TGO Challenge 2015 - Gear Used and Abused

St Cyrus Beach, waving my absolutely brilliant Pacer Poles

I posted a kit list before setting out on the Challenge and so I thought I would write a few short comments about some of the gear I took with me. As you will see, I took a deliberate decision to carry quite a bit more weight than strictly necessary.  I still have mixed feelings about this, and constantly struggle to get the weight versus comfort balance right for me. Having written that, I did note ironically, as I bought a piece of unneeded but fancied cheese in the Co-op in Ballater to stick in my pack, that its extra weight entirely counteracted the saving in grams I made when I bought a lighter sleeping bag last year.  But then who wants to eat a sleeping bag half way up Mount Keen I want to know.

 The 'Big Three' (or Four or Five)

Many backpackers write about the 'big three' critical items of shelter, pack and sleeping bag when commenting on gear and weight carried.  I would also add footwear and rain gear.  To be comfortable you really need to get all these right.  So I took:

Tent - My Tarptent Scarp 1. As the weather forecast was for quite a lot of wind and rain and chilliness, I decided on the Scarp 1 rather than my considerably lighter Z Packs Duplex.  I am pretty confident that the latter would have done me just fine, but I have used and abused the Scarp far more, only having acquired the Duplex towards the end of last year.  I also thought the Scarp would be warmer, given its double skin and lack of mesh, which helps cut down on draughts.  As expected, the Scarp performed superbly.  Rock steady in the squally wind, plenty of space with its two vestibules, allowing cooking undercover and storage of wet gear.  If this tent was half a kg lighter I'd never want to use anything else.

My Scarp 1 in quite strong, squally winds in the lee of Dalbeg Bothy

Pack - the ULA Catalyst.  As with my shelter, I opted for my long used, and so well tried, ULA Catalyst, rather than my Z Packs Arc Blast.  This choice was entirely dictated by taking the Scarp. The Catalyst has a massive external mesh pocket which swallows the Scarp far more easily than the Arc Blast.  It has lots of space, meaning packing up, especially in the wet, doesn't require much care or thought, and is superbly comfortable to carry.  If I had taken the Duplex I would definitely have taken the Arc Blast which is also a great pack, and is about 900 gr lighter than the Catalyst.  I am likely to use the Duplex and Blast combination on all my shorter trips.

ULA Catalyst on St Cyrus Beach

Sleeping Bag - A Z Packs 20 Degree bag (long and extra wide).  I think this is a great sleeping bag.  I sleep very cold, and so if the temperature is going to get anywhere near freezing I also wear my PHD down jacket to bed, which has a hood.  I was only chilly on one night in this set up, unlike in previous years when I used a Rab Neutrino 400 - which I found less warm but quite a lot heavier.  The Z Packs bag has to be one of the lightest on the market in terms of the amount of down / temperature rating.  Having said this, I met one other Challenger who had bought and sold a similar Z Packs bag as he didn't like it for a variety of reasons.  Individual preferences.  Oh, and one of my best investments in recent years was the purchase of down socks from As Toucas, which really make a substantial difference to warmth at night and in the tent in the evening.

Trail Shoes - I wear these more and more rather than boots, and think they are brilliant for the Challenge, especially so in avoiding faffing about at river crossings.  You just plunge straight in.  Despite the occasional snow patches, my feet generally kept warm and after about five minutes you do not notice that they are wet most of the time. I wore the same pair as last year, the 'new' style Inov8 Terroc 330s. 'New' style, but no longer made unfortunately. They were faultless, but having done two Challenges now, plus many day walks, they have been relegated to dog walking since I got home as the uppers have worn through in places.  I have no idea what I will replace them with yet.  As for socks.  I am a real fan of X Socks Exped socks which I find incredibly comfortable, and as in previous years I did not get any blisters, even after some fairly pro-longed road trudges.  Rinsing them in a stream each night keeps them relatively fresh.

