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May 31, 2005
False Pretenses
Saturday, we went to REI. I confess that we purchased the Dog Dome, if for no other reason than to silence the on-going discussion on the topic of whether the dog would sleep in it. (She does, but she does not like it as much as we had hoped. I suspect that she will "condition" herself to it well, however.) While at the store Roomie noticed an upcoming event "Boundary Waters 101." On Sunday, we made a date for this evening to check it out: Smarty-pants may not know it all, after all.
When I got home from work today, I asked if my date would be interested in "dining out" at IKEA, our recent guilty pleasure (though not an expensive one) beforehand. I should have known better. Traffic was light and we had plenty of time to listen to Human League, Tommy TuTone, and something that sounded a lot like New Order. Too much time in fact, and after our Jumbo Dogs, Lingonberry pop, and softee-style frozen yogurt, we arrived at REI 45 minutes early.
We wander about the store, committing to memory every item of even the remotest interest: 68 lb. canoes (too heavy); enormous six-person tents (too many people too close); Buzz-Off™ clothing (too expensive); tungsten fry pan (too small for bannock); microfiber shorts (not in my size); tarp poles (could be useful, hmm, 2 * 12 oz = 1.5 lbs); the tent stake department (the arrow stakes are now sold in red-anodized—sexy!). The most tempting thing was a pair of little tubes for squeezable food along the trail. I remember my mom having identical ones when she was in her Sierra Club phase back in the mid-1970s.
— Let's just get the tubes and go home.
— I should have known better than to give you the reward before the lecture. [Heads toward door.]
— Soft frozen yogurt. . . But let's get the tube things.
— Enh.
— They're cheap.
— What'll we use them for?
— Peanut butter.
— And what will we put the peanut butter on?
— [Pauses] Bannock.
Case closed.
Posted by Underblog at 7:28 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 18, 2005
Bee in a Bonnet
Like Shermanilla, I too have a bee in my bonnet. My bee is pestering me to go titanium in the camping and cookware department. We adore our Coleman Exponent stainless cookset. It has served us well with little sign of wear. However, the coffee cups suck, chilling hot beverages down almost immediately. Also, the plates are so tiny (5½" dia.) as to be useless. Finally there is the weight issue. Hot on the heels of reducing the weight of the hoopty tent stakes, I am eager to reduce the weight of the cookset.
So I do what any underemployed person would do when their boss goes off to a potluck and leaves me minding the store: I create a spreadsheet with the total estimated weight saving and cost saving of going titanium. It does not look promising. Replacing each of the items in our cookset with titanium would only save us a little more that three quarters of a pound. Of course, the plates are 2 inches larger in diameter.
Roomie and disagree on the utility of plates. She likes our diminutive steel numbers as little trays for crackers or almonds. I can handle those in a bowl. Virtually everything we eat while camping is of the soup / beans & rice or finger-food varieties. We have yet to sit down with a steak or burgers while living out of a pack. In my estimation, the plates could be dropped altogether. A titanium set sans plates would save us a little better than a pound. At that point we would be nearly halving the cookset weight.
Of course, the other side of the ledger must be reckoned: this reduction would cost 180 dollars. As my boss suggests, what I really need to do is weigh each of the Coleman components individually to see where we could maximize our weight savings. Unfortunately, I have neither the scale nor the cookset with me here at work.
Roomie is talking me out of tea and into coffee for future camping trips. To this, I say here is just the thing. I am certain that it weighs less than our stainless espresso pot. No titanium upgrade appears to speak to Roomie's Quest For the Perfect Bannock Pan. Of course, we have not made a dedicated trip to REI (or anywhere else for that matter), so there may yet be a Holy Grail awaiting discovery: a perfect bannock pan which will shave precious ounces off our pack weight.
Posted by Underblog at 12:06 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 17, 2005
Rampant Consumerism
Warning: This post contains content that may prove to be offensive to Wal-Mart shoppers.
En route from IKEA Mall of America to REI Bloomington:
—I hate Walmart.
—I like Target.
—I like Target and I hate Wal-Mart and I like Home Depot and I hate Menard's.
—I bet that some people just swear by Menard's and Wal-Mart.
—Yeah, they are called idiots.
I hate the star between the "Wal" and the "Mart." I hate their use of the American flag, when everything you see there comes from China. Just saying is all.
