Good judgement comes from experience.

Experience comes from bad judgement.

I thought that was a really positive attitude about arresting someone. They’ve made a bad decision. The police let them experience the consequences so they might make a better decision next time. That is the best possible outcome, right? Their judgement improves and the police don’t see them again.

This is one of the hard parts of being a Scouter, watching the leaders (the boys) do it wrong and not stepping in to fix it. If you fix it, they don’t get the experience and they’ll just have to do it wrong one extra time. Or four extra times. On the other hand, you do need to keep watching, because the experience shouldn’t be dangerous or so overwhelming that they don’t learn from it.

If you aren’t busy enough with that, take some time to learn from your own bad judgement and experience. I seem to always have a generous supply of that sort of experience.

I use a breathable bivy (Ptarmigan from Titanium Goat) in case of condensation or blown rain. I also like to tuck my head inside the bivy when the breeze picks up. The bivy is essential for tarp camping, but I’m not sure it is worth carrying for use inside the Speedmid, even though it is only 7.5 oz.

Here is the tent set up at Eagle’s Aerie campsite in the Sunol Wilderness. It is set up very low to the ground, because we expected wind and rain. In less threatening weather, the tent can be pitched with the edges higher for more ventilation and more room inside.

Not long after this photo, a big storm came through. With hail. My tent buddy and I ducked inside and stretched out for a nap. As you can see, it was a nice tight pitch, shedding the rain, hail and wind. Unlike a tarp, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time fussing with the pitch. I moved a couple of pegs, tightened the lines, and I was done.

You can see how the edge of the Tyvek sheet was nicely back from the edge of the tent so water would not pool on it.

It is plenty roomy inside. I’m 6’ 3” and my tent buddy is nearly as tall, and we both had room, with our gear inside. The tent walls do slope at a pretty low angle—the heavy nighttime rain was surprisingly close to my head and a little distracting.

This was a very exposed campsite and it was uncomfortably windy and cold outside. It was plenty windy, enough to blow down the cooking tarp, but the tent didn’t show it. It felt very secure, much more so than my other, heavier, tents.

There was no condensation inside. I was a bit surprised at that, because it was very humid (raining), the tent was pitched for minimum ventilation, it doesn’t have a peak vent, and the 40º weather was perfect for tent condensation.

I expected some rain to come in when I opened the door, but it wasn’t a problem. Most of the rain falls on you, whether you are outside leaning over the zipper or underneath it and opening from the inside. Make sure you flip your sleeping bag away from the door, and it’s fine.

The tent does take a fair amount of space to set up. The base is nine feet square, so allow a 10x10 space, as much room as a big family tent. On the other hand, there aren’t any guy lines to trip over.

All this for $170, the same price as a five and half pound REI Half Dome. If you have the cash, you could upgrade to the roomier and even more storm-worthy MLD Supermid, but the Speedmid is a heck of a lot of tent at an affordable price and a very light weight. Less is more.

Funny, Netflix isn’t quite sure what other movies are like Dersu Uzala. I don’t really blame them — what is like a masterpiece?

I guess the list illuminates aspects of the film. These are the films it showed after I added Dersu Uzala to our queue:

• Little Big Man
• Deliverance
• Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, not Steven Soderbergh)
• Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
• Stalker (more Tarkovsky)
• Shogun Assassin
• The Return
• Metropolis
• Earth
• Never Cry Wolf

Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Fritz Lang, and Burt Reynolds, no place but Netflix.

They have purchased books specifically for my son’s special day class. In addition to the resources for AP US History, now they have a picture book of all the dogs that are in Disney movies.

The librarians sat down with the class and talked with them about their interests and which books they like, then used part of their scarce acquisitions budget (the donations really help) for books which would fit the reading levels and interests of the students in special ed. Of course, this is what librarians do, but it is almost always to support general ed.

Our son loves libraries and has a period of student service in the Paly library. In eleven years in a great school system, this is the first time I can remember that a school library has specifically served the special ed students.

I’m really touched.

Let’s talk about the style. The psychedelic flow of Richard Brautigan with flashes of the journalistic precision of Raymond Chandler.

I’m betting you don’t buy the Chandler connection. From the first page of The Big Sleep, listen to the rhythm, the excess of observation, all from the viewpoint of the main character:

I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with blue clocks on them. […] The main hall of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some long and convenient hair.