Waterproofs - I wore a Berghaus Paclite jacket.  And I wore it a great deal because of the weather we experienced.  Paclite is much maligned.  I have been very happy with it, but this item is now about 6 years old, and it has seen its day.  As for overtrousers, I wear Berghaus Paclites, too, and these really are the dog's doo dahs.  I don't reckon there is anything that would better suit my needs, and they do appear to be the commonest type worn by fellow Challengers.  Mine have now provided me with great service for several years.  I have often worn them all day, and find them comfortable and condensation free.


Other Stuff - Most of the things that I carried were used, except for many First Aid items and my repair kit.  I may lighten these for the future, dispensing with some wound dressings and some of the spare dyneema and bungee cord, but this will only save a few grams. I consciously chose to carry other things which I knew would increase weight, and could be dispensed with, but thought they would add to my overall comfort.  Thus, I had the luxury of spare trousers - the incredibly light Rohan Ethers, which I highly recommend if you, too, want to carry a spare pair on trips. They only weigh about 220 gr. I also took the light weight Hi Tec Zuuk shoes for wear in B and Bs and when eating out.  They do the job.  In terms of other clothes I suppose you do not need to carry a spare shirt, socks or pants but it is nicer when you are in town in the evening if you do, and I particularly like my new Rohan Zipped Silver Core base layer which served as my spare.  On the subject of Rohan gear, I walked every single day in my zipped, long sleeved Rohan merino base layer shirt.  I also slept in it every night.  I washed it after Days 6 and Day 9 and to my refined nose it never became offensive!  It is is one of the best bits of basic kit I own.  I wore, and needed, all my cold weather clothing, including lightweight fleece, Montane Prism gillet and Prism gloves, PHD Minimus Down Jacket, fleece beenie and buff.

As is the case almost every time I go out in the hill I used a pair of Pacer Poles which I think can not be beaten, although I wish they would make a model with flick lock closures.

I had one piece of equipment failure.  This was an almost new Piezo ignition sparker thing that came with my MSR Micro Rocket stove which I purchased this spring as the pot holders on my old Optimus gas stove became rather bent.  It packed up after three days.  Fortunately, I carry a spare lighter.  I also had a dodgy self-sealing gas cartridge which didn't self-seal very well, and gave me a couple of anxious moments.  I am, partly as a result of this, thinking of taking my Trail Designs Ti Tri meths / esbit set up in future, rather than gas.

That's enough about gear.  I bought the lot with my own money, of course, so the comments here are not influenced by any of it being free.  Unfortunately!!!!

TGOC 2014 Day 2: Bogs, boots, lubricants and sex crazed inverterbrates

Day 2: Route

Saturday 10 May, 18.4 km, 667 metres, 7 hours 45 minutes

Weather:  Pretty wet, drying up in the afternoon.  Sort of.

View from the Scarp (taken on the previous evening)

One of the less than pleasurable aspects of wild camping is the early morning walk with the MSR Blizzard stake, with the improvised duct tape handle, to a place remote from other tents and water courses for a man to do what a man has to do. Not too bad on a dry day, it is most unpleasant when it is raining.  So I can tell you that having wandered off from my tent at 5.50am in the dry to undertake aforementioned euphemism I felt pretty smug 15 minutes later as I lay back in my sleeping bag with a brew and it started to tip it down. 

 

Loch Affric

It continued to rain throughout the morning, which was no surprise, this being Scotland in May and Challengers all along the north west of the country were just getting on with it.  I headed off along the track towards Loch Affric, eventually catching up with Fran and Allen near the track that turns away from the Loch and heads up towards Cougie. I only caught up with them because they were repairing Fran's boots again.  I walked with them through an increasingly unpleasant, steep, wet and muddy excuse of a path to the main track that heads to Cougie.