OK, maybe it is impossible for me to go to REI for just a little collar to replace a missing one from a hoopty tent stake, one of the set that saved our bacon (or at least our tarp) at Tettegouche. Of course, the real fun is finding stuff you did not know you needed, like titanium cookware. I had heard the hype, but had not experienced it. It is so lightweight the boxes feel empty. Really. Even Roomie was impressed. Titanium is also horribly expensive. But if we find ourselves shaving ounces in order to single portage this summer, some titanium may be in our future. (How far Roomie has come, from being reluctant to go to REI to discovering new lightweight thingies before I do. She is almost a camping-goods accomplice at this point!) Alas, they did not have the hoopty stakes, much less spare parts for them. Trying to find them there was a longshot at best. But we had arrived at the tent stakes carousel.
It may be recalled that I have a somewhat unusual fascination with fancy aluminum tent stakes. And they had quite a selection: two colors of the 6" stakes that normally come with tarps and tents, aluminum snow stakes (basically a piece of perforated L-channel), and even a snow/sand cleat thingie, which was too complicated for me to understand. I reckon that those cleats are the kind of thing you buy when you realize that you cannot get your stakes to stay put no matter what. And they had thick stakes, which resembled the galvanized hoopties but were just a tad shorter. And shinier. And lighter. I wrestled over the decision to purchase new tent stakes to replace the perfectly good (but heavy) ones at home for at least five minutes, long enough for Roomie to go over and discover a new kind of underwear that you wash each night and it will dry overnight, obviating the need to pack multiple pairs. Of course, I gave in.
We both held the line (though Roomie gave me that look that said it would really cheer her up to have it) on the pup tent, which Selkye would not want to use camping, but would love at home. "Maybe for her birthday" I said. Now is not the time to buy something we would have to break down each time someone came to look at the house.
On the way out to the car, I asked Roomie how much lighter the new stakes would be than the old ones. "I bet they are a LOT lighter." How wise she is. The weight-difference between old and new may be visible in the pictures. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that the old stakes were only a half inch longer than the new ones. And these have a nice little cord by which one can pull them up.
Posted by Underblog at 6:59 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 11, 2005
Exit
We have been camping in Minnesota five times now. And it has rained for at least one night each time. Not long after the pre-bedtime nap at Tettegouche, I began to hear the tell-tale sound of drops hitting the tent. We have confidence in the tent, having survived rolling thunderstorms at Afton and a deluge in the Boundary Waters. So I just listened and waited for the thunderstorm. The tent would be fine. A three by four inch puddle of water accumulated where the window tiedown doo-hickey wicked water in. But considering the amount of water that fell, we were pleased. My concern was for the tarp. The high winds continued through the night, and the tarp flapped noisily outside. At some late point, I listened as the tarp stopped flapping altogether. I thought that it might have flown off and landed somewhere in the woods or (worse) in Lake Superior. I listened and worried myself back to sleep.
I suppose that moment when the tarp stopped making noise is when the wind got tired of blowing. We encountered some residual raindrops, enough to make Roomie concerned that we had spent too much time cooking and eating oatmeal. My concern for the tent-poles (they scratch easily and if the ends snap into each other they dent and resist fitting together) plunged us into another iteration of the camping orthodoxy versus having fun debate. The dog was ready for a long nap. We broke camp in what seemed like record time, and encountered only an occasional shower on the way to Duluth.
We really like Duluth, but downtown is completely dead on Sundays, a function of the businesses all locating to the skyway system. Closed office buildings = closed businesses. We had intended to visit the Duluth Pack store and in fact we drove within a block or two of it. But the call for coffee was strong and the Dunn Bros. was so close to the entrance to I-35 that we took off home. When we returned, it felt sticky and steamy outside. It was our first taste of summer.
Posted by Underblog at 6:41 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
May 9, 2005
Tettegouche Part 2
We awoke at Tettegouche cold and ready to start moving our bodies—the only known solution to the backaches with which we seem to always awake. We lower the foodpack and begin the fire to make bannock. The bannock came out much better than our experience at Sibley: not overdone on the bottom and not inedibly doughy in the middle. It was not perfect but quite nearly so, the inside being dense rather than fluffy. I think that the powder is still going off too soon, activating before it reaches the heat of the firepit. Also the heat within the firepit is still not where I would like it. The reduced size of the loaf (1½ cups of flour rather than 2) was compensated for by our ability to eat 100% of it.