I love the black wool socks with blue clocks.

From the first page of Weetzie Bat:

They didn’t care that Marilyn’s prints were practically in their back yard at Graumann’s; that you could buy tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets at Farmer’s Market, and the wildest cheapest cheese and bean and hot dog and pastrami burritos at Oki Dogs; that the waitresses wore skates at the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor’s; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors, and a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter’s, and not too far away was Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers.

None of these facts are necessary to the plot—so much for your Aristotelian parsimony—but every one of these details is important to the main character. The person and the details together nail down the time and place.

Here is a random page that sounds like Brautigan:

My Secret Agent Lover Man had driven her to the beach on the back of his motorcycle and pulled a bottle of pink champagne out of his trench coat. They were sitting on the sand by the sea. My Secret Agent Lover Man uncorked the champagne and handed the bottle to Weetzie. He got out his camera and filmed her taking a swig.

Really, it fell open to that page. Page 36. That hypnotic mix of intensity and distance. The book is even short like a Brautigan novel, only 85 pages.

I have no idea why this is shelved in young adult, except that it is really short and high school is mentioned in the opening sentence.

Go read it. Your library is sure to have it and you can read it in an hour or less.

PS: Right after I posted this, I searched for Francesca Lia Block, the author. I’m not alone in noticing the similarity to Raymond Chandler. Wikipedia has this:

One New York Times Book Review critic said, “Block writes about the real Los Angeles better than anyone since Raymond Chandler.”

Building blocks: I think of them as subroutines, but I’m a programmer. Instead of explaining a white sauce once again or re-explaining how to roast winter squash, both Bittman and Farmer refer to the main recipe. This means more page-flipping, but you learn the building blocks of recipes. Now that I know how to add roasted squash to lentils, I can add them to quinoa.

Variations: Almost every recipe has one or more variants. The Fanny Farmer was great about this, and Bittman does it even better. I chose a variant on the basic lentil recipe because we had winter squash. Some recipes have so many variants that they are clearly showing a basic technique, and inviting other combinations, like the eleven versions of grilled or broiled chicken breasts. This complements the simplification from the building blocks with an explosion of variants.

Information about ingredients: This is where Marion Cunningham’s Fanny Farmer shines, with “all about beets” or whatever, but Bittman is at least as good. Look up a food item and you’ll get information about choosing it at the market, substitutes, and recommended cooking techniques. Bittman is especially good for substitutes.

I cooked both Saturday and Sunday last weekend, with a more ambitious menu on Sunday. All but two of the items were from Bittman. I was using up our weekly vegetables from Two Small Farms, so I targeted rugosa squash (like butternut, but uglier), two bunches of chard, and a big bag of Hungarian peppers. I was going to roast the cipollini onions, but decided to leave that for a mid-week kicker.

Saturday, I had plenty of time, enough time to cook chickpeas from scratch instead of using canned.

• Chicken and chickpeas, Bittman, p 650, variant
• Chard gratin, Bittman, p248, one variant of the general-purpose vegetable gratin recipe
• Toasted rolls, we had some nice sandwich rolls on the verge of getting stale, so I split two of them and toasted them—heat will temporarily reverse staling (trick from On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee)

Sunday was tight on time with an afternoon soccer game. I peeled and cubed the squash before the game, we got home at 5pm, and dinner was on the table at 6:40. Not bad, especially when I had to clear the squash out of the oven in order to use the broiler and had to wash a pot in order to cook the carrots.

• North African variant of broiled boneless chicken breasts, Bittman, p 641-3
• Lentils with winter squash, Bittman, p 431-2, variant
• Hot lemon cashew rice, The Whole Chile Pepper Book, Dewitt and Gerlach, p 221 (has chiles, ginger, and mustard seeds, yum, original calls for ghee, I used olive oil)
• Baby carrots with cumin butter, Cuisine Rapide, Pierre Franey, p 302 (this is super simple and really tasty)

Hmm, I think I managed kosher menus, though I just noticed that.

Using the Hungarian peppers in the rice was a gamble. I’d been trying to use them up, but every time I tasted one, they were beastly hot, so I’d use half and compost the rest. I always taste a sliver of every pepper before using it. For the rice, I got three duds and one hot one, just right. The red peppers were much prettier than the wax peppers it calls for. With the bright green cilantro, the dish was striking.

