Get Yourself A Rain Skirt

All the news is good: I’m feeling perfectly fine, we’re finalizing plans to head back up north this weekend, and Mica and I are sitting around the house this week growing increasingly bored and antsy. Mostly we’re just waiting for some gear to arrive in the mail, because last week we both realized that we wanted to make a few changes, and this is our chance. So while I sit around here trying out new dinner recipe ideas, I thought I’d run down what worked and what we’re changing.

MVP: The Rain Skirt

First, the one piece of gear we both agreed was wildly more useful than expected was the rain skirt. I have Enlightened Equipment’s version and Mica has a hunter orange one from ULA. The designs are slightly different but both of them are essentially the same thing, a piece of waterproof fabric that you wear like a wrap skirt. They generally weigh around 2 ounces.

It rained for about half a day, and for hiking in the rain you cannot beat a rain skirt. It’s super light, and truly waterproof because it doesn’t need to be “breathable” (which is largely a myth anyway). It lets your legs do what legs are meant to do while walking, and channels all the runoff from your jacket away from your lower body. Hiking in rain pants is a special kind of hell, as everyone who’s ever done it knows. This is the solution.

But wait! There’s more! Mica also wore his every day as a cover-up when he washed in the stream or hung his clothes up to dry. Mine is too transparent for that use, but I have a towel instead. It can also lay completely flat and serve as a waterproof place to sit when the ground is wet or muddy. And while we were waiting for our shuttle ride, we had a sudden and unexpected 20 minute downpour. I didn’t even have to get up, I just pulled my rain jacket on, and then spread the rain skirt across my lap, and I was covered.

I still carry rain pants, because I don’t have any regular pants, so my emergency lower-body warmth strategy is fleece bottoms with rain pants over them. But I know that if warmth isn’t a concern, I’m reaching for the rain skirt every time. If you hike anywhere rain exists, I don’t know if I can adequately express how essential it is that you get a rain skirt.

Shelter Updates

I started off with a Gossamer Gear “The One” tent, which is a one person, silnylon trekking pole tent. I love Gossamer Gear’s stuff, it’s a good balance between ultralight and inexpensive, and I’ve used the two person version of this tent happily for several years. I got the One because I wanted something a little lighter for this trip and something that has a smaller footprint, so I could fit it in smaller or more awkward spots. The One does accomplish those things, but it comes with with some drawbacks that it was clear to me after only a few nights I won’t be happy dealing with long term.

First, the One (like many one person tents) only has an entry on one side. This means when I set it up, I have to know which side I want to be going in and out of. This is… fine, usually. But it’s a little extra cognitive load to figure out my whole traffic pattern when I’ve just arrived at a new campsite after a long day, and I found it annoying to be locked into only having access from one side.

More unusually, the One is asymmetrical. It has a wider head end and a narrower foot end. So not only do I have to calculate which way the door should face, I also have to figure out whether that’s possible in a given site with the existing slope of the ground, while still making sure the tent is flat or the head end is slightly upslope. This seemed like it wouldn’t be a big deal but in practice it’s kind of a bad flaw. The combination of one door and the asymmetry makes some sites much more difficult to use. The One is very easy to pitch but I found it annoyingly fussy to place. I’m sure I’d get better at it but every day I wished the thing was just symmetrical and had two doors so I didn’t have to think about anything but the wind direction.

The other problem with the One is that my sleeping pad occupies its entire floor space so inflating it inside the tent and then getting it underneath me makes for a weird topological quandary, and there’s no room left for my pack or most of my other gear. Again, this is not a flaw with the tent, it’s just a consequence of its size. Every night I found myself wishing I had 12 or 15 inches of floor space alongside my sleeping pad, to boil some water, sort gear, or what have you.

To be clear, the One is a great tent in most ways. It’s thoughtfully designed (except the asymmetry, that’s just a mistake in my opinion) and it’s really well made like all GG stuff. The features are on point. It’s light, and it kept me dry and cozy. But I want something a little bigger with two entrances, and I think I’m willing to accept that I will need to find spaces with a big enough footprint to accommodate that.

So I finally bit the bullet and ordered my expensive Zpacks tent.

Specifically I went for the new Duplex Lite. The Duplex is a thru-hiking legend, with millions of trail miles behind it. It’s a two-person ultralight Dyneema trekking pole tent, and it’s the tent that has defined that whole category for years. The Duplex Lite is new this year, and I picked it over the standard Duplex for a couple reasons.

First, it weighs 15 ounces so it’s a few ounces lighter than my Gossamer Gear tent. For a “two person” sized tent, that’s pretty impressive. I put “two person” in scare quotes because the Duplex Lite is more like a one and a half person tent. The floor is 40 inches wide, which means you can just barely fit two 20 inch sleeping pads. But I’m a wide boy, so I like a 25 inch pad, which leaves just 15 extra inches of floor space. Tight for a whole ‘nother person, but if you’ll recall it’s precisely what I wished I had in my other tent. I don’t want to put two people in this tent anyway, so that’s perfect. This also makes it about five inches narrower in the overall footprint than the standard Duplex. Not much, but at least it’s a nod toward my desire not to always need a full 8 ½ by 8 ½ foot square tent site.

The general shape is the same as the One but it has two doors and it’s symmetrical. So to pitch the thing I can just stand with the wind at my back and spread it out, and figure out which end is the head once it’s up.

