The Bora Smock is certainly not at the pinnacle of ultralight gear, nevertheless it is a versatile piece of clothing that maintains breathability while offering warmth and excellent waterproofing.
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Follow the story of a family of five as they backpack over 2000 miles from Georgia to Maine.
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The winner of the BPL summer recipe contest made this tasty treat.
BPL recently hosted a summer recipe contest/giveaway. The winner receives a brand-new Jetboil Joule cooking system. Read the details about the contest here.
The following is the recipe submission from Ken Larson which won the contest.
This is it! The classic monkey bread recipe, oozing with warm brown sugar and cinnamon AND it is easy to make……. as well as being irresistible!
This was the #1 baking treat made by the four granddaughters (ages 11, 12, 14, 14) on our last year’s eleven day adventure on Isle Royal National Park.
Enjoy!
The four bakers.
6 servings (287.5 Cal/serving)
Preparation Time : ~20 min; Total Time 1hr & 10min
The block is used with the Sidewinder Ti-Tri & 1.3 Evernew Ti Pot System.
Looks delicious!
Mix the Dough ingredients together in the Ziploc bag until soft dough forms. Lightly oil a 5” round pan and place a parchment paper disk (slightly smaller than the diameter of the pan) on the bottom of the Fat Daddio’s Pan. Sprinkle the Topping into the pan and spread out to form an even layer. Mix the Coating ingredients together in a plastic bag till creamy.
Baking over! Time to eat!
Flatten dough in Ziploc mixing bag, cut bag longitudinally down the mid portion and then cut left and right to open bag. Divide Dough into 6 pieces using a spatula/knife. With oiled hands, roll dough into 6 equal sized balls (~1-inch ) and then roll them in the Coating. Make sure that all sides of the dough are covered. Place the coated dough balls randomly into the Fat Daddio’s Pan. Pat down the dough to make an even layer across the top of the pan. Sprinkle the remaining Coating on top of dough.
Cooking time ~45 minutes. Remove pan; cool 10 minutes. Serve warm.
Take a bite!
Weighing about the equivalent of half an ounce (16 M&M’s) this knife has a 2.75 inch blade that easily guts fish and small game. Better yet it self-sharpens.
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Although the trip was never completed, the lessons learned were irreplaceable and the experience was very memorable.
An unfortunate consequence of my growing immersion in the world of running has been the nagging voice of others questioning my motivation for wanting to do the things that I do or the much more ominous and obvious question of my sanity. That question has never really bothered me much. My simple rationale behind running has always been simple; I enjoy running and it makes me feel good, so I end up doing it a lot. That’s always been enough for me.
I first became interested in the concept of expedition trail running when I finished my first big solo backpacking trip – 280 miles in 10 days on Vermont’s Long Trail. I was happy with the pace of my walking, but I had been running competitively for several years and after a big triathlon, I felt ready to apply the focused discipline of athletics to the world of long trails.
A job in outdoor education had brought me to Australia, so I cast my gaze around Oceania for a long trail where I could explore the idea of expedition trail running. After a few listless weeks of clicking around on the internet I found the Te Araroa, a trail that ran the entire spine of the island nation of New Zealand. The southern island section was thirteen hundred kilometers of some of the most beautiful trail in the world. New Zealand was high on a short list of places that I wanted to explore while in Australasia, so it was an easy call. All that was left was figuring out how I was going to run eight hundred miles.
A photo of the author doing what he loves.
I started the planning process by asking a few friends if they’d be interested in joining. It seems to take a special type of person to willingly spend some good money to fly to New Zealand to run with me for three weeks without stopping. Eventually I found Casey. Between his passion for running, his fierce willingness to try crazy things, and his calendar availability, I found my partner.
Casey graduated from the same university that I went to when I was a freshman, so he still had that allure of the cool older-brother-type friend that had never really been filled by a close relationship with my own older brother. He wore a long mustache and longer hair, which fit with his vocation of following the summer tour of the band Phish and managing a crew of volunteers. I was never really sure what he was doing when he wasn’t skiing or cycling. It didn’t really matter, because our mutual love of physically and mentally demanding days in the outdoors and that was enough to cement a close relationship between us.
Our plan was simple enough. We’d meet in Invercargill, at the southern tip of the South Island. I’d have three boxes of food with me: five day’s rations that we would start with, seven day’s rations to drop about a third of the way up at Queenstown, and another six day’s rations cached about two thirds of the way up, near Arthur’s pass. We’d rent a car, and hide the supplies somewhere near the trail where only we’d be able to find them, before racing back down south to start the run. This approach would spare us the hassle of trying to organize and coordinate with a support team while still keeping our packs light with only fourteen pounds of food at it’s heaviest. All of our previous backcountry-forays relied upon this self-supported strategy, and purity of style was something that is important to us.
Our timeline was tight, given that we both had jobs we had to get back to. Eighteen days of food – eighteen days until a flight was scheduled to take off from Nelson with us aboard, near our route’s northern terminus. Our gear was also bare-bones. A sleeping bag, a head torch, and a small piece of plastic intended as an ’emergency bivy’ filled out the bulk of our small daybags. As the day of departure drew closer, training intensified and final details were chased up and confirmed. Casey printed the maps and I bought a plane ticket. Things were unfolding well, all along the lines of the ambitious plan that we had set out.
Casey called me a few days before I was to leave and told me he wouldn’t be coming. Tendinitis had hobbled his knees and his doctor was telling him that running eight hundred miles with weight on his back probably wasn’t the best idea. I was on my own.
Despite this late-in-the-game setback, I managed to keep my cool. It’s fine, I’ll just do everything myself, I told myself. I was working in the field the last few days before the trip but I rented a car, printed an alternate copy of the maps, and tried to mentally prepare myself for the prospect of eight hundred miles of trail by myself.
I left my home in Moss Vale when the schedule dictated and picked up the rental car when I arrived at the Invercargill airport, amazed at how easily they handed over the keys to a brand new Toyota Yaris to a 21 year old stranger. After replacing the peanut butter that was confiscated from my rations at customs, I gunned the small car north, racing towards the second cache near Arthur’s pass, a full seven hundred kilometers away.
The farther north I drove, the more I knew the situation was not looking good. The outdoor educator in me was the first to know that the plan wouldn’t work. I had spent the night on a layover in Christchurch to fly down to Invercargill, only to drive back the distance that I had just flown. For this impossibly long solo drive, I only had the car until 10am the next morning – after 18 hours of travel I’d have to drive almost nonstop for a thousand miles if I was going to drop off the packages and make it back down south in time. My lack of accurate and detailed maps also left with me with serious concerns about whether or not I’d be able to quickly find the drop site.
I was pissed off. Even in the lowlying hills, snow covered the ridgelines and valleys in heaping drifts. When the sun dropped behind the mountains around 4:30, I tried adding up in my head the number of hours I’d have to be running in winter darkness to make my daily targets. All I wanted was to be able to get on the phone and call someone, if only to vent about how frustrated I was, but I was by myself and not really sure if I was going the right way.