Next time I make a chard gratin, though, I’m steering closer to that Cajun classic, Spinach Madeline. The original is from River Roads Recipes (1959), but you might want to start with the slightly updated version in Cooking Up A Storm, the collection of recipe reprints requested after Katrina. Just be sure to update the cheese from 1950’s original Kraft to something better, like gruyere or fontina.

Sunday was the most complicated menu I can remember tackling solo, and it was put together casually and made it to the table in a timely fashion. The vegetable box is making me think more, but my cooking is really improving. With a little help from Bittman.

Nice try, but you can’t beat the original window cut-out cover on that last one.

Also, one of the best review titles ever, part of a series revisiting books you read as a kid, this time, Flowers in the Attic, “He Ain’t Sexy, He’s My Brother”.

The Gunn students are shocked, but they are certainly not acting helpless. They continue to do smart things, reaching out, talking, trying to make Gunn a better place for teens. They did this after the first suicide and have not given up.

A new blog titled Henry M. Gunn Gives Me Hope appeared today, and already has dozens of posts. One is about Operation Beautiful, a project to put Post-It Notes with inspirational sayings all over campus.

After the first suicide, students organized ROCK (“Reach Out. Care. Know.”), with a ROCK Facebook group and “ROCK at Gunn” blog. ROCK is completely student-run, including a staffed spot at the Gunn Academic Center and a list of students who volunteer to be “rocks”. Other students are gearing up a second round of handpainted “Talk to me” T-shirts with the proceeds going to the Kara grief counseling center [additional coverage]. The student paper covered teen suicide along with ROCK and the professional counseling available.

The suicides are a sadness beyond words, but the response of the Gunn students is more than just a ray of hope. It is beautiful.

“Best version ever” is not even as strong as “sucks less”. It might mean there is some groovy new feature you will never use. For example, explain to me how “aero shake” is better than Option-Command-H. Shaking titlebars with the mouse multiple times a day? I can feel my wrist hurt already.

Ten years ago, I was a full-time Windows NT developer, running our local Primary Domain Controller (so Infoseek could have ClearCase on Windows). Since then, it’s been all Unix and Mac. For the past six weeks, I’ve been using Windows Vista on a fairly new laptop. I’m really amazed at the current state of Windows. I thought it would be better after a decade.

For comparison, I’ll go through the steps needed when I get back to my cube and want to open my laptop and get back to work.

Mac OS X:

1. Plug in the power and mouse.
2. Open the laptop.
3. Wait two seconds.
4. If you have password locking, type your password.
5. Do work. Total time, under 10 seconds.

No wasted motion. Everything you do is essential and the waits are minimal.

Windows Vista SP1 on an HP 6910:

1. Plug in the power and mouse.
2. Open the laptop.
3. Look at the hard-to-see green power light to see whether the battery has run down to zero. The light flashes pretty slowly and isn’t very bright, so you’ll have to lean over to see it.
4. Remember that it doesn’t matter, and click the power button.
5. Wait a while.
6. The screen says to press Ctrl+Alt+Del, so do that.
7. It ignores the keypress (because it put up the screen before the keyboard driver was ready?), so do Ctrl+Alt+Del again.
8. Move the mouse to choose from the three options for authentication.
9. Oops, the mouse doesn’t work yet, so use the trackpad to select the password option.
10. Type your password.
11. Wait some more.
12. Do work (the mouse works now). Total time, probably a minute and a half.

Ever wonder why people carry their Windows laptop around half-open?

You can’t go get coffee during that time, because you have to keep checking and clicking or typing. There is a flashing light that doesn’t change what you do. The UI even lies, telling you to type something when it isn’t listening. Why would someone think it is OK to release this?

Plenty of other things waste my time. Software installs still need a restart. I couldn’t find a way to hide a window using the keyboard. Printing blocks all input to applications (unchanged from Windows 3.1). I can’t switch from Reply to Reply All once I’ve started a message in Outlook (have to copy the text, close the window, start new message, paste the text). In Firefox, Ctrl-T (new tab) works some of the time, but not all the time. Battery life is silly, about an hour and a half, unchanged from my Toshiba 486 laptop in the mid-90’s.

