Labor Day marks the official end of hiking season in the U.S. Which means that after Labor Day, it’s a great time for a hike: the thin crowds and Indian summers of September make for choice campsites and high miles during cooler days, without having to add a lot of weight to your pack. Nighttime […]
Why are insulated hats so heavy? Andy Skurka learned a lot on his 7,800 mile hike across the country. But sewing was not among the skills he mastered. As I work on this week’s BPL Newsletter, Andy descends from the BPL warehouse loft (location of sewing central, where all of our good designs are born […]
An interesting side show from my boil-water-from-snow time/fuel economy test was the performance of the Jetboil Stove. The Jetboil required 54 minutes to boil 2L of water from snow but used only 1.5 oz of fuel (compare to 20 minutes or so with an MSR XGK-II @ 2.8 oz, Simmerlite @ 3.2 oz, or Coleman […]
Leave it up to a company that considers Wal-Mart a key customer to invent the first backpacking stove that has the very real potential to usurp the veritable MSR white gas stoves as the highest performance liquid fuel stoves on the market. But that’s exactly what kind of potential the Coleman Xtreme has. Backpacking Light […]
Which media channels do you trust? The news media is not particularly known for its sage advice about outdoor travel. They are, after all, "only journalists", or so it’s been said… Perhaps we should place our trust in a backpacking magazine that claims to be the authority in backcountry travel. A reasonable enough assumption, I […]