Despite the fact that a small sliver of the intellectual, rational part of my being knew that I wouldn’t be able to complete what I had come to this place to do, I pressed on into the darkness. Each kilometer of mountain road weighed on both my eyelids and my mood. Somewhere outside of Ashburton, the critical point was reached. The road that my rudimentary directions said I should continue following snaked off towards the left, back the way I had come. A road continued straight, towards the mountains, but it wasn’t state highway 77, which was the single sheet of legal-sized paper said I was supposed to follow.
I wouldn’t need a GPS, I had told myself back at home.
I slowed the car down, unsure of what I was supposed to do. I slammed the steering wheel with the flat palm of my hand, hoping for some sort of navigational insight. I continued straight, figuring in my sleep-deprived mind that if I continued to head towards the mountains that I’d eventually find the extremely specific trail junction where I needed to leave this box of food. A few hundred meters down the deserted road I stopped, turned around, and went back. I performed the same cursory exploration of the other option, hoping for a sign that said something like “This Way For Te Araroa Food Drops For Underprepared Americans”. There was no such sign, and I returned to Ashburton, continuing to curse under my breath the whole way.
I sat in the McDonald’s there, walking in circles. Once that got old, I’d sit down at a table and look around the room for a few seconds before moving to a different table. I still couldn’t accept the fact that I wouldn’t be starting a record-breaking run the next day; the concept of going back empty-handed to those back home who I had told about the run terrified me. I posted an extremely pessimistic and forlorn status on Facebook, packed up my stuff, and started the long, miserable trip back south. I looked at the two big boxes of food on the backseat and almost laughed out loud at myself.
A photo of the author doing what he loves.
I arrived back at the Invercargill airport only an hour late to drop off the car, completely distraught. My gut reaction was to call up the airline to get my ticket changed and get on the first plane out of there, back home. I knew that I was in New Zealand and probably should take advantage of the time I had, since I was already here and had the time off from work. Perhaps it was the embarrassment of what had happened, the abject disappointment and the mounting recognition of failure that grew stronger with time. I spent more time than seems necessary on a pay phone trying to work out with Virgin Australia how much it would cost to get me on the next outbound flight to Christchurch. The price tag of leaving made me pause and reexamine my options. It seemed I couldn’t afford to leave and couldn’t afford to stay.
I walked out the deserted airport drive into town, thinking the walk would clear my head and finally be able to conceive of the possibility of some kind of solution. The road was wet and I didn’t know what to do. For months I had been preparing for and training for a run that hadn’t even gotten off the ground. I walked to the library and turned on my phone. I was pretty humbled by the amount of Facebook love my pessimistic post had gotten. Many of my friends were thoughtful enough to hazard an encouraging comment, and some messaged me directed to offer some words of support.
Most of the people who messaged me reiterated my overall feeling on the merits of setting challenging goals and reaching as far as possible outside of our comfort zones. Some, conversely, told me that I set goals that were too challenging and put too much pressure on myself. Sitting there in the lobby of that public library, agonizing over my decision and over my failure, I could see the merits of both of these perspectives. I tried to think of a Facebook status that would sound artistic and intellectual and explored the importance of failure while not leaving me open to rude comments from friends that questioned my resolve, ability, or manhood. I couldn’t think of anything.
I was pretty hard on myself during the few hours of soul-searching and self-punishment that followed. My ego refused to acknowledge that I had committed to something that was, that day, out of my reach, which just transitioned into me being angry at myself for telling people I was going to do this big thing and then messing it up. I wanted to run back home and hide in obscurity until everyone I knew forgot I had been talking about a trip to New Zealand, but I knew if I did that I’d be unable to fight the boredom. The thought of staying on the South Island and doing a shorter hike by myself was out of the question, due perhaps to my terror at committing to something else I might fail at. Only the middle ground was the way forward, so I bought a one-way ticket towards Wellington and a bus ticket to Turangi, where a friend of mine was living and working as a raft guide.
A trip that was meant to be a broad, expansive tour of the entirety of the island became a focused study of one town, next to one mountain and one river, where I’d spend two weeks with one friend in one farmhouse. The farm lay on the side of a mountain on the banks of the massive Lake Taupo.
Self-doubt bounced around in my head as the small prop plane crossed the Cook Strait over to the North Island, but it was starting to become a good trip again, all on its own. Without an agenda or any daily mileage targets, I ran in the hills surrounding the town, purely for my own pleasure. I won’t go as far as trying to inject some kind of falling-in-love-with-running-again metaphor, but I will say that it was much more pleasant than running to trail for some abstract, remote record attempt. Two weeks flew by with the pleasant company of friends that I hadn’t seen in a while and probably would have missed if I had finished the run. I was again in good spirits when the bus took me back south and the ferry crossed the strait, heading towards my flight home.
The plane took off on time from Nelson with me on it. I felt good about what had happened. I hadn’t run the south island, but that attempt felt months away. A friend had once told me that developing an athletic injury is just the universe telling you to slow down a bit and refocus on the basics, but that can probably be said about any failure. As my flight gained and altitude and banked towards home, though, I was making notes on things to change for the next time I come back to New Zealand and make that trail mine.
Follow the story of a family of five as they backpack over 2000 miles from Georgia to Maine.
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Boy Scouts tackle the Olympic range – from rainforest to snowy divide – in lightweight style.
I grew up in Seattle. I learned backpacking skills in the Olympics, and it’s where I cut my teeth as a trekking and mountain guide in the early 1990s.
It was in the Olympics where I first learned about packrafting log-choked, glacier-fed, ice cold rivers. It was in the Olympics where I first learned about real bushwhacking and infectious slopes of slide alder and devil’s club. It was in the Olympics where I first learned about glacier travel, postholing, talus, bears in camp, and navigating with a map and compass in the fog.
And of course, it was in the Olympics where I first learned how to manage severely inclement weather – interminable rain, fog, and sleet – and the penetrating, chilling humidity that makes synthetic fill gear so valuable there ten months out of the year.
It was in the Olympics where my love for the outdoors evolved from youthful passion into something less glamorous but more mature – an appreciation for all of what Mother Nature had to offer, in all of her inglorious adversity, uncertainty, and mood swings.
Blue Glacier, preparing for a Mount Olympus climb. Photo: Stephanie Jordan, August 1990.
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Much of the Olympics remained unexplored until the early part of the 20th century. Many summits and off piste routes were pioneered by ambitious Boy Scouts and “Hikemasters” (i.e., trek leaders) walking out of Camp Parsons, situated between the deltas of the Quilcene and Dosewallips rivers.
In 1987 I would join the Camp Parsons Staff, and within a few years would carry the Hikemaster moniker with a later generation of Boy Scouts keen on exploring the range’s glaciers, slide alder, and talus.
Parsons Boys on a Mount Constance trek, 1921. Photo courtesy of the Camp Parsons Museum.
In 1990 I’d start dating the Camp Director’s daughter, a fellow staffer. She ran the trading post, had a perm, and seemed strangely attractive … in a Boy Scout uniform.
In 1991 Stephanie and I would embark on our second Olympic mountain hike together – a trip up the Quinault River valley to Mount Anderson and the iconic (and now-endangered) Enchanted Valley Chalet. A little over a year later, we’d marry.
In 1998, our first son, Chase, was born. In 2004, he’d join Scouting. In 2011, he’d visit Camp Parsons for the first time. In 2013, he too, would explore the Olympics with some of his pals as part of the Camp Parsons high adventure program, and follow in the footsteps of Boy Scouts from Parsons who have been walking the Olympics for more than 90 years.