There are other places where it actually feels like a step backwards from Windows NT. Applications crash or hang, both Microsoft apps (Outlook) and apps that are rock solid on other platforms (Firefox). What a mess.

Yes, Vista was released a while ago, but the Mac OS X wake from sleep is unchanged since my rev. B Titanium PowerBook in December 2001, so there is no excuse. In fact, the fast wakeup was the major reason I moved from MacOS 9 to X. I hear that Windows 7 has faster wakeup from sleep, but responding to the competition after eight years? Not acceptable.

As icing on the cake, I just opened up the Windows laptop to unpack a Windows-only distribution. I sftp’ed it over, then Windows Explorer greyed out on me and showed the spinning rave ring of death. I waited two minutes, then started trying to kill it. Took three dialog boxes. It’s restarted, but I’m watching the rave ring spin while it tries to run this exe archive. Wish me luck.

Ah, it was checking for viruses, I guess, though it certainly didn’t tell me what it was doing. Now it is (slowly) installing 23 updates when I tried to power it off. I guess I’ll be at work for another fifteen minutes before I can put it back in the drawer. The gift that keeps on giving.

So I’m back to Mac, and not just because it removes dozens of daily annoyances, but for a deeper reason. Using Windows lowers my standards for what is OK to ship. Maybe Microsoft can stay in business shipping this stuff, but I can’t. I actually need to be better than the competition, not just better than my last release.

Note: Troy Wolverton in the SJ Merc used this lede in my sense this morning. He’s more tolerant, but still “underwhelmed”.

What does it weigh?

• 8x10 silnylon tarp: 14 oz.
• Titanium Goat Ptarmigan bivy: 6.5 oz.
• Gossamer Gear polycryo groundsheet: 1.5 oz.
• assorted tent stakes: a few oz. (mostly titanium skewers, plus a few grippy stakes for loose soil)
• tent poles are my trekking poles, so the weight doesn’t count against the shelter account

Total weight is around a pound and a half. Size, about as big as a Fosters beer can.

Second night, a nice open A-frame pitch at Lower Long Lake. Check out the Sierra Designs Grip Clips pulling out the sides to make a lot more space in the A-frame. These are the modern evolution of the Visclamps that you might have read about in The Complete Walker. Nice lake, too.

Third night, at Middle Emigrant Lake, a really windy spot. This is the tarp setup for the other two adults, pitched low in a nasty crosswind. They borrowed my long Easton stakes to hold the ridgelines in the sandy soil. I used them a couple of times, too. This is a Tundra Tarp from Cooke Custom Sewing, with more tie-outs than mine. Nice tarp.

I laid out my bivy in a narrow spot between two big rocks. The wind was blowing across this spot, so I was nicely sheltered. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a photo until I was packed up, so you’ll need to imagine a bag and bivy laid out here. You can also imagine the marmot scat laid on a rock shelf by my head. With the wind and the cold, I didn’t notice the smell until the morning.

I slept without a tarp a few nights. This is my spot at Snow Lake, where it was 30º in the morning. Most of us slept under the stars because this was the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. My bivy is drying out on the shrub behind my sleeping bag. There was significant internal condensation on those clear cold nights, but I was toasty. You can see the reassuring Michelin Man poofyness of my Western Mountaineering down bag.

Bonnie Lake was even windier than Middle Emigrant Lake, and it didn’t let up all night. It was only in the 40’s, but it was the coldest evening of our trip. Here is a creative tarp pitch, using every tie-out on the tarp and borrowing trekking poles from several Scouts. Buckminster Fuller would be proud.

My more conservative pitch, I call this “the cave”. I learned the pitch from this YouTube video about pitching an 8x10 Etowah tarp. I don’t pitch it exactly like the video — I use a front guyline and throw a clove hitch around the top of my trekking pole. Still, it is easy for a single person to set up. If you look carefully in the photo, you can see that I’ve used my other trekking pole to pull the center tie-out up and make more room. A lot more room, it turns out. My tarp is an Integral Designs Siltarp 2, an 8x10 tarp. In bad weather, a 10x10 tarp would provide a more coverage. Or you could pitch a poncho over the open end. At Bonnie Lake, I was more worried about dew (34º) and wind (the stiff breeze all night).

