Posts by Benedikt Bauer
Having read about the recent foot traverse of Antarctica by Colin O'Brady I was wondering which means the polar explorers of former, pre-GPS times used to determine that they had reached the North ...
To keep this answer focused, let's set the discussion aside, whether a permanent magnet can be strong enough to damage electronics. Physically speaking, you cannot shield magnetic fields -- you ca...
For easy climbs you have quite a good chance to be OK with hiking shoes. The most important property for a shoe to be usable for climbing is, that you have to be able to stand on contact points so...
Some (maybe not all) aspects are: Insulation per weight ratio While your observation "the thicker the warmer" is true in general, there are fleeces that are warmer for the same weight and thicknes...
One approach I learned when playing beach volleyball in Egypt are a pair of thicker socks. With these you still get the barefoot feeling but have a layer of insulation under your soles. For me my o...
The guide's argument seems to be reasonable. However, I would not recommend to simply copy that behaviour but try to go with the more conservative advice you were given. The guide has one big adva...
Finally, you will have to decide yourself if you want to keep it or not and it depends a bit on your preferences and on how much oversized the shirt is. I for myself prefer my base layer shirts to...
I'm not an archer, however, I would be surprised if you would not notice any difference with your backpack as compared to no backpack – at least in the beginning. Basically with every skill that r...
While it surely is possible to pair the watch with several HR monitoring devices, I don't think it's possible to use more than one at the same time. I cannot tell for sure since I don't have an Amb...
As already was pointed out in the comments: leave synthetics. Some time ago (can't find the source any more, unfortunately) I read about a guy who planed on a very minimalistic outdoor trip basical...
Well, basically the difference is just that their design is mirrored. However, I have the feeling that your real question behind the actual one is "Why do they have to be mirrored?" Compared to "n...
In the woods, there are many small items that can fall from above that are more or less awkward to have on your head. This goes from leaves and needles on the "not very harmful" side over water dro...
Olin Lathrop's very good answer to the question you reference basically already contains most of the information needed also your gut feeling about the topic is quite right. So let's look at it in ...
I would say that this guy at the hut was plain wrong. As far as I'm concerned, the working principle of the Gore-Tex membrane is gradient-driven. That means, the membrane itself (if you consider o...
As far as I could extract it, the general question contained in your text is something like: This year in October I saw a lot of robins, male and female, finches and chickadees, and geese flyin...
This answer is not exclusive to archery but concerns basically any activity where there are certain implicit rules that are widely agreed on in the community and are written down explicitly for com...
The most simple solution is keeping them close to your body somewhere within your clothing. This shouldn't be a problem with small items like phone batteries or small power banks. However, to make ...
According to this German blog post either duct tape, the Tenacious Tape mentioned by Greg Hewgill in his answer or – and I was a bit surprised about that – also bicycle tube patches should be OK fo...
The physicists answer: there could be such a measure (it exists for example for the insulation of buildings), but it would in the case of clothing depend on so many factors that it would be close t...
Concerning using hiking shoes on asphalt: it certainly can be done and is a much better option than the other way around (i.e. taking a business shoe on a mountain hike). Hiking shoes are a bit sti...
I don't know for sure, but your suggestion seems right. As you can see on the picture you posted, these birds have their eyes on the side of their head which means that they quite surely are not a...
What are the differences? The different ropes basically differ by how they have been treated to handle water: non-dry ropes (although I've never seen that mentioned explicitly) have no special tre...
Let's go through the different aspects of phone versus dedicated GPS device point by point (however, quite surely without being complete). Basically you have to decide which points apply in your si...
Wikipedia is basically right – you can safely eat it (according to the German Wikipedia article the whole plant, however, the leaves are the most used part) and here in Germany they sometimes even ...
Sharing and downloading routes done by others Concerning sites where you can upload and share GPS tracks you could have a look at http://www.gpsies.com/. There are lots of GPS tracks for hiking, c...