We Jordans have a storied history with Camp Parsons and the Olympics. We have the Enchanted Valley Chalet painted on a milk can that resides in our home.
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In late June of 2013, we’d take a group of Scouts from Bozeman, Montana to a trailhead near Forks, Washington, and begin a trek through the Olympic rainforest. This photo essay presents a few highlights from the trek and hopefully, captures the spirit of Scouting, and the Olympics, in an inspiring way.
Crew Leader Chase Jordan prepares the duty roster for the week. Each crew member would have assigned responsibilities daily, including navigating, cooking, firebuilding, water treatment, food storage and bear bagging, camp cleanup, and erecting the shelters. These responsibilities would rotate daily. These are critical components of what Scouting calls “The Patrol Method” and are designed to foster responsibility and accountability.
Honoring the raising of the United States flag the morning we left. Camp Parsons has a long (if somewhat interrupted) tradition of having the high adventure Scouts wear their loaded packs to flag ceremonies. The purpose of this is twofold: to promote the high adventure program in a visible way to younger campers, and of course, to show the rest of the camp that there’s no room for weenies in the high adventure program – “Stand up straight, give a proper salute, and stop complaining about your heavy pack,” the Hikemaster would say.
One of the most difficult challenges to overcome in Scouting is that of getting rid of hiking boots for expedition trekking. The primary resistance comes from old guard adult leaders who are intolerant of change or the recognition that perhaps there is a better way today. Twenty years ago, we’d disqualify a Scout on a high adventure trek for not having sturdy, waterproof boots. Currently, I serve as the Program Director for the Montana High Adventure Base (MOHAB). At MOHAB, we disqualify Scouts for not having well-draining (i.e., non-waterproof!) trail running shoes (at least for our long distance, advanced programs).
When I was a Camp Parsons hikemaster, I immediately decommissioned the brand new geodesic dome tents that were donated by a thoughtful donor and replaced them with blue poly tarps from the local hardware store. They were lighter, drier, cheaper to maintain, rewarded good pitching skills (and penalized bad ones!) and fostered better group dynamics because we could fit a whole patrol of boys under them. Not much has changed today except the technology. I’m still a fan of using large, lightweight floorless shelters that can house a bunch of boys and require them to use some thought and skill in pitching them.
Ian Engelbech, a modern-day Camp Parsons hikemaster, still doing what a hikemaster is supposed to do: mentor the Crew Leader and let the Crew Leader lead his crew. In 2013, I missed being the hikemaster (instead being relegated to a passive observant) but immensely enjoyed a new generation of hikemaster and Scout learning to appreciate the art of expeditioning.
Trekking past massive Douglas Fir in the Olympic rainforest of the Hoh River Valley. For us in the northern Rockies, “old-growth” means little when you’re constantly surrounded by twiggy lodgepole pine forest. So when our boys were exposed to these massive bastions of the Olympic backcountry, they felt like they were on another planet.
Early mornings bring eerie light to the Olympic rainforest. Moss coats every limb and reflects light in all directions. Sunlight doesn’t burn hot on the rainforest floor, filtered by the innumerable ecosystems defined solely by tree elevation.
The core of Scouting high adventure programs is threefold: cultivate positive group dynamics, expedition leadership, and advanced skills. Backpacking skills that emphasize weight-saving philosophy, techniques, and equipment must be foundational to an advanced backcountry skills program. No heavy pump style water filters for this group.
High adventure – expedition trekking – is work, especially for those tasked with positions of leadership. Long days and late nights are the norm rather than the exception if you plan to tackle an expedition of any difficulty (and thus, real reward). Here, the next day’s Navigator reviews route options with the Crew Leader at 11PM, after everyone else has gone to bed.
Boys have an incredible gift at finding fun in the moment in the midst of toil. Drumming with a bear canister at a camp on the Hoh River.
Summit peanut butter, a Camp Parsons tradition. I learned from the hikemaster that I trained under, that any summit worth climbing must be climbed with an ice axe, and that any summit achieved in such style shall be celebrated by marrying the pick of the axe to a jar of peanut butter. That lesson was instilled in me 25 years ago. I passed it down to these summiteers atop Bogachiel Peak in 2013. I’m confident the tradition will continue.
Steep tundra and prolific snow characterized our early-July route from C.B. Flats to the Sol Duc Valley. It was over this difficult terrain where I learned about the need to keep pack weight insanely light back in the 1980s. We used to circle our high adventure Scouts around a trash can in the Camp Parsons parade field, with their gear laid before them. The hikemasters would then walk around the circle and, with great compassion for the future suffering the Scouts would endure, remove bits of their kit and toss them into the garbage can (from where they could retrieve them at the end of their trek). Doing this successfully allowed us to keep pack weights below 25 pounds for a 5-day trek in the 1980s. Not much has changed today, except that we’ve replaced the garbage can with a more objective tool: a gear checklist and a scale.
A Scout climbs back up a steep snow slope after losing his footing and sliding down it several yards before self-arresting with a shortened trekking pole. We did not equip everyone with an ice axe (like the old days). Instead, we equipped them with a more useful, and lighter tool (a trekking pole) and taught them how to use it effectively for snow travel in steep terrain.
Traversing the snowy High Divide, thankful for no rain and infinite visibility.
Descending the High Divide with the Mount Carrie massif looming ahead.
Searching for confirmation of our arrival at Sol Duc Park on our last night.
The majestic sentinel of the Olympic Range – Mount Olympus – as seen from a high slope above C.B. Flats on the Hoh Lake Trail.
The Camp Parsons Silver Marmot High Adventure Program, Week #1, 2013. Hoh River to Sol Duc via High Divide.
This trip would not have been possible without the advocacy of the parents of each one of the participating Scouts, and their belief in the value of high adventure for their boys. In addition, our travel was funded in part by generous donations from many Parsons staff alumni, Adventure Medical Kits, American Tactical Construction, Redmon Law Firm, Chief Seattle Council BSA, and many others who supported a crowdfunding campaign that has resulted in the movie “Where the Mountains Meet the Sea”, a film about the Camp Parsons Silver Marmot High Adventure Program that will be premiered this fall.
Ryan Jordan and his Parsons-bred wife Stephanie are the co-founders of backpackinglight.com. Ryan is an Eagle Scout, and has served as a Scoutmaster. Ryan and Stephanie are the chartering sponsors for BSA Venturing Crew One of Bozeman, Montana, and the Program Director for the Montana High Adventure Base. Venturing Crew One, whose membership includes seven members of the Olympic trek featured in this story, recently completed a 13-day, 105-mile packrafting expedition in the Bob Marshall Wilderness without resupply. Read the trip blog at Ryan’s website.
Making your own gear is a frustrating and expensive yet very rewarding process. Making your own pack allows you to tailor it to your needs and is a fantastic way to learn about gear.
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As customers of the outdoor industry we want to know which gear works the best. Using open source hardware is a great way to evaluate our gear choices.
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While moleskin still is an effective means to treating hot spots and blisters, new technology is emerging that is far more effective at treating sore feet.
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Review the current offerings in the packraft market and find out which boats are most appropriate for a variety of purposes including alpine lake fishing, incidental river crossings, flatwater boating, expedition packrafting, and whitewater paddling.
