Simplifatico

Gear List - Bob Marshall Wilderness Packrafting / Trekking

In a few hours I'll drive up to Great Falls, pick up my pals at the airport, and drive to a tiny community in the foothills of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem; from where we'll start a 120-mile circumnavigation of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex by foot and packraft (and only a little bit of cheating).

Here are the highlights from my gear list.

PACKRAFTING GEAR

I'll be packrafting in a number of major and minor drainages, ranging from easy going Class I rivers to (hopefully!) a few rumble-tumble PR4-5 creeks.

• Alpacka packraft w/spray deck (80 oz)
• Inflatable type III PFD (15 oz)
• 5-pc packraft paddle (30 oz)
• Helmet (9 oz)

TREKKING GEAR

• Dry bag backpack (40 oz incl. 65L dry bag)
• Woven nylon l/s trekking shirt and long pants (8 oz combined)
• Full zip hooded wind shirt (3.5 oz) 
• Merino wool long johns and pullover hoody (11 oz)
• Waterproof-breathable anorak and knickers (10 oz)
• Inov-8 RocLite 320 Shoes
• Combination of Steri-Pen Adventurer and Aqua Mira ClO2 Tablets for treatment 

CAMPING GEAR

• eVENT bivy sack
• synthetic fill quilt (prototype, 22.0 oz)  
• no pad (use pack, packraft, other gear) 
• no overhead shelter (use packraft, crawl in with friends, trees?)
• synthetic fill hoody (prototype, 7.5 oz)
• 750 ml ti pot, silicone muffin cup, ti spoon, firestarting kit, alcohol stove & windscreen, fuel bottle, ti grill, and fuel (14 oz)  

OTHER GEAR

• Fly fishing gear (Tenkara rod-based kit, 6 oz)
• Small HD Video Cam, Sigma DP2, SPOT, GoPro Wide Helmet Cam, Iridium 9555 (gear for media journalism)
• and all the other usual assortment of little junk that goes into assorted kits like foot care, repair, toiletries, etc.

This, and about 20,000 calories of food.

I weighed my pack and it's 36 pounds (no water). Which has me a little worried since my gear list says it should weigh 38.6 lbs, so...what did I forget?

I guess we'll find out.

Talk to you (via Twitter and SPOT) tomorrow night, I suppose.

Godspeed / RJ

MORE:

• Follow the geolocation of this expedition on a SPOT map at ryanjordan.com/weblog/spot.html.
• Follow SMS updates send from sat phone at twitter.com/bigskyry. 
• Stay tuned at ryanjordan.com for audioblog updates sent every day or two - or three.

Maps!

When I weighed the definitive trail map to the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex (which includes the Bob Marshall, Great Bear, and Scapegoat Wilderness areas), the 1:100,000 scale map published by the USDA, it made me feel queezy: 3.7 ounces - that's almost worth 500 calories of food!

So I set out to hack it up and trim out the areas that we didn't need (oh wait, I mean -- didn't THINK we'd need)...

But this is a two-sided map, so it was tough to trim much off of it - I only got it down to 3.1 oz. Plus, it lacked any sort of meaningful lat-lon grid for navigating, no shaded relief (not a deal breaker, but I think it's pretty to see it when you step back from the map and look at the landscape), and it would be quite tedious to pre-plot our route and key waypoints on it.

So I decided to make my own with NG Topo! and our friends at Speedy Print in Bozeman.

Because 1:24k maps are huge and largely unnecessary for summer hiking (even most cross country travel), I settled on the 1:100k scale, which usually provides more than enough detail for long routes.

So I picked off a square area of about 3,190 square km, crammed it into 392 square inches of real estate by shrinking the scale down a little (to 1:126k). I plotted our proposed route with a bunch of little diamonds spaced every few miles, put some key waypoints on the map (possible camps, trail junctions, packrafting portages, etc.), added a UTM grid with 3km spacing, exported it as a big PDF, and had it printed on a single, 20-inch square sheet of Epson color paper on a fancy pro color sheet printer.

The final weight was 1.6 oz and it's gorgeous - a work of art with eye-popping sharpness. Not bad for a 200km route. The same map printed on lighter paper in B&W came to 0.7 oz. My hiking companions will each carry one of these. We also have some small 1:24k sections of areas we know the trails to have been ... compromised ... since the big fires there a few years ago, and some tricky off trail sections along the top of the Chinese Wall, where we'll attempt 25 miles of off trail travel - those sections weigh about 1.5 oz.

