Gear

Coming to you live from the OR Press Room. Hoping to stay focused long enough to publish this before Happy Hour starts. Free beer. Lots of free beer. You'll understand if I cut this short (smile).

Yesterday was an incredibly busy day, and today has been much of the same. Busy in a good way though, as we are really enjoying ourselves here. Here are a few nuggets we thought might be of interest to some of you...

If you are interested in getting out and hiking or backpacking with little kids, Little Life
is a brand that may be worth looking into. They make backpacks for carrying kids
(one of the lightest weight models on the market) as well as tiny little backpacks for the kids
themselves to carry. The kids backpacks are incredibly cute, and incredibly tiny - get
them started young!

Just a heads up - we're going to be giving away one of these sweet packs in the coming days. So stay tuned. 

There is like a bazillion energy bar companies here. All the usual big names and lots of little companies.
This is one of the brands we found yesterday whose mission and product we really like.
Olympia Granola is a Minnesota based, family run company.
We make most of the food for our treks but this might be a good option for families
who don't have the time or desire to do so. They have free shipping right now for a limited time. 

Our family has used Light My Fire brand Sporks for years.
They are cheap and lightweight. When we bought ours originally there weren't many colors available.
I'm sure you can guess what color Brienne would choose now if given the chance (yes they come in pink).
We've had a couple break (they aren't indestructible) and at that point we upgraded to titanium
(Stronger, not cheaper). But we still own three plastic sporks and use them nearly every week.

Now it's your lucky day because we scored a set of five sporks to give to one lucky reader. 

We want to share some of our good finds with you all and have you benefit somewhat from our trip to OR. 

If you would like to win these sporks please leave a comment saying what your favorite family outdoor activity is. We'll randomly draw one winner next week on Friday, August 12th. Will mail to Canada or the United States.

We have another giveaway coming your way and also some product reviews/giveaways at FIMBY next week. Renee's cool "natural living" finds from OR.

I am now convinced that most children's outdoor clothing is made more for fashion than function. The quality I am seeing these days is pretty abysmal. My theory is that most people who buy this stuff are not actually spending much time in the outdoors doing, you know, outdoorsy stuff.

Kids like to climb rocks and trees, jump over creeks, and explore little crags, nooks, and crannies. They probably spend as much time on their bums and knees as they do their feet. This is normal behavior for a kid. Don't outdoor companies know the conditions for which these things will be used?

Geared-up for a real day in the outdoors.

We spend a lot of time in the outdoors with our kids. I am not afraid to spend money on buying quality clothing, because I know we will use it. The problem is, how in the world am I supposed to know what quality is? You sure can't go by brand name...

Patagonia used to make kids' pants. They were the most durable pants we had ever seen, we were able to pass them down from one child to the other. When our kids eventually outgrew them (they outgrew them before they fell apart) I had to find an alternative.

I have bought three (yes, three!) pairs of pants for my son in the last year. All from different manufacturers. None of them have lasted more than six months each. I am getting a little frustrated with this picture:

Chlorophylle: MAJOR FAIL!

This was our first attempt. We bought these pants last summer while on a trip to the Gaspe Peninsula in Canada. They started falling apart within a couple of months. This is what they look like now...

Blown side pocket...

Blown knee...

Buttons gone...

Blown rear pocket...

Blown hem.

Columbia: FAIL!

This was attempt number two. In a matter of a few months they were unwearable.

Blown knee...

Blown zipper. This issue rendered the pants unwearable.

My daughter's Columbia pants have fared a little better,
but they are starting to wear out prematurely as well, after less than a year.
It is difficult to capture in a picture, but the fabric is starting to get threadbare in some areas.

Mountain Hardware: FAIL!

Our latest attempt to find something for my son. I had such high hopes for these... oh well.

Blown butt.

Patagonia: MAJOR PASS! ... but they don't make them anymore :-(

The photo below is of a pair of well used Patagonia girls' pants. They are on their fourth year, second child, and still going strong. Yes the rear pocket is blown, but I would expect some wear-and-tear after the amount of abuse these have seen. Why Patagonia, did you have to stop making these? Why can't anyone else make them like this?

Old friends. I think we will have a ceremony when we finally retire these pants.

The Challenge

I am tired of spending my hard-earned money on stuff that doesn't work. I would like to issue a challenge to all childrens' outdoor clothing manufacturers: make me a pair of childrens' pants that ACTUALLY work in the outdoors. These are the criteria:

• They need to be quick drying. No cotton! Nylon and polyester are great.
• They need to last at LEAST a year. Multiple years preferred.
• There need to be models available for both boys and girls.

If you provide me with a pair of pants, I promise that my kids will put them to the test in some of the toughest conditions that kids can dish out. I will then report the results here on this blog. If your pants pass the test, I will even pay you full price for them. As I said before, I am willing to pay for this stuff, but I want it to actually work.

So, who is up to the challenge? If you are, contact me.

One of my biggest pet peeves with backpacking is the sheer volume of Ziploc bags (and plastic food packaging in general) that we as backpackers depend on. It surprises me that outdoor adventurers are not more progressive in figuring out ways to eliminate non-biodegradable waste from their preferred activity.

I can't argue with the benefits of plastic packaging. It's waterproof, lightweight, (theoretically) food-safe, inexpensive, and makes it very easy to stay organized. Ziplocs are easy, it's the path of least resistance.

We recently returned from a four-day backpacking trip. As is the norm for us, we made almost all of the food ourselves. When it came to figuring out how to package it all up, I wasn't too thrilled with how the numbers looked.

Let's do the Ziploc math: If every snack requires one Ziploc bag and each person has four snacks per day and we have five people, that would amount to twenty bags per day (4x5=20). Then, if you organize each person's snacks for every day in another Ziploc (ie: a larger ziploc with 4 little snack bags in it), that makes for another five bags per day bringing the total to twenty-five per day (20+5=25). Over a four-day trip that equates to one-hundred bags, just for snacks (25x4 =100).

That kind of plastic consumption just isn't cool. Even if you do wash and reuse. I had to search for an alternative.

In Ray Jardine's Trail Life, he claims to use brown paper (butchers paper, or brown paper bags) and masking tape. We have tried this a couple of times but haven't been completely satisfied with the results. Brown paper is kind of bulky and doesn't handle moisture or greasy foods real well.

This time I decided to try something different. We bought a roll of waxed paper and using some masking tape and a stapler, we were able to create custom sized packaging for all of our snack food. The work was a little tedious but once we got an assembly line going, it actually went pretty quick. The kids thought it was a lot of fun too - they pretended to be factory workers. Thank goodness they didn't organize and strike!

We still used some Ziplocs for organizing the snacks for each day, but instead of using one hundred for five people for four days, we managed to whittle it down to twenty (one per-person, per-day).

Overall, the homemade wax paper packaging system worked pretty well; better than the brown paper system ever did. The homemade Eatmore bars were the only significant problem: they contain a lot of nut butter and everything in the same bag started to get greasy after a few days. Other than that, all of the other foods we packed seemed to fare quite well.

I think we can do better next time. For starters, I want to purchase some pre-made wax-paper bags to help streamline the packaging process. The other thing I want to do is sew some small ultralight stuffsacks for organizing the daily food rations. At this point I don't see it being possible to completely eliminate all plastic bag use, but I still think there is a lot of room for improvement.

Are you a backpacker who is cutting back on plastic waste? We would love to hear what steps you are taking towards that end.