The search for the perfect backpacking camp shoe is one of those topics that seems to generate a fair amount of online postings. Some folks proudly do without or just run around in loosened trail runners while others justify various specialized (and usually expensive) options from vendors like Xeros or ZPacks.

After trying a number of different solutions this is what currently works best for me: $5 -ish Walmart foam and cloth flip flops.

As someone who liked to do thru hikes that are more on the remote end and who uses my phone heavily for shooting / editing / posting videos on trail I am well versed in the ins and outs of how to keep electronics powered on trail.

The piece of gear which provoked the most comments during our extended journey down the Mississippi was our solar box. I assembled it from pieces sold by a company called Voltaic with the goal of having something we could just set out on the boat and have it generate power without us having to micromanage it when the weather got bad.

I have always loved the idea of solar but at least so far I've found that the state of technology doesn't really lend itself to being usable on long distance hikes. When you're getting started early and hiking until evening you can't really set a panel out for any length of time during the effective hours of sunlight and putting it on the pack while hiking usually doesn't work real well due to the fact you invariably end up partially shading the panel. And then there's the fact that lighter panels tend to be fragile and even the few folks that I've met who have made it work seem to have had to replace them multiple times. And I'm harder on my gear in general than all those fine folks.

But when we started planning for our Mississippi Source to Sea paddle one of our goals was to avoid the constant need to go into town to charge our hiking batteries. Because it's one thing getting a ride into a hotel when all you have is a backpack and quite another when you have to deal with a 17 ft canoe loaded down with gear. And in fact we only slept in town 6 times over 75 days and when we did indulge it was never driven by the fact we were lower on power.

Since after the headwaters the river is quite wide we didn't have to worry about overhead trees shading the box. And I worked around the fragility issues by using a hard panel vs anything bendable or foldable.

And this was the end result which successfully saw us through 10 weeks and 2,460 miles despite all the rain, wind, boat wake, and heat waves. 

For an overall picture of my gear see lighterpack.

If you follow my site regularly you've no doubt noticed that I often go for weeks at a time with no updates only to release a flood of new posts at seemingly random intervals.  That's mostly because I spend most weekends running around outdoors and often the weeks in between see me doing everything but sitting down in front of my desktop to write.

This site is just a hobby but it does bring me a lot of enjoyment and I've always has this ideal in my head of being able to do the actual write-ups while I'm still out in the field.  This has led me to purchase a series of keyboards and accessories for my iPhone, iPad, and a few sub $100 tablets in the hopes of finding something that was functional while not costing so much that I'd be afraid to take it out.

Up until this point each of the solutions failed to meet my needs in one or more major ways and I've been stuck just making notes to myself in my iPhone and fleshing out the articles when I'm back home.  And then I came across the Microsoft Surface Go.

Over the years I've accumulated a fair number of of guide books.  They're a mix of peak guides, rock climbing guides, and the occasional small print book covering the history or fauna of a particular area.

While I personally feel the sources available on the internet have surpassed most of the old print guides I do find that many of them still contain valuable information. For example take Andy Zdon's Desert Summits.  While I find it to be a very frustrating book due to the lack of maps and a few other design choices it does have information on a lot of peaks you won't find elsewhere.

The problem I had with my collection was that I was rarely sitting at home with access to my bookshelf when I wanted to plan trips. In fact I had several really interesting books that I tended to forget about for years at a time.

So for a while now I've been contemplating doing something about this situation. For me the ideal was something digital I could access anywhere on my computer, phone, or tablet. (I have had a few books in digital format for example RJ Secor's Sierra guidebook but the DRM included with the legal purchase disallows copying or printing and most other guides just were not available in anything but paper.)

Enter the great guidebook scanning project of 2018!

I'm a little late to the party here since this product was released years ago and can currently only be found at a few retailers.  In fact it had been on my radar as a curiosity that I wanted to try out for years but I never pulled the trigger until I realized it had been pulled from the market.

As of early 2018 the website (http://www.patsbcb.com) seems to have gone offline and you can only find the product in stock in a few online stores.  What appears to have happened is they shut down Pat's and reformed as Sustainable Beverage Technologies focusing on using the same technique to sell soda like beer dispensers to resteraunts.

According to someone I corresponded with on their end they currently do not offer the backcountry kit and while they may do so again at some point in the future they currently have no plans.  So if you're interested in experiencing this particular backcountry oddity best do it soon!

Pat's Backcountry Beverages Beer Kit

I'm outdoors a fair amount and I really like to take pictures.  More for the joy of taking them and to help me remember better over time what I've done but nonetheless I like them to look halfway decent even when I take them in slightly challenging conditions.

My initial look at the 650 was positive but I had a few concerns.  This follow-up is both to address those and share what I think the actual strengths and weaknesses of the device after having spent a few hundred miles hiking with the device.

I have the Oregon 650 but most of the items below apply to the entire 600 series.  The Oregon 600 has less memory, lacks a mediocre camera, and doesn’t come with the rechargeable battery pack the 650 gives you.  The Oregon 600t and Oregon 650t are the same as the base unit but include a chip with maps preloaded.  I opt for buying the Garmin 24k topo maps and loading them by hand since the chips only have 100k maps.

The Oregon 450 is an inferior unit and I wouldn’t recommend anyone get it.  The money you save isn’t worth how much slower the unit is moving around on maps and how frustrating the touch screen is.

This is annoying.

(A followup can be found here)

My habit of returning to camp well after dark has made me rather appreciative of handheld GPS units.  I had a GPSMAP 60csx that lived a good life before getting lost followed by a Oregon 450 originally intended to be a temporary solution that turned into something more permanent.

After my Garmin Oregon 450 GPS developed a habit of loosing satellites while under clear skies I ended up taking a look around at options while working my way through tech support.

I spoke to some rather helpful folks at the Garmin tech support number and they offered to ship me out a refurbished unit for $99.  Even better they would send me a unit out immediately and just charge me 2x $99 until they received my unit.  Not too bad!

Just to cover all of my bases I checked what the other Garmin models offered and saw there had been an updated Oregon released, the 6xx line.

Brighter screen?  More resistant to scratches?  Faster maps?  Better interface?  Rechargeable batteries?

It was enough to get me to drive out to an REI in the few precious hours before the next trip and throw down $500.

As I've mentioned elsewhere I'm rather a fan of the Garmin Basecamp software. Since I've spent the last half decade or so working out of state and most trips "home" are just long enough to do laundry and grab my outdoor gear before running screaming out to the wilderness somewhere it's very useful to me to be able to access all my old GPS tracks and planning resources across multiple computers.

Basecamp is intended to work on a single machine but with a bit of trickery you can utilize Dropbox (or similar cloud services) to synch the database between multiple machines.