Allen scoured the track for old bits of wire and cable ties to add to his boot repair kit for Fran.  We stopped near Cougie for lunch.  After getting very fed up of trail mix and too many cereal bars on previous backpacks I have started to buy wraps for lunch and spread these with Primula Cheese.  This is far more satisfying.  I am also packing my mug so that it is more accessible to encourage me to drink more water when passing burns.  It’s a new Evernew mug, bought just before the off.  It did make an annoying grating sound whenever I unfolded the handles but I found that a tiny squirt of Primula down the titanium channel that holds them in place sorted this.

 

Above Cougie

We followed a track up the hill out of Cougie.  It disappeared long before the Ordnance Survey said that it should, and despite the use of GPS to check we were on this “path” we waded through heather and bog for a goodly bit ie a couple of hours or so.  I can only think that the OS map makers, who now use satellite imagery to plot features such as paths, were using the same satellite that had told master blogger Alan Sloman that there was a brilliant wild camp in the middle of a Cumbrian wasteland on the Pre-Walk Daunder in April. Not that I’m bitter, you understand.

I had planned to camp by the Allt na Muic and not far from the grid reference given on my route plan I did see a pretty reasonable spot.  Allen wanted to “push on for a bit” so I was deprived of his and Fran's excellent company and settled down to a wild camp alone – the only time on this Challenge when my tent was on its own.

I spent an interesting evening.  I foolishly left my tent door open as I went for a short wander to the burn for water and when I returned it was filled with large numbers of flying ants who, it seemed had needed to “get a room”.  They were hell bent on using the Scarp for immoral purposes, and despite shooing as many of them as possible away I had to lie in my sleeping bag watching the remaining swarm with voyeuristic fascination as they cavorted and copulated on the sides of my inner tent until tiredness saw me drift to the land of nod.

Wild camp pitch near the Allt na Muic

Barry Bucknell Lives!

Nice New Guying System

When I had to go out to work for a living I was driven to seek promotion after promotion for one reason only.  I needed and wanted to earn enough money so that I never, ever had to open my car bonnet or to go into a branch of B and Q or the like again.  My intention was to be able to afford “to get a man in” to do it.  Or as Mrs Fellbound sometimes says, with that tone that appears to be suggesting something more than the actual words she uses, “get a real man in to do it”.  So my dizzy climb to the top of the greasy pole of public servantry was a result of nothing more than my inability to do anything practical under the bonnet of the car or at my non-existent work bench.

However, after studying the Yellow Pages I was unable to find any man or woman listed who could do for me in relation to some desired modifications to my Scarp 1.  I had thought of sending a train ticket and a wad of fivers to employ Robin, as he is the master of modifications when it comes to the Scarp 1. And he seems actually to enjoy doing these things.  But selfishly he had headed off to Dartmoor to have a final pre-TGO Challenge jaunt.  Thus, I was in the awful position of having to do it myself.

   The problems:       

• The Scarp has nowhere to hang your wet smelly socks to dry after a day walking through bog in trail shoes.

• The Scarp’s supplied guys appear to be extremely short, putting a strain on the pegs and limiting the choice where you can stick the peg – a potential problem in rocky ground.  Further, the hoop has no supplied guy lines.

I am not certain whether the short guys really are a problem. One assumes that Henry Shires at Tarptent knows what he is doing.  But my own doubts were heightened by the various sharp intakes of breath from fellow Pre-Walk Daunderers when they saw just how short the guys were.  They said little but their stolen glances to each other said it all.  One gust of Scottish wind and that tent will reach Montrose a week or so ahead of poor old Fellbound on the TGO Challenge.  Alan suggested I replace them with an Akto style guying system.  In the end I opted for something simpler.  This was because my poor little brain wouldn't have coped with that and also it might have mucked up the postioning of the crossover pole eyeletes which are attached to the standard guys.  In any case, for me these modifications were already as challenging as would have been undertaking open heart surgery.

The solution:

• I bought some Dyneema from Bob and Rose. “Dyneema” means expensive string but it is very good.