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Follow the story of a family of five as they backpack over 2000 miles from Georgia to Maine.
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The Jetboil Joule is a high-volume cooking system that performs very well in ambient conditions; however more testing in cold conditions is needed to asses its overall performance.
The Jetboil Joule cooking system is a liquid-feed canister, high-volume cooking system.
Liquid feed canister systems take advantage of the canister in an inverted configuration to deliver liquid fuel to the burner, in contrast to upright canister systems, which deliver fuel as vaporized gas to the burner.
The Jetboil Joule is an inverted canister, liquid-feed, integrated stove system that includes a 2.5L pot with an integrated heat exchanger.
The primary advantage of a liquid feed canister system is that it offers better cold weather performance, since the vapor pressure in the canister isn’t changing while the stove is operating.
In the Jetboil Joule system, the canister is inverted, with the liquid feed tube exiting from the bottom of the stove and controlled by the wire valve. The entire canister-fuel delivery/control unit is contained in a cage that provides stability, as well as simplicity of form and function. Most inverted canister stove systems require the canister to be remotely detached from the stove unit.
In upright canister systems, as the vapor pressure in the canister decreases, the canister temperature decreases, and the rate of fuel delivery to the burner decreases.
Thus, upright canister systems don’t work so well in the cold, or for boiling large volumes of water at cooler ambient temperatures.
The Jetboil Joule attempts to solve this problem not only by inverting the canister, but also by preheating the liquid fuel before it hits the burner, which allows it to maintain power in cold temperatures.
The tube that feeds liquid fuel to the burner is preheated by the burner, thus vaporizing the fuel as it leaves the burner head for efficient combustion. This design is commonly used in other liquid fuel (e.g., white gas) stoves.
In addition to the inverted canister configuration and the preheated liquid fuel delivery tube, the Jetboil Joule pot has an integrated heat exchanger, which allows for more efficient heating of the pot, and greater fuel efficiency.
The Joule offers a 2.5L pot with an integrated heat exchanger. Our testing has shown time and again that integrated heat exchangers that have large surface areas with the heat exchanger fins in direct contact with the cooking pot bottom offer significant fuel efficiency gains.
The other unique feature of the Jetboil Joule is that it’s an integrated system that consists only of two parts – the stove base and the pot – which connect to each other to make one solid unit during operation.
There are no separate parts such as windscreens, fuel pumps, or external heat exchangers, and the entire stove unit – with an attached fuel canister, nests neatly into the pot for space efficient storage.
The approximate pot volume of the Jetboil Joule is 2.5 L – just about the right size for melting snow for a 2 or 3 person cook group, or for three season cooking with groups of 3 to 5 people.
Not including the weight of fuel canisters, we verified the weight of the entire system (stove base + pot) as 27.6 oz.
| Stove Weight | Pot Weight | Total System Weight | Nominal Water Capacity [1] | Inside Pot Dimensions | |
| MSR Reactor 2.5L | 6.3 oz | 14.9 oz | 21.2 oz | 72 oz (2.1 L) | 6.875 in (dia) x 4.375 in (height) |
| Jetboil Joule | 11.7 oz | 15.9 oz | 27.6 oz | 88 oz (2.6 L) | 6.125 in (dia) x 6.0 in (height) |
[1] Nominal water capacity was calculated as the amount of water that the pot can hold up to a point 0.75 in below the top rim of the pot.
Other features of note include a lid that serves as a pasta strainer, a silicone-coated folding handle that contains the system when packed away, a piezo-electric igniter, a neoprene pot cozy that helps the system retain heat during cooking, and enough fine fuel line control to be able to simmer foods at low heat.
Using the Jetboil Joule simply involves removing the stove base, attaching a fuel canister, filling the pot with water, attaching the pot to the stove base, opening the fuel line valve, and clicking the piezo-electric igniter to light the stove.
Setup is even easier the second time around, because the fuel canister can remain attached to the stove base until it empties and needs to be changed out with a new canister.
Let’s compare the Jetboil Joule with another integrated canister stove system, the MSR Reactor with its 2.5 L pot (note that the Reactor system is an upright, or gas-feed system, as opposed to the Joule, which is an inverted, or liquid-feed system).
For the purpose of this baseline test, both system pots were filled with 72 oz (2.1 L) of 55 deg F tap water. The test was performed indoors at an ambient temperature of 65 deg F. Boil times represent the time to a rolling boil. The tests were performed at an altitude of 4,750 feet above sea level. All other test procedures were based on the test description in the Lightweight Stove Systems for Group Cooking series. See Table 2 for the results.
| Water Volume Boiled (L) | Boil Time (mm:ss) | Fuel Consumed (g) | Canister Capacity (# Pots Boiled Per 8 oz net Canister) | Fuel Efficiency (g of fuel consumed per L boiled) | |
| MSR Reactor | 72 oz (2.1 L) | 12:30 | 20 g | 11.4 pots (23.9 L) | 9.5 g / L |
| Jetboil Joule | 72 oz (2.1 L) | 5:45 | 20 g | 11.4 pots (23.9 L) | 9.5 g / L |
I have to admit that I was pleasantly shocked by the Joule’s operating efficiency. A blisteringly fast boil time for a large volume of water, a system that was easy to setup and operate, and nesting storage that allowed the fuel canister to remain attached are its strong points.
The canister can remain attached to the stove unit and stowed inside the pot for simple storage and easy setup the next time it’s used.
We’ll reserve our review rating pending long term testing of cold weather performance, a more detailed evaluation of the stove’s design, engineering, and construction, and consideration of its carbon monoxide production.
But for now, there’s a lot to like about the simplicity and fast boil times from the Jetboil Joule, especially for group cooking that requires larger water volumes.
Delmar O’Donnell conducted a poll of BPL readers and teamed with Roger Caffin to relay the results which tell a lot about the BPL demographic and their backpacking preferences.
On the 23 of June 2014 Delmar decided to run a simple poll of BPL readers on what they actually carried. Over 170 responses were received: more than expected. This article summarises the responses.
On the 23 of June 2014 Delmar decided to run a casual poll of BPL readers to answer ten gear questions he had. Figuring people might be willing to answer twenty questions (the polling site could handle more than ten), he asked BPL Forumites to suggest ten more questions, and he included the first group that were submitted. Delmar thought he might get 20 or 30 people responding to the poll, total, but was surprised when scores of participants took it, yielding interesting data. By the end over 170 responses had been received. This article summarizes the responses. Since so many people have contributed to this survey, we have made it an ‘open to all’ article, and published it as quickly as we can.
Why has it been done this way? Delmar posted the following in the Forum thread about this survey:
Friends, this survey has generated more interest than I was expecting. I contacted Roger and asked him if BPL would like the data and graphics when finished. Roger asked me if I’d be willing to write the results into a BPL article. I think I’m far too inexperienced a backpacker to write a good article for a sophisticated audience as we have here, so I declined, and asked Roger if he’d like to write an article instead, based on the data being gathered. He said OK. So I’m shipping the data and graphics to Roger and crew, and you can expect a BPL article with the results sometime after the poll closes. The BPL staff will be able to add deeper and more significant commentary and interpretation than I could hope to.