The Duplex saves some weight by not having zippers on the vestibule flaps, instead they attach to hooks at the far end of the guylines and overlap each other slightly. The Lite model also dispenses with internal pockets and some other minor features, but aside from that, the biggest change is that it uses a lighter weight fabric for the floor. The traditional Duplex uses a 1 ounce per square yard Dyneema, while the Lite uses a 0.75 oz/yd. If you ask Reddit whether this makes any practical difference, you will receive literally every possible answer. My own knowledge and experience lead me to believe it won’t matter, because the tent floor isn’t a major leakage risk in any but the worst circumstances, Dyneema is very easy to patch, and I think people generally underestimate how tough this material really is. But the new design hasn’t been out for long so if I’m forced to eat these words you will read about right here.

Mica is also upgrading his shelter from a Six Moon Designs Lunar Solo to a lightly used Gossamer Gear The One which has just become available locally at a great price. The Lunar Solo suffers from a kind of odd geometry which makes it tricky to get a good pitch, and as a single-pole tent it narrows to point at the peak. The floor space is a little better than the One but sitting up it’s more cramped, and Mica carries two poles anyway. The One will also save him six or seven ounces of weight. He has tried it out and decided that blowing up his pad inside it will not be a problem.

Miscellaneous Gear Changes

Shoes: Mica’s shoes are worn through at the heel (they started that way) and he’s finding that it chafes, much to everyone’s surprise. So he has a new pair on their way in the mail.

My feet felt like blast furnaces every day, so I’m heading back with a lighter, more breathable pair of trail runners from the same brand (Inov-8). I’m also swapping out my Darn Tough midweight socks for lightweight. And I have a variety of blister prevention and mitigation strategies planned, informed by John Vonhof’s Fix Your Feet.

Sleeping Bag: I love my quilt but I do not need a 20 degree sleeping bag yet, and I can save half a pound and significant pack space by bringing my much lighter and smaller Sea to Summit Spark SPII. It’s not as comfortable but I don’t care. I’ll swap the quilt back in later, at the moment I would rather have the space and shave off the ounces.

Bye-Bye Podcasting: The idea of recording audio was an experiment, and after a few days I think it’s one I’m not going to pursue. The gear, small as it was, always seemed to be in my way and I wasn’t really inspired to use it. Maybe some of it will come back, but for now all I’m keeping are the little wireless lav mics that I can hook up to my phone. I think I’ll stick to writing for now.

Layering Down: Along with a fleece and a rain shell, Mica brought a light insulated jacket, which he’s leaving behind this time. He didn’t need it, and it took up a lot of pack space. He’ll pick up a lightweight puffy when it starts to get cooler.

Food Changes

Trudging along in the depths of my combined nausea and hunger last week, I had a lot of time to think about how much I didn’t want to eat anything I had with me and what I wished I had to eat instead. The two things I craved the most were freezee pops and Saltines. Obviously freezee pops are out of the question unless someone shows up with them at a road crossing, but Saltines are doable. I decided to bring some oyster crackers, which are basically Saltines shaped for traveling.

When we head back out next week, the plan is to cut down our mileage to a very reasonable 8-10 miles per day, at least for a while. So anticipating more free time I have also revised my food strategy from freeze dried meals to what I’m thinking of as “basic trail cooking.” That is, meals for which I can source ingredients at any grocery store and many of the better stocked gas stations, and which allow for a reasonably flexible combination of meat, starch, and vegetables and at least the sensation of cooking. For example:

• Mashed potatoes with carrots, beef jerky, and gravy: Idahoan potatoes with carrots diced up small and boiled in the water, chunks of beef jerky mixed in, topped with some McCormick packet gravy. Delicious.

• Ramen with Stuff: I like to hit the Asian aisle and find the ramen packets with no English on them, which are generally a lot better than the domestic variety. The more mysterious a range of flavoring packets they come with, the better. Can be plain, or I can add some egg (as long as the egg crystals last), carrot, seaweed, tuna, salmon, chicken, whatever.

• Easy Mac with Stuff: Similar idea to the ramen, but the add-ins are more like bacon bits, pepperoni, maybe also chicken.

• Knorr Sides with Stuff: You get the idea right?

• Tortellini Soup: dried tortellini in Cup o’ Soup. Can add instant rice and/or chicken.

• Poké Bowl: Instant rice, salmon (with honey and soy if I can find some honey and soy sauce packets), carrot, avocado, sesame seeds, nori, egg. Mix mayo and hot sauce and you’ve got a respectable sauce for it too.

I’ll be carrying a range of the bases for these meals, as well as a couple carrots, a couple avocados, and a selection of meat pouches. For breakfast I have some shelf-stable bacon bits, egg crystals, some cup noodles, little miso soup packets, and any of the meals above with fewer add-ins. For lunch I’m planning on wraps (ham and cheese for a couple days, then I hope avocado and Fritos, or chicken salad) and some instant soups.

I’ll try to do a more in-depth post later on my whole cooking setup, and how it evolves over time, for the real nerds.

Fs in the Chat (for Food)

I know there’s a ton of outdoors experience in the readership here, so in the chat I’d love to see your best Basic Trail Cooking recipes and ideas. Anything goes but for me personally the most helpful recipes will only involve either shelf-stable or very hardy ingredients, and won’t require that much of a cooking process beyond boiling water and maybe a short simmer. We’ve got months ahead to feed ourselves so give us some things to try out!

PS: Not my ass in The Washington Post dot print today, lmao.