I am wearing my Patagonia #2 wool hoody and bottoms. Patagonia silk weight glove liners and Double Wright Socks. With my start-off AT gear list I would have an Ex Officio long sleeve hiking shirt and convertible pants, an insulated vest, a second pair of socks, a Marmont Ion or something like it and VB socks. This then is what I have to play with to see if I can stay warm enough to make me happy. Note that I will not try and sleep if I am cold.
polar duo silk iso
Wait till you see the Polarguard Delta Vest (sort of) that I am making. About 2.5 or so ounces. I expect only a little over 2 ounces and it should be finished tonight. All light silk and one layer of Polaguard Delta. It will replace a conventional weight vest at around 6 ounces. I decided the Cocoon Vest was not going to be ready before my first hike segment so this is its replacement.
I want to see if by using very light silk with Polarguard Delta sandwiched between it to keep weight as low as possible, and then covering it with a Pertex Quantum jacket and pants or a Pertex Quantum top on a bivy I can get the same results but with a lighter total weight.
For indoors and outdoors For the silk-gloss coating of wood substrates with good or limited dimensional stability (see table), soffits, garage doors, window frames/door surfaces, gutters, downpipes, facade claddings, handrails, derived timber products (see table), rigid PVC, sound old paints and aluminium. Copper, galvanised surfaces, iron and steel after suitable priming. For the overworking of sound coil coating surfaces and powder coats (see table). Single-tin system for base and finishing coating of the above substrates after suitable pretreatment.
Picked up my first piece of new gear in a while, a Petzl Duo Z2 headlamp. Its many settings range from close/wide to telescopic searchlight, and it casts up to 430 lumens. Why does an arctic traveler need a US$250 headlamp that boasts of being usable in combustible gas environments? In the High Arctic travel season, from late March till early September, you don't need an artificial light of any kind, because the sun is always above the horizon. But in the low Arctic, or in late summer, when night returns to the North, typical headlamps will not throw enough light to alert you in time that a polar bear is approaching.
2. Some polar travelers wear tape on their noses or cheeks. They claim it's for wind protection. I would argue that using tape is dangerous, because the thin material gives no insulation to speak of and it hides when that part of the face goes white with early frostbite. I have a compass around my neck at all times and use its mirror to check my face frequently in a wind. If it's white, I warm it briefly with a bare hand until color returns.
In an era dominated until recently by fleece and other synthetics, wool has staged a comeback, thanks to a handful of manufacturers spinning high-end garments from merino wool. (Full disclosure: Icebreaker is an occasional sponsor.) Fine merino fibers lack the scratchiness of ordinary wool; light merino T-shirts and underwear are silk-like, while warmer garments feel wooly yet comfortable. Moreover, these manufacturers have a design sense: Some merino T-shirts look elegant, a word I never thought could be applied to a T-shirt, while sock patterns strive almost to be Kandinsky-esque works of modern art.
Disadvantages of merino relate mainly to price versus longevity. Synthetic underwear lasts essentially forever. I have several long johns that are twenty years old and have another decade left in them. Their merino counterparts last about three years; the delicate, silk-like briefs one year, the $100 T-shirts the same. The briefs and long johns rip, the necks on the T-shirts stretch and permanently deform. Merino underwear tops, however, endure.
Unfortunately, their info page, Stoves 101: How Much fuel Should I Carry is not up to the standards of their actual stoves. It's obscure, blathersome and not very useful. They could have distilled much of it into a few direct sentences: In winter, you use .18 to .25 liters of white gas per person-day, depending on how much fluid you and your partner/s need. Some people sweat a lot and have to drink more than others. The .25 includes an excess of at least 10 percent, in case one of the fuel containers leaks or you have to use a bottle as a Molotov cocktail to scare away a polar bear if the usual deterrents aren't handy.
Out of laziness and comfortable familiarity with the Berwins, I've never used these superior models, so I can't say how durable they are. I'm not even sure where to find them any more. While Berwins continue to be made, the Hummocks bindings shown above, which were manufactured until recently by a Canadian engineer named Richard Tanguay, no longer seem to be available. Likewise, polar guide Richard Weber used to sell similar bindings, and maybe he has a few remaining in his storeroom -- try emailing his website -- but he no longer advertises them. See Richard's YouTube clip of these bindings in action. You just can't ski like that on Berwins.