A nice stealth A-frame pitch for the other two adults, on the West Walker River. We camped in the area that used to be called Lower Paiute Meadows, but it is so overgrown that they’ve renamed Middle Paiute Meadows as Lower. This is now an unnamed wide forested area on the West Walker River.

And my cave pitch at the same spot. I tied off the center tie-out to the deadfall instead of a trekking pole. You can see the space made by the pullout in this photo. When it works, I like pitching next to big fallen trees. They make a nice windbreak.

That’s it. Seven nights in the Sierras with a tarp. My tarp buddy went home after the first night, escorting one Scout with acute mountain sickness and one with equipment problems. After that, I was stuck carrying my pound and a half of roomy shelter all by myself. Dang. I’m pretty happy I didn’t plan on splitting a tent with my buddy.

Things can be obvious if they are simple. If something complicated is obvious, such as anything that anybody seriously studies, then for it to be simple you must be abstracting it a lot. When people find such things obvious, what they often mean is that the abstraction is so clear and simple its implications are unarguable. This is answering the wrong question. Most of the reasons such conclusions might be false are hidden in what you abstracted away. The question is whether you have the right abstraction for reality, not whether the abstraction has the implications it seems to.

Abstractions are essential to understanding, but we must keep in mind that abstractions ignore information. Essentially, they are storytelling, organizing raw data into actors and relationships while leaving out the irrelevant stuff. When too much stuff is deemed irrelevant, the narrative becomes obvious, but the abstraction may become mostly fiction, too removed from the raw facts.

I still remember my freshman physics professor at Rice warning us that real atoms were not anything like the Bohr model of the atom, but that the model gave great answers for a useful set of questions.

With humans, it is all storytelling.

Via a post on Tyler Cowen’s blog, Marginal Revolution.

I’ll list the gear by category in decreasing order of weight, but first, a photo of everything that went into my pack laid out on my groundsheet, taken on day 7 of the trek.

Now, everything packed, but before I clip the Crazy Creek chair onto the back.

I carried some crew gear, but that varied day-to-day. Usually one or two fuel canisters and/or a stove. Call it two pounds.

Food: 10 pounds. The common food for our 8-day trek was 7 pounds per person. We required each person to bring 3 pounds of their own choice of trail food. The weight requirement was based on NOLS recommendations (see NOLS Cookery) and was pretty close, with maybe a half-pound safety margin. Used a heavy-duty stuff sack, 50 feet of line, and a tiny S-biner for the PCT bear bag hang.

Water: 5 pounds (typical). 12 oz. of gear, plus 2l of water. The Platypus reservoirs were for treating extra water and storing extra for cooking. Quite handy, but you can’t fill them from a lake, they just stay flat when you put them in the water. We used the Calistoga bottle or the milk jug basin to fill them. The Calistoga bottle was also useful for treating an additional liter mid-day. The Aqua Mira drops sound fussy, but were a delight to use. You mix drops form the two solutions then let them sit for 5 minutes, then add them to the dirty water, then wait 15 minutes. It always takes five or more minutes to fill the water bottles, so mix, then fill, then treat, then go do something else. Also about 4X to 5X cheaper than Katadyn Micropur tablets. One limitation, you need to mix separately for each bottle and the kit only includes on mixing cup. We brought all our cough syrup measuring cups from the back of the bathroom drawer, so we could treat water bottles and hydration system for a dozen people in one shot.

• CamelBak 2l hydration bladder (finally found a shutoff valve for this at the excellent Peak Sports in Corvallis)
• 2 Platypus 2+l collapsible bottles (1 oz. each)
• 1l plastic bottle that held Calistoga sparkling water
• Aqua Mira water purification drops (also at Peak Sports)
• extra mixing cups

Sleeping: 4 pounds. My sleeping gear is the heaviest category in my base weight, but I’ve tried lighter pads (borrowed my son’s Z-Rest, tried a Gossamer Gear TorsoLite) and they just were not as comfortable as my full-length not-quite-the-lightest model of Therm-a-Rest. I love this sleeping bag. It is really expensive, but it is light and I totally trust it. On our coldest night (30º), I slept without a tarp, only the bivy, and never closed up the hood. I took off my fleece cap in the early morning because I was too warm.