The wind is strong and constant as we fill the day / food pack and head off. We remember to bring the nearly empty water jug (to be refilled on our way back in) with us to the car. We take the cart in anticipation of bringing a six-pack back with us (we remembered to bring a small cooler with us from Saint Paul just in case we felt that we deserved a beer after a day of hiking and exploring).
We reach the trailhead for Tettegouche Camp just before 9:00am. It is always a good sign when you find no other cars in the trailhead lot. Roomie is positively smitten with the signage along the trail, which includes a map of vertical elevation to be covered as well as horizontal distance. Along the way, interpretative signage tells us that northern Minnesota is strewn with anorthosite, which is uncommon on Earth's surface but very common on the moon's. Somewhere after the 300 ft. summit along the trail, we come within sight of Tettegouche Lake, where a very small collection of old-growth white pines stands.
Tettegouche Camp is actually on Mic Mac Lake. The lake itself is pretty though small and unremarkable, save for the fact that there is no sign of any other development on it. In fact, we do not see another soul at the camp or along the trail the entire time we are there. I suspect that it is too early in the season for the fishng that people like to do at Tettegouche. The lodge is very cool, though it is too dark in there to get a good photograph. The place feels like a ghost town: everything appears to be in working order, lacking only people to give it life. The lack of people is what I think I like best about camping. It is the one environment where I prefer not to have others around.
Tettegouche Camp is an example of what Minnesota does really well at its state parks: preserve history for future generations. The park is a fairly recent innovation, founded in 1979 or so. Before that, the camp belonged to a businessman who had managed to buy out the other members of the "Tettegouche Club" who had operated the camp as a hunting and fishing retreat. The buildings date back to the 1920's and they are meticulously maintained, but more importantly, they continue to be used as hunting and fishing cabins. Thus one can experience something of the past as well as observe it.
We snap pictures of the lodge, "Cabin B" (saved from the 1994 fire), the dock, my dream cabin, the cool old functional hand pump (whose water is far superior to the stuff available at the campsite), and the bat-house. I think bats are an excellent way to lower the biting insect population, and someone at the DNR at Tettegouch must feel the same way too. It is warm at the lake and along the trail, so we shed a few of the layers we put on at the campsite. After snacking on granola bars, trail mix, and rice crackers, we head back up the hill to the car. On the trail back, we see a deer jump across the road and into the woods. We also see what appears to be wolf scat. It looks like corded dog poop but with an awful lot of fur mixed in. Fortunately for us, it is pretty dry.
Silver Bay is a depressing town. Only the presence of Rocky Taconite cheers us up. But Silver Bay has an ATM, a Zup's, a gas station, and a liquor store (all within 500 feet of each other) and so we can meet our present needs there. Roomie wants bread for sandwiches, and so we go into Zup's (the only other Zup's in which I have shopped is in Ely). I protest irrationally but viscerally at the "mission creep" : the possible addition of mayonnaise to the shopping list threatens to turn "camping" into "shopping in strange grocery stores." I go ballistic when Roomie starts checking out the apple butter because I misconstrue her curiosity at finding it there for an intent to throw it in the basket as well. The "to mayo or not to mayo" discussion soon conflagrates into a much larger discussion about my orthodoxy about camping to her preference for "having a good time." For me, camping is all about planning and preparation. I am totally open to having bread along, but we could have brought in from home. I worry that the mayo will not keep and we will end up tossing it out. We do have a cooler and ice—or will once we buy beer—but I do not want to get in the habit of packing along ingredients that require refrigeration. Roomie quickly points out the fallacy of my logic by noting that beer needs refrigeration and I wanted beer, right? I call it a compromise: bread but no mayo. Roomie calls it irrational "camping orthodoxy." We are both right.
The wind has picked up again as we return to the campsite. As Roomie assembles gouda and salami sandwiches sans mayo, I tie down the tarp, which has pulled its stakes up. I never manage to refind the stake that I had found at the campsite earlier. One of us finds the hoopty tent stakes in with the tent hardware. I had bought these giant 1 foot stakes for the Burning Man Expedition of 1998: This is why I never throw anything away. I attach the guy wires to the hoopty stakes and plant them deep. Lesson: Always bring the giant tent stakes, no matter which tent you bring.