- length. Many superwarm parkas are made not for polar expeditions but for 8000-meter peaks. Some of them are cut short so that climbing harnesses can be worn with them. These aren't appropriate for arctic travel. You want a parka that's reaches the floor of the tent when you're sitting down, without being cumbersome car-coat length.
Correspondent Nenad Rijavec is off to Ellesmere Island shortly for five weeks of sledding, and sent me his design for a polar bear alarm fence, based on the blueprint I published here a few years ago. Here's his link. The fence looks well thought out.
Theoretically, the narrow end of the tunnel should point into the wind, but that is not always practical. For one thing, wind can change direction after the tent is up and become a crosswind. Secondly, you may want the door pointing in a particular direction. In the photo below, Alexandra is setting up the tent so that the main door (not shown) faces the beach, so that we can keep a lookout for approaching polar bears. Amazingly, the tent is as secure broadside as it is nose to the wind. The wind just seems to glide off that slippery nylon.
Of course, these are not the only suitable arctic tents, just the two most common types. There are some clever ways to cut weight while keeping good wind resistance. Once I traveled with some Russians who had a homemade winter tent that consisted of a single wall of parachute silk, below. The smart feature was a set of aluminum spokes that served as the apex of the tent. It folded closed for travel and fanned out in camp by loosening a wing nut. Perimeter pieces fit into holes at each T-joint for rigidity. At the end of each spoke was a slot for a ski tip. Thus, the skis doubled as tent poles. The tent accommodated a dozen people, but you could easily engineer smaller versions for four people and up.
PH Designs is another small British company catering to the seemingly endless queue of UK beginners who want to pull off some ambitious polar feat. The Xero 1300, a little less than five pounds, uses 900-fill down, with an option to upgrade to 950-fill for an extra $200. Base price is $1,300, and it claims a "typical operating temperature" of -54C (-65F). Don't count on it -- not unless you also wear a down suit inside this large-cut mummy bag, as their model does in the comical studio shot illustrating this bag at work. That might work for high-altitude mountaineering, where you're only at high camp for a couple of days, but no one wears a down suit inside their sleeping bag on a long polar trek. Baffled parkas are so bulky that I doubt you could wear one inside even an outsized mummy bag without compressing the insulation of both parka and bag. Besides, a bag that needs that sort of supplementary insulation to work at its advertised temperatures is like claims of a flying aardvark: "just add wings."
The Tempelfjorden bag from Helsport has an honorable pedigree. First, the company is Norwegian; if any country knows polar travel, it's Norway. Second, the weight -- about 9 pounds -- is right for a bag that actually handles extreme temperatures. Finally, it is classic two-in-one system, with a thick inner down bag and a thinner synthetic overbag. Many competent polar travelers have used it, including Borge Ousland on several of his adventures and Rune Gjeldnes and Torry Larsen on their Dead Men Walking trek across the Arctic Ocean. At $900, it's reasonably priced, too.
In winter camping, and especially in arctic travel, the single most important item of equipment is a sleeping bag that works in the temperatures you'll be encountering. In his classic Antarctic tale, The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote of getting frostbite in his sleeping bag -- an unambiguous indicator of inadequate gear. When I was briefly involved with a group of Russian polar adventurers back in the late 1980s, they proudly showed us the sleeping bags they used for a polar night trip on the Arctic Ocean. They were essentially three-season bags. "Was good experiment," enthused one rocks-for-brains strong man. "It showed us how much we are able to bear." They shivered all night and lost toes to frostbite because of crappy ski boots. Very good experiment.
Last year on this site, I wrote about high-intensity headlamps and their occasional usefulness in arctic travel. In the High Arctic, you don't need a headlamp during the travel season (April-August) because of the 24-hour sun. But in the shoulder months (March, September), and in lower latitudes, headlamps are a typical part of one's kit. If you're traveling or doing chores around camp at night, you have to watch for approaching polar bears, but ordinary headlamps don't throw a far enough beam for safety. That's where the high-intensity lights come in. 2ff7e9595c
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