Through a Fresh Clear Cut to Mcdonald's

290 calories burned, 500 calories eaten.  On this walk we discovered that the trail closest to home just got logged.

Victoria British Columbia, Canada walking tour and stuff

I went to Victoria for a couple of nights and did some urban hiking.  I probably walked about 9 miles in total.  I'm almost over the flu and am working on my home made, self designed daypack project.

Mountain Equipment Co-op



Jesus is knocking on your church door,
don't let him in, he'll get mud on the floor

Homeless in Canada look healthier than homeless in USA

Only if you walk onto a boat

Douglas street



You are here



Canadian Customs



Ferry Wake

Western Washington, Almost heaven
 

Nippon Paper industries biomass plant and pulp mill
smoking away on the
edge of Olympic National Park in Port Angeles

The flu?

We seem to have the flu in our house.  We are all quite sick.  It will probably be another week before I can hike again, but I am recovering.  I'm doing everything I can to try to keep this from turning into a sinus infection.

Sawyer Squeeze Mini Final Review

Sawyer Squeeze Mini Final Review

First of all thank you to Sawyer for giving me a free mini squeeze filter to review!

This will be my final review for the Sawyer Squeeze mini filter.    I used the filter on about ten day hikes and on one backpacking trip.  Right away the gasket failed while using the filter with a water bottle.  I got new gaskets at the hardware store and they worked well.  I know that Sawyer will mail out new gaskets for free, but I did not feel like waiting and gaskets are very cheap to buy.

The cap on the outflow end has a small retaining ring.  The cap was often difficult to get off and one time I had to use so much pressure to get the cap off that the retainer broke.  So now when I have to get the cap off there is no retainer and sometimes the cap flies away into the woods. 

I took the Sawyer mini on a backpacking trip to the ocean and the filter worked well and it was so much better than a pump filter, but the gasket kept falling out.  I think my replacement gaskets were too small.

I would dip my bladder into a river and then attach the Sawyer and squeeze water through the bladder into a bottle.  The chance of contamination with this method was high, I felt.  Untreated river water could drip down the bag and into my bottle.  Certainly one must take care when using all filters.

I love the squeeze filter concept, and I love that Sawyer is doing such wonderful work to bring clean water to folks in developing nations.  But I don’t think I will use my mini filter anymore.  I hope to buy (or better yet be given) a couple of regular sized  Sawyer Squeeze filters for my planned PCT Oregon hike with my daughter this summer.  The regular sized Squeeze filter has a faster flow and a built in push pull cap.  I don’t know if the regular has the same gasket issue.  I think that gasket issues can be averted by using the filter with a bag instead of a bottle.

Clearly Sawyer has revolutionized back country water filtering with the squeeze system.  The regular sized squeeze weighs almost nothing compared to a traditional pump filter and the flow is faster.  I have not used the regular sized Sawyer squeeze filter, but I feel that the regular sized Sawyer Squeeze filter is the best option for me.  I just had too many issues with the mini that make it not worth the one ounce of weight saved.

Sekrit Hunter's Camp on the Skok

  I needed to get out of the house but could not go too far so I decided to make a return trip to the Sekrit hunting camp.  This time we had a fire and enjoyed hot tea from water heated on the fire.

My friend only had experience starting fires with split wood and an axe.  Fire starting was not going well.  I had my friend step aside and I showed him how to start a back country fire with so-called "squaw wood".  That is the tiny dead twigs attached near the base of a douglas-fir tree. 

  It takes a lot of work when this stuff is wet because you have to keep feeding the fire with tiny twigs until you have coals, only then can you add pencil sized pieces of wood.    It takes a lot of tiny twigs to get to the hot coal stage but the twigs burn up fast so you have to keep adding them and adding them and then once you have some coals you can finally add pencil sized pieces.  It takes quite a while  before you even dare to put baseball bat sized pieces on the top to dry. 

It takes time and patience and a lot of work to light a fire in a wet rain forest with no fire starter this time of year.  Even once the fire was going good we knew that we could not let it sit for too long without adding more bits of wood to the sides to try to get them dry enough to eventually add them to the fire.

On the way in we saw a very large trap set up on Forest Service land but it was not loaded.  It would have taken something larger than a pick up truck to haul the trap in I think.  Also who ever hauled it in must have had a key to the gate.  Strange that it was left unlocked but not loaded.

I don't understand why Green Diamond aka Simpson gets to put a gate across forest service land.  The Green Diamond gate should be placed where the actual Green Diamond land starts in my opinion.

I was expecting rain and was not feeling energetic so I only took my little point and shoot camera.

4 miles 300 feet elevation gain 500 calories

Very fresh bear poop

mystery trap

Soft fuzzy dead shrew on a bed of moss