I am leaving the BPL staff with a couple of difficult to interpret variables by the way I asked some of the questions. For example, it’s difficult to tell which maps people are using based on the way I set up the options, and by allowing multiple choices. (Allowing multiple choices always make the interpretation more complicated.) So the staff will be doing the best they can with the imperfect survey I whipped together. I mention this by way of saying: don’t blame BPL staff for some of the inevitable ambiguity in the results. They’re just working with the survey I wrote. A few interpretation issues aside, there is (to me at least, and Roger seems to think so too) some really interesting data here. So I hope you will enjoy the data when it’s published.
So, without further ado, here are the results. There are three sections: the first covers Gear, the second covers Locale etc, and the third gives a couple of cross-correlations. I did look at doing more cross-correlations, but they turned out to be not really meaningful: the questions were not sufficiently tightly specified in this simple poll. So I have chosen to avoid ‘over-analyzing’ the data.
As to the individual bars in the graphs – you need to interpret them correctly. Look at ‘Pack Size’ for instance: the first bar is labeled ’30’ – that means 0 – 30 L. The next bar is labeled 40: that means 30 – 40 L, and so on. The final bar is labeled > – that means more than the previous bar. The vertical axis shows how many responses there were in that category. On the other hand, graphs like ‘Shelter’ are interpreted differently. The first bar, labeled ‘bivy’ shows that just 5 people ticked this box. About 61 people ticked ‘tent single wall’. And that is about it.
What this article does not cover are the comments some added to their answers. There were some good suggestions for questions there for next time. Noted. A few people pointed out that too many categories were ‘single-choice’ and did not allow for people using different gear for different trips. True – but it started as a very casual survey.
From here on, ‘editorial’ comments are the sole responsibility of Roger, so you know where to pour your wrath. I will add here though that we do not know just how representative the 170+ respondents are of the whole BPL community. If you disagree with the conclusions – did you fill in the survey?
A few responses were clearly in cubic inches so they were converted. No-one carries a 1500 L pack!
Clearly, most readers prefer to use a pack with a decent capacity. Does this mean that many of us carry packs with an internal frame, despite the great PR which tiny frameless Cuben packs have received? It would seem very possible. Maybe that is because an internal frame pack is so much more comfortable to wear when it has more than a few kg in it? Mind you, pack Base Weights (next) are not that high.
I will add that my wife likes a large pack even though she keeps the weight down. She has several reasons for this. The first is that her large pack fits her torso really well, so that despite its higher weight it seems to carry more easily. Yes, I do keep offering her lighter packs, but none of them have fitted as well. And ‘fit’ matters! The second is that she finds it harder to reach things in a smaller pack where everything is packed in tightly. Trying to find a packet of biscuits somewhere down there for a much-needed snack in pouring rain can become ‘too hard’. Finally, on some trips (especially long ones in Europe) she needs the volume so she can pack food safely – like loaves of fresh bread and half a kg of cheese bought in a small shop for lunches for the next few days. Squashing that sort of stuff down is just not smart. I know I keep saying it is only weight which matters – but sometimes that is not so.
We measure pack volume in Liters, but Base Weight is still expressed in pounds – at least here. Sigh.
Well, the UL ideal is somewhere between 5 lb and 10 lb, so clearly a lot of us don’t quite reach that Nirvana – although a few did! But let’s be very realistic here: if you are going up in the mountains during shoulder seasons, SUL gear is just not going to hack it. OK, Ryan Jordan did manage it once in the snow, but he had zero room for the unexpected – which happened. That said, a 12 lb Base Weight for shoulder seasons is not bad, especially up in the mountains. It seems to me that 35 lb Base Weights are fairly common among the uneducated, even for weekend walks in the lowlands. But, keep trying!
This covers pretty much the full range of shelters. Bias and opinion rage on. A category which was not included was that of a bivy bag under a tarp. We had a few who wrote that one in. Some others were not sure what category a ‘tarptent’ fell under: for the most part I have called them single-walled tents.
The UL hype is often focused on bivies and hammocks and tarps – but it seems that tents remain very popular. This may, or may not, reflect on where readers camp. I note that cowboy camping (groundsheet and no shelter) and hammocks are low in volume, suggesting that many are going higher in the mountains where these may not be realistic. Of course, as you all know, I am biased in favor of single and double-wall tunnel tents for two people.
Two factors were not covered in this question, making interpretation difficult. The first is whether the shelter in mind is for one person or two. Obviously a bivy will be for just one person, but what about a tent? Yes, a tent may be heavier – unless the weight is shared (in principle) between two. My summer tunnel tent weighs 1.26 kg, which sounds heavy, but that is for two people and works fine in very wet weather. 630 grams per person is very reasonable, and think of the comfort and convenience! But Sue says I snore.
What I cannot tell from this data is just how many of the ‘double wall tents’ are really just a single wall tent with a bug-net inside. There are a lot of such designs on the American market, but few (if any) genuine double-skin tents. So we have some uncertainty here.
This one covers pretty much the full range of warmth layers. It does not cover mats of any sort, which is a pity. Next time maybe. We started with three categories here: down quilt, down sleeping bag and synthetic sleeping bag. The option of a synthetic quilt was not included at the start, but 7 people ‘wrote them in’, so we have included that number as well. Each option allowed for ‘summer’ gear (above freezing) and ‘colder’ gear.
This was most interesting. I am sure many readers will have come from a traditional background and could be expected to still have down sleeping bags, but it seems that good down quilts have really gone mainstream. In a way, that is very gratifying for BPL. Owners of sleeping bags should always remember that they can use a ‘bag’ as a quilt if they want, by just not doing the zip up. In fact, once converted to quilt-use, you might want to consider removing that heavy zip. I did.
A subject beloved of a very large part of our technical readership: stoves! And their alternatives.
Let’s deal with the obvious loser first: liquid fuel stoves running on white gas. Given their huge weight penalty and very high cost, their low score is no surprise – and is thoroughly merited. Definitely dinosaur territory. Interestingly, wood fires fare not much better. Exactly why this is so I am not sure, although I note several problems with them: mess, smoke, lack of wood in high mountains and increasingly, fire hazard regions.
The we have alcohol stoves and ESBIT stoves. I admit to some surprise at how many use ESBIT, given the mess you get on the underside of your pot, but perhaps the ease of use (and very low initial cost) explains its popularity. OK, it works. Alky stoves fare better than ESBIT, as might be expected at BPL.
But the real surprise is the way canister use towers way above the others.
Perhaps the speed/power and ease of use of small upright canister stoves explains this. Yeah, I am biased, but you can see why.
This is an interesting one, and some of the captions need some interpretation.
I will admit to considerable surprise over the popularity of ‘Jacket 1’. Given the weight and cost of Gore-Tex I was expecting to see this much lower in popularity. I was also a bit surprised at the number of entries for ‘Jacket 4’. On the other hand, I had expected to see far more entries for ‘Poncho’ (which I assume includes ‘capes’), given they way they are discussed so often. Strange.
I will comment here that the phrase ‘not breathable but zip ventilated’ is a bit naive in my humble opinion. I know arm-pit zips feature in many advertisements, but few find they work under serious conditions. On the other hand, a wide-open zip down the front certainly helps. But ‘breathable’ is a bit of a joke anyhow: check where your packs rides against your back. Ha! My solution here is a poncho over my pack.
