We got our grant from the Alaska Conservation Foundation!

It’s a beautiful first day of spring here in Seattle. The sun is shining, the cherry trees are blooming, and we’re scrambling to get all our ski gear ready. Tomorrow we fly up to still-snowy Anchorage. We’ll work with Sheri at Alpacka Raft to make some gear, I’ll give a slideshow/lecture on last summer’s Pebble Mine Watersheds trip, and we’ll test out some of the gear by spending six days skiing down the Kenai Peninsula.

I’m crossing my fingers that the mailman brings me a box today – we’re expecting some cuben fiber fabric from Quest Outfitters. If it doesn’t come today, we’ll have to scramble something to make a shelter out of (kind of a necessary piece of gear), and we won’t get to test out the cool new fabric.



Voiding the thermarest warranty
delaminating the future arm holes




cutting the arm holes

Life Vests

Our old thermarest-life-vests have been destroyed by too many punctures and too much time close to the fire. But like much destruction and wearing out of gear – we’re taking this as an opportunity to improve the design. So I picked up a couple of brand new Thermarest ProLite 3s at REI, and Hig immediately proceded to void the warranty by taking a hot iron to them.

Heat delaminates the outer cover from the inner die-cut foam. So we heat up the area we want to cut out (arm holes). Then we take the scissors to it, further desecrating this brand-new piece of gear. The hot iron seals up the holes again – or almost does. Usually some glue to catch the last few leaks is required. Then we attach some straps, so this thing can be worn. In the end, we have a serviceable life vest that still can be slept on (with a little care to avoid the holes).





sewing on straps




resealing

modeling the fleece suit
still needs a hood

The fleece suit is one of the places where we shun most standard backpacking wisdom (you might argue that we’re shunning all standard wisdom by even doing this trip, but that’s beside the point here). Most people believe in some kind of a wicking, long-underwear-type base layer – wool or synthetic. And for insulation, both down and high-loft synthetics are lighter than fleece. There’s some merit to this. We intend to basically go this route for our winter gear.

putting on life vest

But our experience with “wicking” under layers, like polypro, is that under certain conditions, they can actually make you colder. Like wet conditions. Where the water comes from rain or surf rather than sweat, it’s continuously soaking you, and there’s no way anything’s evaporating from the outside of the fabric. Fleece right next to the skin is the only thing we’ve found that actually works in these conditions. Wool supposedly does as well, but it’s even heavier. So, for now, we’re sticking with fleece bodysuits.
The one Hig’s modeling here is made of “powerstretch” fleece, which we’re testing to see if it’s better or worse than the standard 200 weight fleece. Not quite finished here – we’ll be adding a hood.

ready for a living room paddle

Unfortunately, there’s no time to make one for me! So I’ll be stuck with the very worn out 3-year-old version.

One thing you might notice from all these pictures is the horrible mess I haven’t quite succeeded at cropping out of the background. That’s not our workshop. It’s our house. Which is more of a workshop than anything else, and is quite as much a disaster as it looks.

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