• I cut a piece off and tied it across the inner as a washing line for my smalls. This required me to know how to use a pair of scissors and tie a round turn and two half hitches. Thank goodness I had been in the Scouts.

• I removed the existing guys and replaced them like for like but over double the length.  This requires knowledge of how to tie an overhand knot and correctly thread a linelock.  It was quite technical but I Percy Veered and it seems to have worked.

• I added guys to both attachments on the hoop.

• I have also done this clever thingy with some guy line, linelocks and my trekking pole to help with stability and to give more clearance between inner and outer, which should help reduce condensation.  This wasn’t, of course, my idea.  Others do this.  I saw it on Steve's brilliant bloggy you tube thingy-me-bob of him putting the Scarp up on Hindscarth in the Lake District.  I would recommend you check this video out, not least for the catchy folky background music.  The photo below shows this set-up reasonably well.

I sealed the cut ends of the Dynamee with a lighted match. I decided this was best done straight after cutting and not once the cord was attached to the tent.  This was to avoid conflagration nightmare.

Trekking pole thingy guy

All in all this has added 80gr in weight.  And more pegs but I will not bother with spare pegs now as the two trekking pole thingeys are not strictly necessary so I will have pegs for those which could become replacements for crucial pegging points.  Also, I have ditched some of my blue pegs for grey as Martin has advised me that the blue paint is heavier.

The cleverest bit is that I replaced one guy at one end with different coloured Dynamee.  This shows me which side of the Scarp is the “head end” as the inner door is at one end of the tent.  This should help when putting it up. If I can remember “red is for head”.

That’s enough about modifications. It's doing my head in, as Phil Mitchell or Ian Beale might have said.

Now, which way is Scotland?

The End of the Daunder: Reflections on Companionship and other Heady Matters

Early morning brew

I awoke, as is my habit, very early.  This was after a good night’s sleep in the Scarp 1.  It’s a good shelter.  Apart from its practicality of design, and robustness in the blustery conditions we had experienced, it also has a nearly white inner and a light grey outer.  This, combined with the longer end struts, makes for a lovely light and airy feeling.  It seems far more natural than the yellow inner and dark green outer of my Akto, much as I like the latter.  A joy of wild camping is waking early when the sky is clear, opening the tent and porch door and brewing up whilst still in a warm sleeping bag, and drinking tea in the silence, punctuated only by the noise of the wind and birdsong, contemplating the beauty outside.  And this is what I did, watching the sun rise over the flank of Brae Fell, the other side of the narrow valley that separates it from Longlands.

 

On Longlands Fell

 

Croydon does a mysterious and joyful dance as he counts his Kryptonite tent pegs and realises they are all still there

Slowly the group came to life, and we enjoyed a leisurely shortish walk back to lovely Caldbeck.  The Daunder had been planned from the start like a military operation by General Sloman.  It went as all British military operations ie setbacks in the early stages followed by marvellous victory as all comes together at the very end (and even without the help of the Americans on this occasion).  So the weather was perfect, the scenery was perfect, the lambs looked lovely and we arrived at the Oddfellows Arms just a few minutes after opening time and the beginning of the lunchtime menu.  We refreshed ourselves, walked the mile down to our cars back at our starting point, and then set off for home – the southerners back down to Cockneyland and Lynsey to Wetherfield.  I had the long 12 miles trek back to my cottage.  When I write “trek” I am being metaphorical, for I went in the car.

 

The art of Daundering: never pass a bench without sitting down

Caldbeck: Andy points his backside at the camera.  An end of Daunder ritual, perhaps?