The entries for rain kilt and rain pants do not surprise me if they relate to up in the mountains. There are times when bad weather is just bad! We carry rain pants as appropriate.
This item contains a few surprises, although the zero entries for ‘nuclear’ does not surprise me. I wonder what Delmar was thinking here?
I had expected to see much higher scores for chemical treatments, but clearly many people are not happy with the whole idea. I will admit that my wife and I have gone off it as well, despite how light it can be. I had expected to see more entries for UV treatment (i.e. Steripen), but it is fairly new and maybe many are still ‘not sure’ about that one.
What did also surprise me at first was the huge popularity for ‘filters’, but I think this needs interpretation. The older pumped filters are definitely dying: MSR seems to have had a really bad run of failures here. I don’t know why. On the other hand, it seems likely that the Sawyer gravity filters are really popular, and one can see why: low cost, long life, light weight, and easy to use. More on filters another day soon. A few people pointed out that they combined a filter (which does not handle viruses) with a simple chemical (which does).
Finally, there is a small contingent which does not treat their water at all. While we do carry a Steripen, most of the time we don’t treat our water at all these days. We are just a bit careful about sources.
This item really contains several alternatives. There’s the perennial argument about compass vs. GPS of course, but also there are different sources for maps (in America). I cannot comment on map sources.
I am seriously gratified to see that map and compass remains so very popular. Compasses do not run out of batteries, and with a map you can see a long way around you. I am sure GPSs have some uses, but they do not replace decent navigation skills among our readers. And I am pleased to see that quite a few also use an altimeter.
An amusing and fun subject, this one. It was suggested by Doug I, so Delmar included it. I do not know what to make of the “don’t poop” category, so I will ignore it (and the suffering).
I know there are some like Andrew Skurka who advocate going without TP, but I can’t help feeling that the hazards are just too great. For a start, finding anything soft or smooth in the Australian bush is highly unlikely, and I suspect the same applies in most other places too. But more importantly in my opinion is the potential health hazard created by possible contamination on your hands when you don’t use TP. The risk has got to be many, many times higher, and I do not think the risks are worth it. Finally, I still can’t see what the fuss about the weight of a little bit of TP is all about. A mouthful of water would weigh more.
Then we have the highly charged issue of what to do with the TP. I know there are some places, like at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where special conditions (pack everything solid out) have to apply, but those places are rare. If you use your eyes in the bush you will soon realize that there are animals around, and those animals poo everywhere. I do not believe that burying your poo does any damage to the bush at all – in remote areas. There is of course the problem of very popular areas where hundreds of people camp. Fortunately, these days the various ‘authorities’ have put in pit toilets or fly-out environmental ones.
But what about the TP? Well, anyone who lives on a farm or uses a septic tank system knows full well that TP decomposes quite quickly, so in my opinion burying it makes a whole lot of sense. That is: burying it: leaving your TP on the surface is simply uncouth and vulgar, and should be condemned. Burning your TP is not recommended in fire-prone areas anyhow!
This whole category was suggested by some BPL readers. There are some important items in this list (collection), along with some ‘not so important’.
For me, the most important item here is Pillow. You are going to spend somewhere between 8 and 12 hours lying down, hopefully asleep. You use a pillow at home to help you get a good night’s sleep: surely the same applies when you are camping? So Sue and I always carry some sort of pillow. However, there are nearly 100 entries here for a pillow, but there are over 170 respondents to this survey. What do the other 70 or so do? I suspect that many of them make up a pillow out of a stuff sack and spare clothing or gear, but didn’t count that as ‘carrying a pillow’ per se. Maybe some always sleep on their backs and don’t need a pillow. We cannot tell, but we can say that more than half of our respondents deem a pillow sufficiently important that the weight is justified.
The next most popular item is a Smart Phone. I don’t even own one, so I may not be qualified to comment. If the trip takes the walker out of range of the towers, one wonders why bother. Some I know carry maps on their smart phone; some use the pseudo (or real) GPS function for navigation, some use the phone as a camera, and some may need to carry the phone to get ‘permission’ to spend some days away from home. Keeps the SO happy you know. I can’t argue with the last one.
This one is a bit contentious: oh well. What the ‘wheels’ category was about I do not know: wheeled Zimmer frames maybe? Anyhow, I asked Delmar why he included ‘wheels’ and he answered “Comic relief. This is probably the most light-hearted survey I’ve ever run. What’s amusing is that every once in a while, someone chooses the silly option in most surveys. But not here … I guess poles and staffs are dead serious subject matter.” To be sure!
Delmar added to the above: “This question was the main reason I ran the survey. I just purchased my first set of trekking poles and was trying to decide whether to carry one or two. So I figured I’d ask the BPL collective. Got my answer!”
Here I have to admit to being in a minority: we don’t carry trekking poles in Australia. There are two main reasons why we (most Australian walkers) don’t: we have never needed them in the past, and they can be an absolute nuisance in the Australian bush anyhow. They just get in the way in the scrub. My biased opinion is that they are a great triumph of marketing spin over common sense – at least in most cases. It is interesting that medical research has shown that you expend more energy when using poles than when going without. However, if you have damaged knees they can be nice to have on long steep downhill sections.
All that said, they can be of use when travelling over snow and ice, and my wife sometimes takes an ultra-light carbon fibre one in the Alps in Europe for that reason. Under those conditions I usually take one of Steve’s CF/Ti ice axes.
This is mainly an American thing, for dealing with bears (and may be raccoons etc?). Overseas readers may safely pass by. The ‘sleep with’ category had the phrase ‘Platonic relationship’ tacked on, while the other one had ‘alternative relationship’. Some humor. What more can I say?
So where do all the BPL respondents live and walk? Well, no surprise: mainly in North America, and mainly on the West Coast. The fine dry summers of the South West must have something to do with its popularity – both for walking and for living. No-one in Antarctica though.
Ken Thompson is responsible for this question: how keen are our readers to go walking? One measure might be how far you are willing to travel, and the range is wide. There are those who can just about walk out the door (we have done that a few times ourselves), those for whom a drive of a few hours is normal (done that often enough), all the way to those willing to travel many, many hours for their ‘fix’. Australia to Europe is a minimum of 24 hours, and it seems we are not alone. But 1 to 4 hours seems most common.
The first few respondents to this question had to answer in hours, but this was soon changed to minutes. I have converted as appropriate.
Another two measures of keenness are numbers of nights out per year and maximum length of trips. I have put these two together here.
Maximum nights out spreads right across the board, from just 4 nights to, well, more than half the year. Obviously a lot of you are very keen. I suspect that many of you may be constrained by jobs and family from being out more: been there ourselves.
In a way, nights out correlates with trip lengths. Many of you have done quite long trips – hundreds of miles. A few are clocking far longer trips: that has got to mean many nights out of course. Gear is getting a good workout!
Finally, we have Elevation and Climate, a suggestion from Ito Jakuchu. You will have noticed that single and ‘double’-skin tents and down gear rated to >32 F scored quite highly, as did the use of canister stoves. Here we see a lot of you going over 6,000′ or 2,000 m. I am sure those are correlated, but the statistics are not meaningful with the way the questions were asked. I guess the idea of relying on a summer quilt or bag, a small tarp and an ESBIT stove at 9,000′ in the shoulder season somehow lacks appeal. I wonder why? Sure – you can get away with it sometimes, but mountain weather … is variable.
