories. I did NOT need to be dodging cars or saying "Hi" to a hundred people walking their dogs. I needed to be alone with my thoughts and work on being a healthier me. I needed a Hike Time was short, so I went local. I went to Pawtuckaway State park.

The walk in, or "approach" was a nice, fast, nearly level walk in the park, literally. Then the "up" started. Not a gentle sort of "up" at all but the kind of "up" that one usually associates with stairs or a ladder. In fact many of the natural features of the ascent resembled stairs. Big stairs. I have been up some "bigger" mountains lately that war not as harden the joints as North Pawtuckaway was! Now, the difference between the "top of the climb" and the "summit of the mountain" is about a hundred feet of elevation that you gain by hiking along a half mile ridge line. The views are at the "top" and not the "summit". I urge you to poke around at the top of the climb as the views are pretty darn stunning for a scant 800 foot investment. Of course, you might not have a choice but to poke around!

I have a motorcycle. It's a dirt bike. It's a KTM. I don't ride it much. You see, when you have a KTM there is a certain expectation that you have to live up to as far as having a certain amount of skill and ability to deserve a KTM. The guy painting the white rectangular blazes on the North Mountain Trail "deserves" his paintbrush LESS that I deserve my KTM. Seriously, if you are going to emulate the Big Dogs, at least try to do it well. The blazes of this trail are old, worn, widely spaced and in-distinct. It is super easy to wander off on the ascent as there are often several ways that the trail "could go" and no clear indication which way that it should go! A minor annoyance once you realize that there are no side trails or any thing and that you can't really get lost up there. On a positive note, the coming down was even less clearly blazed than the going up, but it was daily clear where the trail went on the descent.

The walk back to the Jeep was a little more rushed that I would have liked, as I was late getting home. It wasn't until then that I saw my first Human either, so I knew that my time alone was truly over for the time being. Tomorrow is a day of places that I don't want to be and then bad to work the next day. Then event after event after event. It might be some time before I have any time to go rambling by myself again. I look forward to that opportunity though. It can't come soon enough!