Since leaving University, the best part of 40 years ago, almost all my hill walking has been done alone.  Not by choice, more by circumstance.  I am not a natural socialite, but do enjoy walking with others, as long as the group is not too large (the 6/7 of the Daunder would be an absolute maximum in my eyes), and when people have something like the same levels of fitness and pace.  Going solo does give one a particular perspective on life.  I find that I become more self-absorbed and reflective when I walk alone.  That can be a good thing; it can also be hell at times.  It is good to go at one’s own pace, to stop when one wants to, to choose one’s own route, to savour the sound of silence and the sounds of nature.  But going solo can, for me at least, also lead to more anxiety if the going gets difficult or the conditions become bad.  It can be good, on such occasions to have companions with you to share decisions, to laugh about difficulties and, even more, just for general companionship, even the companionship of silence, when nothing more needs to be said.  I think that to get the best from our beautiful British hills and mountains one needs to do both: to walk alone at times but also to walk with others on occasions.  I will be seeking out more opportunities to do the latter over the coming months and years.  I hope that sometimes the opportunity will arise to walk with some of my fellow Daunderers again.

Is it Meant To Be?

My Trailstar in Glen Tilt in her more youthful days

If you read the masterly blog of Alan Sloman , a veteran TGO Challenger, then you will know that he has got himself a new mistress called Trinnie.  It was a lightening romance.  Wanda, his old flame, is no longer on the scene.  I am too polite to ask him why.  He had a brief flirtation this time last year with one of Martin Rye's cast offs.  But the last few weeks has seen him first court, then walk out with, and finally fall head over heels for Trinnie.  Trinnie is a dark skinned, American beauty who goes under the surname of Trailstar.  She is tall, elegant and shapely, although she does take up quite a lot of space, and as a result she makes a real statement wherever she goes.  Alan knows how to show an American girl who has come to live this side of the pond a good time, and has already taken her to several wonders of the United Kingdom – Windsor Great Park, Scotland and the Lake District.  

Alan took Trinnie with him on last weekend’s three day Pre-Walk Daunder in the Lakes.  I was kindly invited along, and hope to give my version of events on this blog shortly.  This meant that I could see Trinnie in the flesh rather than just in photos.  I am ashamed to admit that over the course of three days I rather fell for her.

Trinnie stands tall and proud on the right here as Alan enters her on his knees whilst Aktos and Comps flap and billow

I know that I have been highly critical of the Trailstar family in the past, having had a brief fling with one of Trinnie’s older sisters.  I complained regularly to all who would listen that she was just not the right size for a tall chap such as me.  She didn’t keep my feet warm and dry at night.  Then I bought her a slinky new handmade undergarment, the Oookstar, but still she made me sleep with my knees slightly bent, and I soon relegated her to the back bedroom where I keep stuff I have little use for.  She was replaced with a dumpier, wider, more practical model, also American, a daughter of Henry Shires of Scarptent.

Alan’s infatuation and frequent singing of Trinnie’s charms, however, has made me think of these girls in a new way.  The Daunder saw much wind and a fair amount of rain.  I needed to cook inside my porch for three days.  This is, of course, neither fun nor particularly safe, and quite sordid when you spill half of a semi-rehydrated meal in the cramped space.  Alan and Trinnie, meanwhile, were holding wild parties, Trinnie entertaining as many as five men and one woman on the Saturday evening.  Rather too intimate?  Possibly, but how many others could do that?  I silently began to covet Alan’s new girl.  Which is less sinful, I might add, than coveting my neighbour's ass.

So I have sheepishly been into the back bedroom.  Trinnie’s elder sister has been taken out.   She has been on the scales again, and has reminded me how much more sylph like she is than the dumpy Scarp.  She is at this moment enjoying the evening sunshine out in the back garden.  I lay next to her this afternoon, and have tried to convince myself that I am not too tall for a comfortable night with her.  True, her skin is somewhat grey and wrinkly after being kept inside so long, and she is looking slightly saggy today, but that is my fault not hers.  With a bit of practice I am sure I can help her get that elegant, carefree look of old.  And so I gaze at her and contemplate, and think of what might be….

A coy view of her rear......

....and now a brazen full frontal