Finally, one can note that dry weather is favored by the majority, but moderate wet weather did not score low. Here I suspect the BPL readership may differ slightly from the mainstream, which will be focused very much on ‘mod/dry’ conditions. I can understand the hot/dry contingent as well: desert walking can take you to some fascinating places. On the other hand, while I don’t mind cold/dry, I have to express some admiration for those who handle cold/wet. To be sure, it can be managed – with the right gear and some skill.
This is a very short section as the questions were not sufficiently tightly worded. However, we can offer two.
It seems that tents may be associated with colder conditions: 62 people used a tent of some sort with down sleeping gear rated for below freezing, while only 35 used a tent of some sort with down gear rated for above freezing. That would seem logical, although there were twice as many 32 F ones, so the correlation may not be that strong.
This most interesting graph shows how many people use a GPS as a function of the length of their longest trip. There were 22 people in the first bar (up to 10 miles), 18 in the second bar (10 – 20 miles), 2 people in the 40 – 80 miles category, and so on. It would seem that people who do long trips simply don’t bother with a GPS at all. This fits with my experience – and the batteries don’t last that long anyhow.
Follow the story of a family of five as they backpack over 2000 miles from Georgia to Maine.
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Getting outdoors often makes all the difference, and a long expedition can go a long way to transforming your life.
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Canyoneering is challenging as it offers an opportunity to tackle a variety of terrain using new gear. Combining canyoneering with backpacking is a recipe for a legendary trip.
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Hand Propelled Vessels are banned in Yellowstone National Park. This is in direct violation of the Park’s founding principles. Not only should HPVs be allowed on Yellowstone’s waterways but their presence will improve the health of the ecosystem.
Ryan Jordan, the author’s dad, packrafting on Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park.
In 2012, several kayakers illegally attempted a run of the Yellowstone River. This endeavor lead to a helicopter, horseback, and foot pursuit through the Yellowstone River’s Black Canyon. The kayakers were fined $5,000 each and were banned from Yellowstone National Park (YNP). After the appeal to the District Court of Montana, their sentence was twenty-five dollars apiece, a lifetime ban from YNP and the closing statement, “Do not bring this frivolity into my courtroom again” (Ammons). Doug Ammons and the rest of the kayaking community are not the only groups unjustly affected by the ban. The canoeing and packrafting communities also suffer. This “frivolous” ban on boating on the rivers of YNP is contrary to the legislature governing the administration of the Park and is a violation of the principles on which YNP was founded.
The prohibition of paddling is inconsistent with legislative documents promoting the principle of the enjoyment of the populous. The earliest document demonstrating this principle was the Dedication Act of 1872. This act created and described YNP as a “pleasuring-ground”, and states that one of the purposes of the Park is to provide “for the enjoyment of the people” (Dilsaver; MacDonald). Additionally, this same goal is stated in YNP’s Strategic Plan, which says that the Yellowstone is set aside for the satisfaction of the current and future generations (Menard, et al 4). The prohibition on Hand Propelled Vessels (HPVs) is in direct violation of this principle which is expressed in each document because of the rarity of conflicts resulting from multiple user types and rarity of discrimination.
Social scientists have determined that user conflicts occur rarely and when they do occur, they seldom have a detrimental effect on the enjoyment levels of recreators. In a study conducted in Rattlesnake National Recreation Area, near Missoula, MT, where high instances of conflict between hikers and mountain bikers were thought to occur, less than 20% of the perceived conflicts resulted from actual behavior. In fact, both the backcountry cyclists and the hikers agreed that the perceived conflicts rarely affected the group or person’s experience and their enjoyment (Watson, Williams, and Daigle 68-69). Therefore, it is sensible to reach the conclusion that conflicts between paddlers and fishermen while floating or trail users during portages would only be perceived and would not negatively affect the enjoyment of the populous of Park users. In fact, this data suggests that paddling is not inconsistent with the Park’s goals, and allows paddling to be considered for recreational purposes.
However, because this ban is in place, a significant segment of recreationalists feels discriminated against. In fact, 10.2 million Americans kayak and 20.6 million Americans canoe (Vonk 26). This segment of the American populous totals over 30 million people, not including packrafters and Adirondack paddlers, among many other types of paddling; and the discrimination against this large group of users should be minimized. The allowance of HPVs on Park rivers would minimize this discrimination and would enhance how YNP administers the Park based on the values and legislation governing the Park.
Allowing HPVs on the rivers of YNP would not cause severe biological impacts, as claimed by conservationists and park rangers, but instead it would be consistent with the legislation in place to protect the Park’s biotic resources. Yellowstone’s mission statement states that its purpose is to protect the Park’s natural resources including, but not limited to, the grizzly bear, wolf, elk, bison, and its prolific aquatic species: the Yellowstone cutthroat trout (Menard, et al 4).
Permitting HPVs would not reduce the stability of populations in comparison to other allowed recreational activities, such as, snowmobiling. In fact, over two thirds of passes by snowmobiles results in either injury or death (Davenport, and Switalski 347)! This is a severe loss of energy producers in the ecosystem and is a major negative effect of snowmobiling. Another negative effect caused by snowmobiling is a decrease in native wetland plants and an increase in noxious weeds of the sedge family (Davenport, and Switalski 347; Watson, and Dalwitz). Native wetland plants are shown to suffer a 23% decrease in density and a 12% decrease in size. These decreases are coupled by a 44% increase in noxious sedge weeds, resulting in severe ecosystem disruption. Additionally, botanical disruption is caused by compacted snow which reduces the insulating air pockets in the snow and conduct cold air towards the ground. This causes a decrease in plant density and biodiversity while furthering the reduction of winter growth of perennials and evergreens, further delays seed germination, as well as negatively affecting decomposition rates of organic material, humus formation and microbial activity (Davenport, and Switalski 348). Each of these biological processes is important because there is a direct quantitative correlation between those processes and many aspects of forest growth (Chavat, Ponge, and Wolters 625). A final way that snowmobiling damages botanical life is via carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon (HC) emissions. Snowmobiles emit 54 tonnes of carbon monoxide and 20 tonnes of HCs on the peak day in YNP. This carbon monoxide reacts with the hydroxyl radical in earth’s troposphere to form CO2, which has a severe detrimental effect on the environment (Feilberg, et al 4867). This increase in CO2 causes a decrease in botanical health and efficiency through heat stress, an increase in anaerobic microbes producing toxic metabolites, and a decrease in the groundwater table (Perry, et al 826-9). The HCs produced by snowmobiles, after diffusion into the soil, inhibit plant growth and seed germination. These HCs, such as benzene, toluene, styrene, and naphthalene, increase the toxicity of the soil to inhibit the growth and germination (Pascale, et al 968-9). These effects, in conjunction with each other provide for a major impact to the biological producers of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem inside YNP. There are no consequences as severe or drastic that occur because of paddling.