• 20º down bag (Western Mountaineering Alpenlite)
• Therm-a-Rest Prolite 4
• eVent compression stuff sack
• small fleece pillowcase (stuff with fleece jacket)
• a few feet of rubber drawer liner to keep pad from slipping

Essentials: 4 pounds. All that little stuff, mostly the ten essentials, but I put the raingear, extra food, and insulation in other groups. The mountain men called this a “possibles pouch” because it was the stuff you might possibly need. That might be a more accurate term than “essentials”.

• crew-sized first aid kit (1.5 pounds)
• Sam splints
• Yaesu VX-7R ham radio (0.5 pounds, for emergencies, but the canyons blocked all VHF and UHF, dang)
• Tom Harrison maps of Emigrant and Hoover
• Silva Ranger compass
• Petzl Zipka headlamp (not only small and bright, but cute!)
• trowel and toilet paper (take a full roll for a week-long trip!)
• sunscreen
• insect repellent
• signal mirror
• Bic lighter (and a spare)
• blanket pins to attach wet socks to outside of pack
• 50 ft. of light cord
• tiny bottle of campsuds
• toothbrush and toothpaste
• travel-size alcohol hand sanitizer (doubles as fire starter)
• basin cut from bottom of milk jug

Camera: 3.5 pounds. Most people could cut a lot of weight out of this area, but I’m just not satisfied with the results of small digital sensors. It was worth it to me, check out the results and decide for yourself.

• Canon EOS-50D digital SLR
• Canon EF-S 17-55/2.8 zoom
• two size 5 S-biners to hang camera from my pack instead of my neck
• spare battery

Clothes: 3 pounds. I threw in the PrimaLoft vest after the last shakedown because my pillow was too small with just the fleece. Stuffing the vest in there made it the right size. The vest was also an emergency extra layer for me or anyone else (Scoutmaster habits die hard). The nights were a lot colder than expected (down to 30º), so I wore it around camp. The long underwear are used as PJs.

• ancient Helly Hanson lightweight polypro zip-neck top
• generic midweight long underwear bottoms
• fleece jacket, swag from work
• REI PrimaLoft vest
• 2 extra pair underwear
• 2 extra pair wool socks
• separate stuff sacks for clean and dirty socks and underwear
• homemade fleece cap (was a troop project using 200-weight fleece from Outdoor Wilderness Fabrics)
• fleece gloves (only put them on to watch meteors, could have left at home)

Pack: 2 pounds. My pack is a Starlite from Six Moon Designs. It was completely stuffed at the beginning and not especially comfortable over 35 pounds (its advertised upper limit), but was just fine from the 3rd day on. My good ol’ Lowe Expedition carries weight better, but it weighs 6 pounds and carries almost twice as much (95l instead of 55l in the main bag). Not really worth it.

Shelter: 2 pounds. I would have shared the one-pound tarp, but my tarp buddy walked out with our AMS victim on the first day. Dang, I had a big tarp all to myself. The grip clips were another last minute addition and were a good idea. These are a modern, much improved version of the old Visclamp, just right for adding side tie-outs to a tarp pitched as an A-frame. Hint: attach them before you pitch the tarp or get a friend to help. The Ptarmigan bivy is from Titanium Goat (love the name). It has a breathable, tightly-woven nylon top with a DWR finish to repel water. I rarely zip it all the way up. I mostly duck under the the hood to dodge the gentle nighttime breeze that steals so much warmth.

• 8x10 silnylon tarp
• titanium skewer tent pegs
• two 12” fat Easton aluminum pegs for soft ground or sand (I used these and also loaned them to the other tarpers)
• Sierra Designs Grip Clips
• Ptarmigan Bivy with net window option and a custom short side zip
• Polycryo groundsheet (1.5 oz.!)

Luxury: 1.5 pounds. My Crazy Creek chair. Even when I was a kid, the one thing I really missed in the backcountry was a place to sit down and lean back. This isn’t light, but I tried the Crazy Creek Hexalight (half the weight) and stays busted through the fabric after three days at summer camp. Wasn’t as comfortable either. The padding on the original chair is stiff enough to turn a pointy rock into a sittable spot. It also does a good job of leveling out your sleeping spot when slipped under my Therm-a-Rest. It doesn’t fit in my pack, not even the Lowe, but works fine clipped on the back.

Reading material: 1 pound. OK, maybe should be in Luxury, but I carried a paperback SF/Fantasy book (Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell) and poetry (Mountains and Rivers without End by Gary Snyder), both in a small dry sack that I got for Christmas (thanks Mike!).

