Posts by Olin Lathrop
To get a long lasting fire, you have to limit the cumbustion somehow. Think embers as apposed to much flame. Wood stoves are specifically engineered to allow you to control the rate of combustion...
I have a self-inflating mat, and I think the foam serves three purposes. In order of importance: It sets the shape of the mat when inflated. Think of the foam as limiting how far the opposite wa...
You say you go to wild places to get away from trails, but that is actually the root problem. One purpose of trails is to funnel all the human use to narrow areas to minimize the overall damage. ...
There is little point in bringing a camera if you're just going to pack it away. The best place for a camera is around your neck and shoulder when you're hiking and not immediately taking pictures...
No, a "national forest" here in the US is a legal designation and does not mean the land is actually covered with trees (a forest). In the US, there are quite a number of governmental divisions th...
There is no standard for the color and shape of blazes used to mark trails in the US. Generally, trails are managed locally, so at best a set of blazes follows a pattern in a particular area. A f...
I don't know of a site that lists all trails in the US. This is probably because trails are managed by the same patchwork of authority that manages the land. There are various federal, state, reg...
Camping restrictions and permits to enter particular areas are actually very rare when you look at the total land area. I believe in every case these are done only to prevent degradation caused by...
The issue here isn't about mixing fuels since white gas basically is gasoline. The difference is that commonly available "gasoline" as used in cars for example, contains a lot of additives. These...
Think about whether it really matters if your feet stay dry. Will this be in warm enough weather when trenchfoot and frostbite are not problems? If so, the simplest answer may be to let the feet ...
This is really up to you, but I think if postholing is enough of a issue it would be good to wear snowshoes. If nothing else, it just makes things easier. One problem of postholing can be sometim...
Yes, first stop to not make things worse, take a deep breath, and collect your thoughts. After that it depends a lot on the situation. I don't like most of the other answers because they assumed ...
Getting 10°F (6°C) temperature rise from a candle in even the smallest of tents is clearly nonsense. Do the math. Figure a candle puts out about 80 W. Of course there is large variation from can...
Let's look at the physics behind where all the condensation came from. At night the air gets colder, but the ground has a lot of "thermal mass", so stays much closer to the average day/night tempe...
Yes, it is definitely doable. -20°C is only -4°F. The real question is whether it is doable by you at the level of discomfort and hassle you are willing to put up with. Only you can answer that....
This is a great example of technically true statistics being misleading. I'll take their word for it that more people get injured by moose than any other animal except hippos. However, I strongly...
It's always OK to move fallen debris from the trail, assuming you are sure you are on a real official trail. Make sure you don't accidentally remove "brushed in" trail entrances. That is where br...
It's not clear what you think the layer principle, is but you don't have to dress in layers. It's the performance of the complete stackup that matters. In cold weather, this could be achieved, fo...
Being alone in the wilderness and being there with a group or with friends are two different experiences, each with their own merits and drawbacks. You have experiences with groups already, so I'l...
I had a pair of Yaktracks for a couple of winters, and they turned out not to be what I really wanted. They do work very well on packed snow and you can walk inside most places without having to t...
I suspect the answers will be scattered. I don't know of any one source of Tyvek maps that cover everything. For the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the AMC publishes quite decent trail maps in...
Getting trail conditions is region-specific. For example, in New England the Appalachian Mountain Club provides a good deal of trail info. I'm pretty sure there is a web site about trail conditio...
Your legs aren't as sensitive to temperture extremes. Right now it's winter here and I'm walking around outside with a regular shirt, a wool sweater, and a wind breaker on my torso. Inside I ta...
I do deliberate trail maintenence regularly, and unfortunately what you can do is severly limited if you want to do it casually while only carrying something small. There is no set of tools you ca...
There are two possible reasons not to store batteries in a headlamp that won't be used for a while: Residual current draw, and batteries leaking and destroying the headlamp. To make things waterpr...
