Posts by Kate Gregory
My preferences are to minimize stove time. To my mind if you have a stove and a cooler that's luxury and you should have no problems at all. In the mornings I like to just boil a kettle, no stove a...
There are two different kinds of Nalgene bottles. The originals were soft, sort of white/translucent, and designed for lab work. You absolutely could pour boiling water into them - and much worse. ...
The first consideration is siting the tent. Is there shade? A breeze? Ideally a breeze off the water? Can you open two sides of the tent so the breeze flows through it? The same tent can be dramati...
Any place that snows has the saying "too cold to snow," and it's generally true. Not that mere cold prevents snow formation, but that the coldest weather is generally clear and cold, with no precip...
Start with making a better list of skills to learn. Identifying edible foods is nowhere near skill #1. I occasionally pick berries, and even more rarely catch and eat a fish, but you can have decad...
I don't backpack, but I canoe camp and I used to do it with small children. We took a watch and used it for three things: we need to have all the work done and food eaten by the time it's dark, s...
For pizza, I do it in a frying pan with cornmeal under it to keep it from sticking. A lid helps a little. For corn bread, I make "corn pone", again in the frying pan. You didn't mention regular bre...
In addition to heat and humidity, my shed exposes my possessions to cold and damp, and worst of all to outdoor animals such as squirrels, which like to nest in large hollow things (filling them wit...
I think you could do OK with Provincial Parks in Ontario, especially if you were planning to swoop south of the 401 to see Prince Edward County. http://www.ontarioparks.com/park-locator/ The t...
I have several gluten-intolerant people in my life, and though I haven't taken them camping, here's how I would feed them. Breakfast: for a short trip, bring some gluten-free muffins or bagels. Fo...
It's hard to know what it is about that picture you consider partial. Is it the triangular opening through which you can see the door? Or, more significantly in my opinion, the fact that the fly do...
If being in air below 0C is not normal for you, the difference is probably caused by breathing through your mouth vs your nose. Where there is visible snow, it's colder than 0C. You can feel uncom...
I have a pair of rings inside my tent up at the top that allow me to string a clothesline - I use a hockey lace and leave it in place all the time. I can then hang things up inside my tent. On a su...
My solution is to let the phone be a phone (and GPS and web browser and ...) and take a camera to be a camera. My camera uses AA batteries, it's simple enough to bring spares, and I have a solar re...
Plenty of places sell sleeping bag liners. Sometimes they are designed to make the bag warmer, other times to be more absorbent. For example, Mountain Equipment co-op sells quite a few, some of whi...
Three things pee right before you go to sleep. I know it seems obvious, but people forget keep warm and sleep well. You can wake up just bursting to pee in the morning, or you can wake up kinda n...
I've carried them out, and I've burned them in the nightly fires we were having anyway. This was canoe-camping rather than hiking, so weight was less of an issue - but a weeklong trip accumulating ...
I am not sure why you want to do this, but I have noticed that in a group of people in cool (not cold) weather eg 5 C which is 41 F, those who live in places with a very cold winter (rural Ontario ...
I use Solarcaine, which contains a local anesthetic, on both mosquito bites and sunburn. Just don't get any in your eye, nose, or other tender areas. It's sold for sunburn relief but works just as ...
The big guideline for you will be water content. Dried food, with little or no water, won't freeze. Fresh fruit and vegetables, eggs, peanut butter and so on probably will. In most cases, freezing ...
Peanut butter has good calories. Dried beans are good too though they take a long time to prep and cook. You can home dry any vegetable - carrots, tomatoes, corn, mushrooms etc. I also take tomato ...
Thermarest and other self inflating foams should be stored inflated, not deflated and rolled up. Generally anything that has a small form and a large form, and is expected to transform into the lar...
A free standing tent can be put up in a location that won't let you put pegs into the ground, such as on a rocky surface, because it establishes structure of its own and the pegs are just to keep i...
I would not recommend camping alone if you have not camped before. There is quite a lot of multitasking - in a group of 4 adults often every single one works simultaneously for an hour or so when w...
I use Nalgene bottles (much more heat resistant) for rehydrating dried meat or beans. I pour in boiling water, leave the lid loose until it cools a little (otherwise it shrinks in the bottle walls ...
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