Raingear: 13 oz. Includes a windshirt that repels light rain and breathes a lot better than raingear. The windshirt was perfect for lunch stops above treeline and the very windy campsite at Bonnie Lake. My Tilley LTM6 hat rounds out the raingear, but that was worn, not carried.

• GoLite Wisp windshirt (got this at half-price, used it almost every day)
• DriDucks jacket (blew out the pants snow camping)
• ULA rain wrap (actually got the Etowah version because ULA was out hiking for six months)

Kitchen: 4 oz. This would be lighter, but the Sierra Club cup is just right for tea.

• Orikaso XL bowl
• Lexan spoon
• Titanium Sierra Club-style cup

What did I wear?

• BSA Action Shirt, long-sleeve
• BSA Switchbacks zip-off pants
• Tilley LTM6 hat
• Vasque Blur SL trail runners
• Gerber LST lock-back knife (light, good steel, affordable)
• Storm whistle
• Rite in the Rain field notes and a ballpoint pen (this notebook is perfect, unless you write a lot, fits in your pocket and is waterproof)
• chapstick

Things I didn’t take and didn’t miss:

• camp shoes, I hike in shoes that are comfortable
• gaiters, I have a tall pair for winter camping, but the Sierras are dry in the summer
• liner socks, I stopped using these years ago, no blisters
• water pump, heavy, requires regular maintenance, and doesn’t stop viruses

Things I maybe should have brought:

• Body Glide would have helped when I had some chafing.
• Some plastic to hang over the camera when it rained.
• A bright laser pointer would have been really useful for pointing out constellations on those clear nights.
• I would have used a timer for my SLR to take 30 minute exposures of the Perseid meteors (but I ain’t payin’ $150 for a Canon TC80N3, geez).
• I might have used sandals or water shoes for river crossings, it took a bit took long for my trail runners to dry out. Luckily, we only had two soak-your-shoes crossings.

I take very similar gear on a weekend campout, with the addition of a small aluminum kettle, a Super Cat stove, windscreen, and some alcohol fuel. That is enough to rehydrate food or make tea.

The original idea was to use it to keep the freezer bag meals from falling over while they were rehydrating, but we kept finding new uses.

The least-expected use was for a bucket brigade to fight a single-tree wildfire that we found. The initial containment and a satphone report were done by Troop 959 from San Diego, but they needed to move on to evac an ill crewmember. Our crew (Troop 14, Palo Alto) took over and spent most of an hour putting it all the way out.

Since we had forgotten to pack a Pulaski or a big crosscut saw or even an Indian pump, we had to improvise.

Here is a photo of the fire when we took over.

Here is our bucket brigade, getting water from nearby Cascade Creek. The milk jug basin is being passed up. We also used two cooking pots, but an extra five basins made a big difference.

Once we knocked down most of the fire, we used the basins to attack the remaining hot spots.

Also note: one of the 100 uses for a bandana.

As far as we could tell, a campfire had lit a tree root under the fire circle, and that had smoldered through the root system, eventually consuming the major roots on one side of the tree and lighting the core. The tree fell after the roots on one side were destroyed, opening it up for more fire. This photo shows the original campfire ring along with the surface area that was burned to ash above the destroyed roots.

The incident number for this fire is HTF-952 EK1P, according to the Sierra Front Interagency Dispatch and the WildWeb website (check out August 2009 fires and look for the wildfire labeled “Walker Creek”, even though it was Cascade Creek).

That list shows it as a false alarm, probably because we had the smoke knocked down by the time that a helicopter and an airplane flew over to check (we saw them). Maybe I’ll call them up and correct the report.

The rest of the fire photos are at flickr, tagged with HTF-952.

We found plenty of other uses for the milk jug basins:

• put one the bottom of a food stuff sack to give it some shape and help it stand up
• scooping water out of lakes and creeks to fill water bottles (you cannot fill a Platypus flexible water bottle by submerging it in a stream, it just gets flat and stays empty)
• washing socks and underwear
• an especially silly hat

Overall, it was the best innovation of the trip and by far the cheapest. A couple of Scouts said they would take one on every trip from now on. For me, it is right up there with a bandana for a multi-use, lightweight item.

Nice oak floors, too.