I’ve spent the last few weeks playing with GPS receivers, initially with Craig’s old one and very basic Garmin eTrex which he loaned me. (Thanks Craig!) A basic eTrex was certainly nothing flash at all. Having only a low-sensitivity antennae, it barely works when there’s a tree on the horizon let alone being under bush cover. This aside, it was great having something to play with to simply get an initial idea of all the basic GPS terms and ideas. A little over three weeks ago, I finally bought my own more sophisticated Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. This new extension to my tramping hobby has also manifested itself on this blog, which is why several of the trips now have Download GPX and Load map links. (The former downloads a GPs eXchange Format file, and the latter opens a Google Maps box with the described route overlaid.) I’m hoping to keep this up in the future, and I suppose time will tell how it works out.

It’s been a surprisingly difficult decision for me to get a GPS receiver, and not strictly because of the cost. I’ve been putting it off because I’ve really wanted to get a good feeling of how to navigate without one, and I’ve not wanted to have the temptation lying around that would encourage bad habits of using a GPS without understanding the surrounding land. I definitely think that understanding maps, compasses and (sometimes) altimeters is the way to go, perhaps with a GPS to fall back on when things get unexpectedly bad or chaotic. I certainly don’t ever want to get myself into a situation where I go out relying primarily on an electronic device that runs on batteries. There’s a stigma in some tramping circles that’s attached to openly carrying a GPS receiver. To some extent I do even agree with the origins of this stigma, I think, though mostly because there do seem to be some people out there who really are relying primarily on a GPS to get them through a tricky situation without necessarily having the more fundamental navigation expertise and experience to back it up. I suspect it’s asking for trouble, which is why I’m hoping I don’t fall into the trap myself.
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It’s bright orange!

I commented to Craig and a couple of others earlier this afternoon that to me it seems the most embarrassing kind of tramping accident that didn’t necessarily involve idiocy might be to become trapped inside a sleeping bag. It’s just been a pet fear of mine for a while now and something I might one day like to produce a horror movie about. I find something disconcerting about completely zipping oneself up inside a sleeping bag on a cold night without the certainty of being able to locate the zipper in the morning, or having the zipper get stuck on something and refuse to move. For some reason this leads to mental visions of a giant sealed sleeping bag bounding out of the Tararuas.

The reason this topic of conversation arose was because I’ve taken the claustrophobia one layer further and bought myself a nice little bivy bag, primarily for emergencies and as a possible alternative to carrying around my Huntech 2 to 3 person fly as backup shelter when I’m not planning to camp.
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For all of today, Wellington was doing a cute thing that it does several times a year. The clouds come in low over the harbour and drift over the city. Living in the hills, it’s possible to either be inside the clouds, or above them and looking down over a flat desert of smooth drifty white. In Northland, on the western side of the Tinakori Hill, our view of Otari Wilton’s Bush was relatively clear but for the walls of fog creeping around the end of the hill and making their way towards us, but always evaporating before they reached us. Many people living in the cloud would stay at home for the day, believing it to be dreary and depressing weather, but I find walking through this subtle kind of environment fascinating.

Stacey and I went for a walk down into the central city, 20-50 minutes away depending on urgency, and the view over the harbour was iconic of these kinds of days. Much of the mist would have evaporated by the time we saw it at 11.30am, but with the Orongorongas highlighted by their contrast in the background behind the city and the harbour as they lead towards the southern extent of the Tararuas, it’s a good sight all the same.

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I bought myself a new compass yesterday, which was another Silva Field 7 baseplate compass, identical to the one that I lost last October. It’s the most basic Silva compass on the market. It’s often marketed as being “ideal for youth and beginners”. For me it seems to do the job perfectly well and while I’m not a navigation supremo, I’ve been working on it for a while now and I’ve not yet had any issues with having only the basic features. I guess they market it that way to drive people towards the more expensive parts of their range.

For several months I’ve been using a baseplate Coleman compass that I found at Rebel Sport for a quarter of the price, and for me at least it works just as well as the Silva Field 7. It’s slightly larger though, if only because it includes extra features like a magnifier that I never use, and ultimately that’s why I decided to replace it. It’s only after I’d been using a smaller Field 7 compass for a while that I noticed the Coleman compass was actually quite heavy, and that’s why I bought myself another Field 7.

It’s a shame they’re priced at about $35 for something so basic, which I think is more of a branding thing than anything else. If I could get a cheap un-branded compass of similar specifications then I would, but they’re hard to find on short notice. I suppose that all you really need is a magnetically sensitive needle inside a nicely divided circle. It probably helps some people to have a few features like a better grips on the dial thingee and a magnifier for maps (which I’ve personally never used), but I’ve yet to see anyone using something like a typically expensive sighting compass for tramping navigation in New Zealand. Perhaps it’s a consequence of the circles I associate with. They’re in the shops a lot so they must sell, and I’m quite interested to know what sorts of activities people use them for.

Wow — the Tararuas have had three weekends of fantastic weather in a row, and I haven’t been there for any of them. I guess I did at least get out to the Ruahines a week ago, though. This Saturday and Sunday I stayed at home, however.

For a while now, I’ve been keeping an eye out for a new pack to replace my disintegrating Macpac Glissade. It’s not really disintegrating, but I’ve patched it up with tape in a couple of places despite it only being a couple of years old. The major problem I’ve been having is that if and when I replace it, I want to make sure I’m getting something that I really want, and honestly there’s not a lot of selection in Wellington retailers right now as far as packs go. Just about everything is the same basic design, with pockets and openings all over the place. This is unfortunate because in essence I’m looking for a simple, relatively light single-access-point tramping pack without lots of zippers (which add weight unnecessarily) and without lots of bits hanging off it (which add more weight, and get caught on things).

