Posts by Lagerbaer
The answers regarding flammability (and the ensuing death trap) and carbon monoxide poisoning are correct. Even in foul weather, cook outside your tent. If you do lots of camping in bad weather (Ne...
Keep active. Bring a good hat. While your body can reduce blood flow to fingers and toes to prevent the core from getting cold, for obvious reasons it doesn't want to reduce blood flow to your hea...
This depends of course on the tools you have and what your overall situation is. For example, if you know that you are on a certain path and you have a compass, and if you are on a slope, you can ...
A knot that's simple and easy to use, explicitly for the purpose of tying in to the middle of the rope, would be the Alpine Butterfly. Tie it, then put it to your belay loop with one or two lockin...
Well, here's the situation. You're on an outdoor trip in winter. It's cold outside and after a long day all you want to do is crawl into your warm sleeping bag and not get out of it until the next ...
Eat something with high energy content. If it's warm, even better, but as Freedom of the Hills explains, the warmth is merely a psychological factor, what really warms you up is the energy in the ...
Regular polarized sunglasses are usually meant for drivers of cars, as these glasses, in addition to darkening the sky, also suppress glare/reflections. If you travel in snow, light will come fro...
Some, not all, do indeed come in two sides, and which one you use depends on the reason you use it. One of the sides strongly reflects heat. A hypothermic person therefore wants to have that reflec...
When abseiling from an anchor during rock climbing, I like to use a backup prusik as a potential lifesaver in case I screw up. However, I have heard different advice on where to put it, both for w...
There is really only one way to determine this, and that is experience. Do a few hikes in different terrain, different settings (dayhike vs overnight), different weather and different group sizes, ...
There is one more important technique you can use that I was taught in New Zealand, where you have to cross rivers all the time. If you have a group of people (at least 3), you can greatly enhanc...
I'm currently looking to buy a new tent. The old one had a floor that was said to withstand a hydrostatic head of 10000 mm, but the tents I find in the stores here go to at most 3000 mm for the flo...
This knot is what I'd call a stopper knot. You twist turn the end of the rope two times around itself, as shown, then thread the end through the now-created loops. It is used in rock climbing: If ...
