Jul 22 2013

Review: Kelty Carport (take 2)

Use the carport however you see fit - spare bedroom or covered kitchen.

Use the carport however you see fit – spare bedroom or covered kitchen.

The utility of Kelty’s Carport should seem obvious. Though made to create a vestibule to a car, for car camping, it also doubles for whatever you can make of a three-sided, lightweight roof. When you know what you’re doing, it assembles in about ten minutes. On my last kiting adventure it was used to create an awning to break the midday sun off the side of a trailer. After half the season Zeke still hadn’t put up his awning but he had a good excuse, Nathan had parked his adjacent trailer too close to make room for the awning, at least, not without his permission to use his trailer to secure two corners of the tarp.
Keep making backcountry turns

Jul 18 2013

Bill Johnson, Olympic downhill champ, ends treatment

Former Olympic downhill champion Bill Johnson no longer wants to go through treatment after dealing with a life-threatening infection that has attacked his major organs.

Associated Press photo

Associated Press photo

Hospitalized since June 29, the one-time daredevil skier refuses a feeding tube, even though it hurts to swallow, his mom said in a phone interview Wednesday. He no longer wants supplemental oxygen or even antibiotics that could possibly help him.

He’s tired of being poked with needles, sick of all the tubes attached to him. His mom said that Johnson’s wish is simply to leave the hospital and return to his room at an assisted living facility in Gresham where the 53-year-old was living before the illness.

That way, he can fight this on his terms and in his own way.

More from the Register-Guard

Jul 16 2013

Technique: Primary Search for Avy Victims

 

In the primary search the goal is to obtain a signal ASAP without overlooking one.

In the primary search the goal is to obtain a signal ASAP without overlooking one.

Okay, you’ve made the mistake and said your “Oh S#!&’s” because someone triggered an avalanche and was caught and buried and out of sight. You take a deep breath and say it again.

What do you do next?

  1. Mentally mark the last place you saw your friend. If you’re in a group, determine who knows the lowest place that your friend was last seen.
  2. Switch your beacon(s) to receive mode.
    If you’re in a group, someone must become the leader at this point. (This is a critical move, and a critical position worthy of an entire chapter in a book itself.) Among other things, the leader should check that everyone has their beacon in receive mode. Anyone who has ever practiced a group search knows that someone in the group usually doesn’t do this right, or they accidentally switch back in to transmit mode in the middle of the search. Of course, this puts everyone into a new state of confusion and slows down the search for your friend(s). Make sure you’re not the bonehead doing that.
  3. If you don’t have a signal at all, then you need to begin moving towards your friend(s) down the slide path according to one of the following patterns.

Keep making backcountry turns

Jul 15 2013

Profile: Yvon Chouinard

If you don’t stick your neck out, don’t leave the ten essentials behind, you’re never going to have an adventure.

Yvon Chouinard - more than a mountaineer.

Yvon Chouinard – more than a mountaineer.


After a six-plus year hiatus, Yvon Chouinard is back in the backcountry — on skis that is. Felled by a broken arm injured during a beach-side bouldering session, Chouinard’s prodigious, storied freeheel career ground to halt through the residual discomfort associated with the injury. While guaranteed a permanent position in the pantheon of America’s ice, rock and mountaineering greats, as well as in the annals of rags to riches business success stories through his founding of Patagonia, the ever-growing number of young, backcountry and telemark initiates may need a refresher on his background and accomplishments.
Keep making backcountry turns

Jul 12 2013

Review: Exped’s Dreamwalker (take 2)

 

Yours truly, caught live at The Delta, Dreamwalking.

Yours truly, caught live at The Delta, Dreamwalking.

We humans are not only creatures of habit, but we are overly influenced by mob mentality. That is the purpose of the relentless polls by the lamestream media, to control the thinking of the sheeple by assuring them, or warning as the case may be, that they are safe as long as they get in line with the majority (however contrived that presentation may be). Along with the mesmerizing influence of the stupevision screen, we fall for it.

The herd mentality has ramifications beyond political. For instance, consider sleeping bags, a subject and product that is hardly controversial. The mummy style sleeping bag is very popular among the climbing and backpacking crowd, and probably among casual campers too because they want to be cool like the hardcore mountaineers. It is true that when you want maximum warmth with minimal weight a mummy bag rules.
Keep making backcountry turns

Jul 10 2013

Technique: Determining Search Strip Width

 

Knowing your search strip width can help reduce search times.

Knowing your search strip width can help reduce search times.


One simple thing you can do in preparing for a real avalanche rescue is to figure out what the Search Strip Width of your avalanche transceiver is. This involves taking time to do a few iterations of measurements with you and your friends.

There are more complicated ways to determine search strip width that take into account things like the spatial orientation of the victims antenna combined with a probability factor. Though reliable this requires a lot of testing, something the average person simply will not do. It does yield a larger range, which can help to shorten a search. However, the simple way is more conservative and with modern (circa 2012) beacon technology, good enough:
 

Search Strip Width = 2 X Minimum Effective Range

Keep making backcountry turns

Jul 08 2013

Technique: Avoiding avalanche trouble

As has become tradition, July 4th was a Delta weekend, which means windsurfing and/or kiteboarding. Sherman Island local Ray dropped by and we got in to a bit of a conversation about the perils of kiting and how his hang gliding and parasailing friends are always testing their release systems before they ever get airborne. He didn’t think any of his kiteboarding buddies did a similar check. He had me pegged and the guilt his observation triggered did cause me to double check the safety release on my chicken loop the next day. The parallels with backcountry skiing were unmistakable.

Fortunately I didn’t need to use it, but it turns out I did need to use some emergency skills later on that I had only learned about, but never actually used.
Keep making backcountry turns