*note: don’t forget the gallery link at the bottom of the post*

Last weekend my Dad and I went to Mt. Adams. Our original idea was to climb the mountain, but a number of factors let to our decision to just take it easy and do some camping [for those reading this as a trip report, the mountain is climbable, it just has more snow than normal for this time of year, and there is about a 1/2mile hike to the original parking lot/trail head].

It was a really fun time though…we found this area off the side of the road that was huge, and unoccupied…so we took it (ALL FOUR DAYS). We made a bonfire every night, drank beer, roasted hot dogs…couldn’t have been better

One of the things we did was to go into the “Ice Caves”. These are lava tubes that are so cold, they have ice in them like stalagmites and stalactites (did I spell those right?). It was super cool, because we got our crampons on, and just climbed around in them. You had to watch for pools of ice water, and not to hit your head though…did both many times

One of the other things we did, was to hike up a route called the “Sleeping Beauty”. I tracked the hike on my Garmin eTrex Vista C, and Suunto X6-HR, and both charts are below.

I used the GPSBabel program to convert the way points on the GPS to a Google Earth file. Works really well. I tried GPSDump first, and although slightly more intuitive, I couldn’t get the track to be visible enough for this posting…GPSBabel made very visible blue lines, so I stuck with that one. It’s interesting to note that the trip up, and return trip don’t completely match. To be honest I’m surprised I got any signal in the dense tree cover of the forest, but this may be what could account for the inaccuracy. Through the Google Earth file, you can actually click on the different way points to see when they were taken, what altitude, the speed etc… I’m very excited to use this technology for paragliding once I’ve learned how to thermal, and start doing some small cross country flights (XC to me, being anything a few feet away from launch )

When we got home, we climbed Saddle Rock in Wenatchee, so I included the Suunto graph of that too…forgot to being the GPS on that one.

As always I’ve included a picture album here too, so click below to see that. Thanks for a great time Dad.

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CLICK HERE FOR GALLERY

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Well…school’s running, I’m working full time, and the weather is getting colder so I’m getting very short on free time…which means I’m stuck at home doing “homework” most of the time.  So I’m starting something new.  Since I can’t get out there as much, I’ll spend more time here and do some product reviews and How-to’s to bring some (more) traffic to my page.  So what do we have today you may be asking yourself…well…something that’s a little different, and might appeal to a smaller crowd, but still very cool.

It’s the Brasslite Turbo ll-D ultralight backpacking stove.  I’ve made a number of alcohol stoves with soda cans, tuna cans, beer cans etc…I’ve used insulation, created pressure chambers with jet holes, and attempted priming setups and simmering functions.  The results were sometimes impressive, but they were still flimsy and easily crushed.  They worked fine, but I rely on my stove for water and cooking so I prefer to have something more trustworthy.

I actually made this video almost a year ago now and recently found it in my files, so thought I’d post it and see if people want more.  It’s sort of long and drawn out, but at the time of making it, I didn’t see any other video reviews of the stove, so thought I’d do one for fun.  Enjoy, and comment away.

*Note-It looks like their prices have dropped since I made the video too…so check out their website at www.brasslite.com

cheers,

Justin

A couple weeks ago (yep…slackin’ on the webpage again) my good buddy Bryan and I went camping at Priest Lake.  He is traveling the country and has both a personal blog page, and a page to cover his journeys.  It was a really great time.  The day before I had purchased a whitewater kayak from a coworker for a steal of a deal so I brought that along to play with in the lake.

Bryan didn’t really fit…..heh

The Lake comming in was truly a sight too…expecially with the islands in the middle.

We camped in the forest down a forest road across from the Lionshead camp ground.  In this campground is a boat from the 1950′s? that was scuttled and burned but washed to shore before it could sink.  This sucker was so inneficient it took 8 (EIGHT) cords of wood just to cross the lake…that’s crazy folks…no wonder they burned it…I might have too.  Pretty cool all the same though, the nails holding it together are more like railroad stakes.

Our next adventure was to find the infamous “rock slides”.  I’d camped up here about a year ago on a busy weekend where the only place to camp when we get there was at a traillhead.  Come to find out later, this trailhead lead to the rock slides I’d been hearing out.  Aparently there is some granite rock up the trail that has been carved out over the years to make some perfect slides.  A thin layer of moss has made it perfect for people to slide down then into the river.  Unfortunately our trip was cold and wet but we still wanted to see them.  Sure wasa bugger just getting to the trailhead though.  We had to dig our way past many snow patches:

And push at least one big tree off the road…

Just to get to the top (which we never really did)…I should add that Bryan did a lot too, he was just behind the camera in these shots.  We crossed lots of small creeks, and waded through waist deep snow (mmmmm…PB&J)…

But it started getting dark so we decided to head back.  Buddy later told me they slides are right near the trailhead so who knows…either they were covered in snow, or they don’t exist and people are pulling my chain…

…so we took a couple more shots and headed back down…

Back at camp we broke out the guitar and harmonica and started playing some Bob Dylan tunes.  Bryan was actully pretty good, and it lasted for quite a while.  We contined that long into the night with a good fire and some fermented goodness

The next day after we made breakfast, we bagen to discuss the diversity of cheese and how important it is to camping.  With the harmonica and guitar out, we decided to turn it into music…and on that note I’ll leave you with a little video…enjoy!!!

Disclaimer: Watch only if you are (1) hard of hearing and/or (2) your speakers are broken

(I tried to edit it but gave up…so it’s straight from the camera)