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Michelle recently posted thoughts about her Platypus hydration system, which inspired me to write something about my own experiences. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for a while, but hadn’t really formulated it in my head until now.

In case you didn’t know, a hydration bladder is a water-holding bladder with a hose attached. They typically sit in a pack that you’re wearing, and the attached hose makes it easy to keep sipping water on an ongoing basis without having to stop and unpack a water bottle. In this day and age, a variety of backpacks are designed for use with hydration bladders, and often have a small gap through which a hose can be fed. Platypus is the brand-name for a well known line of hydration bladder products put out by a holding company called Cascade Designs, which also does a bunch of other well known outdoor brands like MSR and Therm-a-Rest. Their main competition in the trendy-looking shiny-hydration-bladder industry, at least in New Zealand, seems to come from CamelBak, which makes a range of backpacks designed to hold hydration systems, but will also sell the plastic bladders individually.

A plethora of more generic brands also exist, which are typically much cheaper and probably at least as good. Thanks to the name recognition, however, “Platypus” and “CamelBak” are often used as generic names, at least in the circles where I associate, to simply mean “some kind of water hydration system that isn’t a cheap and nasty plastic bottle”. I discovered this when I noticed that many people were referring to my Platypus as a Camelbak without really caring that it wasn’t. Ironically now that I have a Camelbak, I’ve already heard at least two people refer to it as a Platypus, and nobody has yet called it a Camelbak. They’re basically all water bladders, and for some reason not many people seem to like boasting that they’re drinking out of their bladder. Maybe this is why there’s a preference for using the brand names.

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I’ve spent the odd night over the past winter feeling rather cold. The most “interesting” of these was that episode in the wood-shed between 3am and 6am on a Saturday morning. The absence of sleep before 3am and after 6am probably didn’t help, but I suppose I’d hoped that it would have been warmer during those 3 hours. I probably managed about an hour in total, which made for a very long and cranky Saturday of walking.

This event, and some other recent events, have convinced me that maybe it’s time to fork out some cash and replace the Kathmandu PaceSetter bag that I’ve mostly used recently. I think some people would see the words “Kathmandu” and “Sleeping Bag” in the same sentence (or any gear for that matter), and immediately think that it’s a horrible product. I don’t want to criticise it too much if I can help it, because it’s served me pretty well. At this point I still plan to use it during summer because it’s adequate and probably better suited. It’s usually okay in huts and under an open fly at the low-ish altitudes where I’ve used it, but I can vouch from my own experience that for a sleeping bag that was marketed near the top of the Kathmandu range, I still thought it was… well… flimsy and unreliable, and sometimes cold, at least when it was exposed to places that weren’t under much other shelter.

Consequently, and just in time for mid-Spring (I’m brilliant at timing), I’m now the proud but uncertain owner of a new Macpac Sanctuary 700XP sleeping bag, which I hope will turn out to be more appropriate for some of the winter-like things I want to do in the future. It’s not the warmest bag in the range, but when looking at the relative weights and the loft and down fill, it already seems much warmer than what I already have and without being any heavier.
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That could have gone better. My compass has just been claimed by the Ruahine Range during an “unscheduled” pack-floating incident in the Oroua River near Iron Gates Hut. I think it must have floated out of my pocket while I was concentrating on other things which, to be perfectly honest, seemed more important at the time. In hindsight I still think they were, and my robust little navigational instrument was a necessary price to pay. I guess it says something for making sure that everything’s tied down. It’s probably most of the way out to sea by now.

It was a Silva Field 7, which is a very basic baseplate compass and it does the job perfectly. They retail for about $30 so it’s no great financial loss. It’s still a bit of a downer, though, since I make an effort not to leave junk lying around in the wilderness.

Other than that, it was a worth-while experience. I’ll write something and post photographs of the trip in coming days. Meanwhile you could read Robb’s account of his solo trip in the same area a few days beforehand.

Update, 27-10-2008: It seems I wrote the account of the whole trip faster than I thought.

Trying to help dig a snow cave during a blizzard a couple of months ago (during that training course) really made an impression on me. I realised that although handy at times, regular sunglasses can be seriously out of their depth in some conditions. For much of the weekend it was difficult to choose between being blind from perpetually fogged up glasses (thanks to warm breath coming up the balaclava) or being blind from a stinging and freezing wind in my eyes. In the end I guess it was fortunate that we were digging the cave about 30 metres from the club lodge, so it didn’t really matter.

It’s true that we were there on a weekend that was noted for its unusually severe weather, and as we were sipped hot chocolate in our toasty lodge, about 2,000 skiers were being hastily evacuated from the mountain. Perhaps I’ll never experience that kind of thing again, but one thing I learned was that the people with proper goggles protecting their faces were a whole lot better off than people like me who’d decided to try and put off getting any. It inspired me to buy some proper snow goggles before my next alpine trip, primarily for a safety thing I suppose, just in case. This will probably be a few weeks away, but I thought I’d try to go shopping now before all the stock’s gone, since it’s getting towards the end of the ski season.
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I have a new camera! It’s a Canon Powershot A720 IS, which is actually very similar to my old Canon Powershot A710 IS. Notable differences between the two are that it takes photos at a slightly higher resolution, it’s reportedly several grams lighter, and it has less water inside.
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