We return to the trail to see the falls. There are three sets of waterfalls on the map, and one of them is the highest waterfall in the state. The trail has some climbs and dips to it, and we are already a little bit tired by our earlier 3.4 mile hike. The lower falls do not look impressive, and the middle falls are way down a long flight of stairs. We decide to check out the upper falls first and should they be unimpressive then we can see the middle falls on the way back. Luckily for us, the High Falls are the big ones. The Baptism River flows over a 60 foot cliff, thundering as it lands in a pool. The mist and the scenery remind us of the Middle Falls of the McCloud River back in Siskiyou County. We are stumped as to why the river appears to be yellow: perhaps it is the taconite.
Along the way back to the campsite, we snap some pictures of an outcropping around which the river bends. In one corner of the river bend, a crevice protected from the sun still holds a large chunk of ice. We each have a beer and we eat at a ridiculously early hour. The tarp flaps violently and loudy in the high wind, so I run a third guy wire from one of its sides to nearby tree. Selkye is exhausted, as are we, and we go to sleep early enough that I awake refreshed thinking "Wow, my back isn't sore and it is so light out!" before realizing that I have slept solidly for at least an hour and it is still light out.
Posted by Underblog at 7:53 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Tettegouche
While we did not drive to Gubbio and purchase fennel and snapdragons for our garden, we had a little adventure of our own this weekend. We had been told that there were some empty campsites at Tettegouche State Park, but that they could not promise us one on short notice. So we leave St. Paul at the crack of dawn in order to be sure that we would not be beaten out by a less deserving party. When you arrive at the campground at 10:45 am, you pretty much get to have your pick of unreserved campsites. Only one campsite was reserved, so we had to pick our spot. Unlike our trip to Sibley, we did not have to return to the Ranger Station to trade in our site. Instead, when we made our choice, the Ranger said "Oh, that is a beautiful site. Off the path, about a foot above the lake, nice and private." It sounded ideal to us.
Tettegouche State Park is a lovely place in spring. There are no bugs to speak of, and (as it turns out) few campers at the campsites. The only other occupied cart-in campsite this weekend belonged to a family who had tried to stay there once during the summer and found it packed. Since they were told that everything along the North Shore was similarly booked up, they spent the night in the car. The people who reserved the one reserved campsite appear to have never showed up at all. We saw some folks at the car-camping sites—notably a couple with two kayaks atop their SUV whom we had seen on the road as far back as the Scenic North Shore Drive.
We parked at the cart-in lot and forewent the cart. As we packed our gear in, we decided that since the cart obivated the need to conserve weight, we could use the bigger REI Camp Dome 4 instead of the less commodious Sub-Alpine UL. It also occurred to us that we should have filled the water jug at the Ranger Station before hiking the 3/4 mile to the campsite. We also forgot to take the overpriced bundle of wood with us As we return to the car to get the cart and the larger tent, I remember that I forgot the empty water jug. So before we had explored anything but the trail between the lot and the site, Selkye and I had hiked nearly 4 miles.
We hitched the cart to Selkye, and began the final trip to the site. Roomie felt bad for Selkye, so she helped a bit too. Roomie pitched the tent while I hung the tarp. There is an positive relationship to the simplicity of the design (eg tarp vs tent) and the difficulty involved in setting it up. Tarp hanging is not made easier by the fact that they behave as sails. I get one of the adjusters to work properly, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do the same arrangement on the other stake. In the process of staking down the tarp I find two other stakes, one of which I immediately put to use. The tarp basically served as a garage for the cart.
Perhaps our favorite feature of the campsite we occupied is that it has a private footpath to a small jetty onto Lake Superior. The views south and north were of spectacular basaltic-looking orange rock formations. Off the tip of the jetty was a small island. We spent an hour or so checking out the pebble beaches and lichen formations on the nearby rocks. Because we are of a certain age, we ate early. Selkye was so tired that a square foot worth of grass was sufficient to lay her head. Inside the tent, she was no less ready for some comfort.
The night itself was cold and clear, and because Roomie insisted on having the windows open all night we both got to enjoy a fragment of a starlit night and spend the night shivering in our bags.
Posted by Underblog at 6:11 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 6, 2005
Off We Go Again
Time for a little adventure, as a reward for surviving these six years of classroom environments. Roomie and I are employing the crack of dawn departure tactic, as we did many times many years ago when we would visit Dunsmuir. The Thermos™ is pre-heated, the car is mostly packed and fueled. The dog has no idea what is going on, though she may be the family member who enjoys camping the most.
Off to Tettegouche State Park, or somewhere close to it.
Posted by Underblog at 5:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack