Posts by ShemSeger
RETREAT Your option 2 is best, but having said that, rescue crews will want to know you're out there sooner than later. In the option 1 you described, you would be activating your PLB, then waiti...
Pemmican Pemmican was a high energy food used by the Native Americans, who introduced it to the early explorers and fur traders in North America. There's no specific ingredients for pemmican, but...
It's easy to tell when your screws need to be sharpened, because they don't cut as well and get increasingly difficult to place, but with proper maintenance your screws should never get to that poi...
If you want to get your ropes clean in a hurry, use a rope brush: This is the result after pulling your rope through one of these brushes twice: Fill your tub with cool to luke warm water, th...
I use my hip pockets mostly for holding snacks or other items that I want regular and immediate access to. When I go out on a hike I pack both hip pockets full of granola bars and other goodies, ...
One quick way to deal with twists in a rope if you're single pitching is to switch ends on the rope you're climbing with. When it's your turn to climb, instead of tying into the same end the last c...
Sew it back together and tape the seams. Working with Goretex or any other type of waterproof material is the exact same as any other type of fabric. The only difference is that you tape the seams...
Probing is the best and only guaranteed technique for safely locating crevasses. Knowing how crevasses form will help you identify areas where crevasses are more likely to be, but you can't be cert...
Most backpacking sleeping pads are insulated, some are even down-filled. When they're deflated they lose a lot of their insulating properties. This can be detrimental in cold weather, because when ...
Downwind. The first time I got caught in open water with whitecaps was when I was 13. We were on a multiday canoe trip and the winds picked up on the last day when we had to cross the lake. Instea...
Would they eat wild horses? Yes, and they do. Would they control their populations? No, not really. The fact that there were 30 - 60 million bison roaming North America before westerners came to t...
"Mountain Exposure" is a very broad term. Simply defined, it means you are exposing yourself to some risk of injury or death in the outdoors. Your level exposure while climbing is determined by h...
Red Ochre Red Ochre is a natural earth pigment found in clays that are rich in iron. It's been used for thousands of years by cultures around the world as a natural sunblock. It's also the same pi...
I mark all my stuff with an engraver. All my Nalgenes have my name engraved right on the front under the Nalgene logo. You could engrave whatever you want on the front then do marker over top. The ...
I have to contend with 100km+ winds with my 17.5ft canoe, so I've tried pretty much every method of attaching a canoe to a roof you can conceive, and the one that works the best is this one: It'...
The best thing to do would be to simply bring two water bladders and switch the hoses over your shoulder after the first is emptied. Alternately, you could try routing two hoses over your one shoul...
I've been in the early stages of hypothermia before, and I can tell you from experience that when you're in the early stages of hypothermia, you're convinced you're okay and that nothing is wrong; ...
The rule with Via Ferrata is to always have at least one point of safety clipped in at all times. Many people have fallen to their deaths while unclipped from their safety lines in order to pass an...
Sew it back on and tape the seam. Stitching GoreTEX is the same as stitching any other material, the difference is you want to use Tenara thread, and you waterproof the seams on the inside of the...
Bats eat hundreds of mosquitos per bat every night, which is amazing for human peoples and the principle reason people hang up special made bat houses. Bat guano (poop) also creates habitats for ot...
I made a hiking "wheelbarrow" out of an old external frame backpack by bolting a pair of swoop handle bars to the top, and a Monty BMX wheel to the bottom. It was pretty awesome, I made it for an o...
No, plants cannot be relied on globally for directions. But they can give you hints sometimes. The only thing plants can tell you is in which direction the sun typically shines from. This isn't es...
A lot of timber gets harvested in the winter, especially now that you can harvest timber from the comfort of the heated cab of a harvester. Falling trees in the winter does the least amount of dama...
I visit a lot of caves in the Canadian Rockies, and there are similar concerns with transporting microorganisms from cave to cave, as well as diseases such as white nose syndrome in bats. For the a...
Porcupines are den animals, and rarely venture far from their dens. Trees are where they find food, but they seek shelter in little hidey-holes wherever they can find them. Most of the time, their ...