In comparison to snowmobiling, hand-powered paddling does not have as drastic consequences for the biotic populations of YNP. Other than the trampled riparian vegetation at backcountry launches and take-out sites, which would be nowhere near as drastic as vegetation destruction caused by snowmobilers, hand-power paddling may actually improve habitat of one of the Park’s most prolific species: the Yellowstone cutthroat trout. The cutthroat trout requires habitat with both riparian and lotic vegetation in order to filter ultra-fine sediments from the water in order to keep gravel beds in good condition for survival, with gravel ranging from seventeen to sixty-two millimeters in diameter (Machtinger 4.) Unfortunately for the cutthroat trout certain rivers are becoming overgrown with lotic vegetation (United . . . Boating 55-104). Studies show that boating could potentially improve habitat for cutthroat trout and other similar species because boating can be correlated to the reduction in lotic vegetation (Sandström, et al; Hilton, and Phillips). Therefore, the allowance of paddling would enhance the park’s ability to provide for its prolific species and as a secondary consequence provide for the species consumers, fulfilling its goal to stabilize and improve the biotic community of YNP.
Unfortunately, the detrimental effects of snowmobiling in comparison to paddling are not the only discrepancies seen in YNP, there is also a discrepancy with the effects of motorhomes and RVs in comparison to paddling. These effects include CO2 emissions more than twice that of camping with an automobile and tent or automobile and tent trailer (PFK 3-5). Similar to CO2 emissions from snowmobiling, the increase in CO2 from motorhomes causes a decrease in botanical health and efficiency through heat stress, an increase in anaerobic microbes producing toxic metabolites, and a decrease in the groundwater table because of warming induced drought (Perry, et al 826-9).
But increased CO2 in the air is not the only detrimental effect to the environment. Formaldehyde, which is found in many motorhomes and RVs, has serious health consequences to the Kingdom Animalia (Odendahl). At temperatures greater than 70F, where formaldehyde is released into the atmosphere from commodities where it is used as a preservative, its inhalation is a cause of nasal lesions, damage to the epithelium of the nasal cavity, damage to pharynx and larynx, while also having carcinogenic properties. When formaldehyde is ingested, commonly through plants in areas where formaldehyde is present in the troposphere, it may potentially cause gastrointestinal lesions, papillomatous hyperplasia, hyperkeratosis, atrophic gastritis, and focal ulceration in the forestomach and hyperplasia (United Kingdom). Though governments make the claim that formaldehyde is not harmful at normal emission levels, the large number of motorhomes and RVs driving through YNP every year makes formaldehyde a concern for the animal kingdom (Scotland). All in all, the inhalation of formaldehyde and ingestion of formaldehyde containing plants, negatively affects the biotic realm in a degree much larger than the negative effects of paddling while not having any probable consequential improvements to the environment.
Additionally, park rangers and conservationists argue that the allowance of paddling would have severe consequences for the abiotic factors of the environment inside YNP, especially the geothermal features, which are affected in a greater degree by erosion. This concern comes especially from Yellowstone’s Dedication Act of 1872 which provides “for the preservation, from injury or spoliation, [. . .] natural curiosities, and wonders [. . .] and their retention in their natural condition” (Dilsaver; MacDonald).
Though the concerns are legitimate, they are avoidable with simple training. The American Packrafting Association’s PACKRAFT Code of Ethics may diminish this problem with only training on the fourth and eighth points of their code. The fourth point, “keep an eye on our traces” means to simply observe the impact you are making on the environment. With the institution the eighth point of the PACKRAFT Code of Ethics is apply those observations to “tread lightly”, in a way that minimizes the impacts you produce on the environment (“Code.”). Additionally, environmental impact reduction by minimal teaching on two of the principles (second and fourth) of Leave No Trace. The second point is to “travel and camp on durable surfaces”; would mean for paddlers that travelling would be limited to the waterways and any foot travel should be limited to established trails, rock, dry grasses and snow. When the paddlers camp, this point means that paddlers should spread campsites in pristine areas throughout the area in order to prevent significant and possibly irreparable impacts. If possible paddlers should try to camp in areas devoid of vegetation and should always camp at least 200 feet from riparian zones. The fourth point of Leave No Trace states “leave what you find.” This not only means to leave natural curiosities where they existed but to also leave the rivers in as pristine of a state as possible and to not transport invasive and aquatic nuisance species into the areas (“Leave.”). The spread of aquatic nuisance species is caused by the release of live bait, the release of aquatic species from one body of water to another, and the failure to clean one’s boat before launch and after takeout (“Aquatic.”). The institution of codes of ethics similar to the PACKRAFT Code and Leave No Trace would eradicate concerns about negative effects on abiotic factors of the environment, especially those concerns regarding terrain.
The ban on river paddling in YNP is additionally not necessary for the retention of validity of the 1972 Wilderness Designation. A total of 2,032,221 acres of land has been set aside as recommended wilderness and is currently being managed as a wilderness area under the Wilderness Act of 1964 (United States . . . Wilderness.; “Yellowstone.”). The Wilderness Act, which instituted the National Wilderness Preservation System states that in order for land to be eligible for continued recommendation and to be a wilderness area, that there must be “no use of motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats, [. . . and] no other form of mechanical transport” (“Act.”). The permission of paddling in YNP would not disrupt Yellowstone’s 1972 recommendation by not introducing motorized usage into those areas.
If YNP fairly considered the allowance of paddling on park rivers the “frivolity” that was spoken of by the judge would not infiltrate and waste the time of our court system. If a permit system was instituted in order to prevent destruction from overuse of the paddling community, the National Park Service would still be able to enhance their ability to provide for the enjoyment of the people, and may enhance the biotic and abiotic factors of the riparian and lotic ecosystems while not causing the cessation of the possibility of induction into the National Wilderness Preservation System. Therefore, in order to solve the dispute between the paddlers and YNP and prevent time spent frivolously in the court system, the park should allow for limited access to the streams and rivers in YNP via the institution of paddling into the backcountry permit system.
Chase Jordan (left) with BSA Venturing Crew 1 of Bozeman, MT.
Chase Jordan just completed his sophomore year at Bozeman High School. His passions include playing the viola, tenkara fly fishing, backpacking, and packrafting. This essay was written as part of Mr. Maxwell’s AP English course in the spring of 2014. At the time of publication, Chase and four other friends will be attempting a 13-day packrafting circumnavigation of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Follow their trip online via satellite at ryanjordan.com.
“An Act to Establish a National Wilderness Preservation System for the Permanent Good of the Whole People, and for Other Purposes (Brief Title: Wilderness Act of 1964).” PL 88-577 (3 Sept. 1964). National Wilderness Preservation System. Web. 21 Mar. 2014.X
Ammons, Doug. “Counting Coup along the Yellowstone River.” The Laugh of the Water Nymph. Missoula: Water Nymph, 2005. Web. 12 Mar. 2014.X
“Aquatic Nuisance Species.” Conservation. WA Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, 2014. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.X
Chauvet M., J. F. Ponge, and V. Wolters. “Humus Structure During Spruce Forest Rotation: Quantitative Changes and Relation to Soil Biota.” European Journal of Soil Science 58.3 (June 2007): 625-31. Wiley Online Library. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.X
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Similar to its cousin, the Wonderland Trail which circumnavigates Mt. Rainier, the Timberline Trail traces the shadow of Mt. Hood and makes for a spectacular journey.
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An Esbit cook system is very lightweight, fuel efficient, and ideal for warm-weather, solo cooking.
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