Activities

For the past few months we have been working towards eliminating the use of plastic for food storage. For some reason, the thought of potentially harmful chemicals leaching into our food doesn't hold much appeal for us.

Just recently I had the idea to use our backpacking kitchenware - pots, mugs, bowls, etc. - as storage containers for the fridge. Since they are not in use when we are at home, giving them a new task to do means we need less storage space for our outdoor gear. It also means that we can get rid of some other containers in the kitchen that we would normally have used for that task. I love having the opportunity to use items for multiple purposes, this is a fundemental principle of lightweight backpacking, why not extend it to the home as well for simpler living?

A side benefit of this idea is that it helps to justify the cost of purchasing higher quality backpacking gear. Titanium kitchenware, while durable and light-weight is more expensive than its steel and aluminum counterparts. Making the gear play a role at home as well as in the backcountry can make those higher prices seem more reasonable since the gear gets more frequent usage.

Titanium is a great material for the task of food storage. It doesn't contain nickel (which some people are allergic to) and is immune to corrosion. It is considered completey biocompatible and is therefore the material of choice for use in hypoallergenic jewelery, medical tools, and medical implants.

One example of a container perfectly suited to home food storage and backcountry use is the Snow Peak titanium bowl. They are a great price at $16 each and have a volume of just under 2-1/2 cups. Other containers that can be used include mugs and pots - pretty much anything that can reliably hold liquid.

Most outdoor mugs and bowls don't come with any sort of lid so I improvised a solution using a resource that all backpackers are intimately familiar with: Ziploc bags. Backpackers are no stranger to Ziploc bags. We like to reuse ours but no matter how carefully we clean them, the bags eventually wear out. I designed a sewing pattern using old Ziploc bags to create elasticized lid custom fit for each bowl/mug/pot that we own. This pattern will work just about any polythylene food-grade bag (i.e. Aloksak etc.) and is a great way to keep some plastic out of landfills a little longer.

The instructions for making your own lids are as follows:

Equipment and materials required:

• The container you want to cover (of course!)
• A sewing machine
• Used Ziploc, Aloksak, or other polyethylene bags
• Marking pen (i.e. Sharpie or similar)
• Polyester thread
• 1 mm round elastic cord (pick it up at any fabric store)
• Small safety pin

Instructions:

1. Trace the outline of the container on the outside of a bag using the marker. Make sure that there is at least a 1/2 inch of plastic beyond the edge of the traced line.
   
2. Using the sewing machine and your polyester thread, stitch a circle 1 cm (3/8 inch) outside of the line you just traced. You will be stitching through both sides of the plastic bag. Don't close the circle completely, leave about a 1/2 inch wide gap between the start and the end of the stitch. Make sure you backstitch at the beginning and end of the stitch to prevent it from coming undone.
   
3. Stitch another circle 1 cm (3/8 inch) outside of the first one you just completed. This time completely close the cirlcle. Again, backstitch at the beginning and the end of the stitch. When you are done, you should have three concentric circles: The inner one is the pen marking, the next one is the circle with the 1/2 inch gap, and the third one is the outer circle that goes completely around.
   
4. Cut the the plastic away from the outer-most circle, leaving about 1/8 inch of plastic around the outside of the stitching. You should now have a plastic disc.
   
5. Grab both layers of the disk from the middle and pull them apart.
   
6. Poke a hole through only one side of the middle and cut it out, leaving about 1/8 inch of plastic from the inner stitched circle. You should now have a round piece of plastic with a single layer in the middle and a double layer ring around the outside.
   
7. Tie the end of the elastic cord to the safety pin. Feed the pin into the outer ring, through the gap that was left in the stitching. Thread the elastic all the way around the outer ring and all the way back out of the hole. When you are done you should have the elastic threaded through the outer ring and both ends sticking out of the hole in the stitching.
   
8. Pull both ends of the elastic until your plastic disk looks like a shower cap. It should be small enough to tightly stretch over the container. Once you have the size right, knot the two ends of the elastic together and cut off the excess. The knot should pull back into the hole. You may have to shift the plastic around so that it isn't excessively bunched in any specific area (you will know what I mean when you see it!).
   

Voila! You should now have a perfectly fitted plastic lid for your container...

and a shower cap for your American Girl doll...

Note: I am not as concerned about plastic being used for the lid. I figure that since the food will mostly be in contact with the container rather than the lid, everything should be fine.

We just got back from our weekend backpacking trip to Camden Hills State Park with Renee's parents and the Sifferman family. John just wrote an incredibly good trip report as well as put together this video:

I will be writing more on the trip in a forthcoming post.

On the topic of trip reports, do you remember way back a couple of months ago when the kids and I went to sleep under the stars to watch the Leonid meteor shower? Well, I finally got some photos from one of the student photographers who was there. The quality isn't great, but it gives you an idea of how things went:

Notice that white sugary coating on our sleeping bags? Yep, that's frost. It was a little chilly that evening but we were all toasty warm.

It has been on my mind for quite some time to take a first aid course. I figure that since we spend so much time in the outdoors, away from 911 and ambulances, that it would probably be useful to have some clue as to what to do if (when?) things go wrong.

The student outdoors club at the college where I work recently announced that they would be organizing a wilderness first aid (WFA or wiffa as they say) course. I jumped at the opportunity and also asked my 10-year-old daughter if she was interested in joining me. Much to my delight, she said she was! How often does one get to combine outdoor adventure, father/daughter relationship building, homeschooling, emergency preparedness, health/wellness, and meeting new people into one activity? I am always on the lookout for ways to integrate multiple goals into a single activity, and this seemed like an especially good opportunity.

The course consisted of two eight hour days of instruction. Approximately half of the time was spent in the classroom learning and the other half was spent in the outdoors practicing scenarios. I was very interested to see how my daughter would respond to this type of setting. She hasn't spent any time learning in a classroom, never mind with a group of college kids nearly twice her age.

At first things started off rather tentative: she was very quiet and whenever we were asked to break-up into partners for practicing the scenarios, she wanted to be with me. By the end of lunch on the first day it was like a switch went off, she completely changed: she was confidently participating verbally during the lecture sessions, partnering-up with different people for the scenarios, and even volunteering to act as a victim for in-class demonstrations.

Testing consisted of 3 multiple-choice quizzes as well as continual evaluation by the instructor over the course of the two days. On the final quiz, she kicked-my-butt by getting 100% correct while I managed to get a rather surprising number of questions wrong. She has an amazing ability to retain information, some of the answers to the questions on the final quiz were not covered during the class but she learned them inadvertently while flipping through the instruction book.

Needless to say, she earned her WFA certification and made her father proud. Congratulations Celine!