The paper accepts a fine point rollerball without smearing (I like to use the the Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine, 0.3 oz), and folds precisely and perfectly into a size that fits right into my favorite map case - a 12" x 12" Aloksak (weight 1.1 oz, nice to contain all my journaling stuff, and protect the map in case I flip the packraft or get bombarded with a deluge, although by itself, it's water-resistant enough for most trekking).

And my favorite part: I left big enough margins on the map to write a lot of notes, and I plan to journal on the backside - which is entirely blank ...

... which means I can leave my 0.8 oz notebook behind.

Gear List: Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex

In a few days, I'll be taking a short expedition with two others through the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex by foot and packraft. I plan to travel in a big loop that starts in Benchmark and ends back at Gibson Reservoir, a distance of about 120 miles not including some side trips I'd like to take to explore some tributaries of the big rivers by packraft.

We plan to take one layover day high upon the Continental Divide (my partners will be observing the Jewish Sabbath and I'll be exploring some river drainages by foot and packraft), and we plan to take one other food & water fast day (so will travel a short distance only). As such, we have the equivalent of about 6 or 7 full days to cover the distance.

Even though I won't be extremely tapped with respect to the need to minimize my pack weight, I will be taking a packraft, DSLR, video camera, fishing gear, sat phone, and a SPOT, so I do plan to go pretty spartan on the remaining gear so I can keep my starting pack weight less than 40 pounds.

I may publish the details of the gear list after the trek over at BPL, but until then, here are the highlights:

Packrafting Gear. I'll be running some big easy rivers, and hopefully, some steep hard creeks, so my plan is to keep my packraft versatile enough for hard water but light enough for a long trip. I'm not a huge fan of spray decks for creekboating so as I write this, I'm leaning towards a 64 oz undecked Alpaca with a 28 oz Sawyer Packraft Paddle, a 1 oz bungee lashing rig, the 14 oz Stormy Seas SV100 PFD, and a 2 oz repair kit that will allow me to sew gashes and patch big holes. If I'm feeling bold I may ditch this whole plan at the last minute, save POUNDS, and take the Alpacka Scout Packraft, the Alpacka Ultralight Paddle, and use Platypus bottles stuffed in my rain jacket for a PFD.

Shelter and Sleep. Right now, we have beautiful blue skies and it's like, 80 degrees in Bozeman. That means that I'm warm. Which further means that as I look at my kit for this trip, I really want to toss out a bunch of insulation and shelter stuff. So as it stands now, I'm using my packraft, paddles, and some AirCore 1 guylines for a shelter if it rains, my pack for a sleeping pad, my PFD for a pillow (or God forbid, torso insulation), and one of those nifty 7 oz Terra Nova bivy bags for real nastiness...but I have another bivy I made up out of Cuben Fiber and Pertex Quantum that weighs only 3.0 oz and that one is awfully tempting. I figure on nice nights I can use the packraft for a bed (how about the pack for shelter?). Since the bivy isn't really a bivy, I'll stick with a headnet and a campfire for nighttime slaughter avoidance (we couldn't be going at a worse time of year for mosquitoes...) For a sleeping bag, I'll stick with something trusty: my synthetic quilt, 24 oz, which should keep me warm up high, and OK enough (remember, I have a PFD for more insulation!) in the colder river valleys, where low temps will be in the 30s (I hope).

Clothes. Hey, remember that bit about using a PFD as torso insulation? Yeah, so...that's kind of the overriding theme. I think I'll bring a firestarting kit as my core insulation. My luxury item will be a pair of 4 oz rain pants, for packrafting in cold water.

Food. OK, here's where it gets good. I'm banking on catching a bunch of fish (I'm bringing a 12 oz fishing kit that consists of a fly rod and reel, line, leader, tippet, flies, floatant, strike indicator, split shot, and license). Plus, we're fasting a day. Plus, I'm not carrying a big pack for a day (the Sabbath day, see above). Plus, I'm generally going pretty light. Plus, we're lounging in a packraft for at least 50 or 60 miles. Plus, I won't even be walking uphill for the first 56 miles (yeah, we're cheating on the first climb over the Divide, more about that later). SO...between the awesome fishing and my awesomer custom trout cakes recipe, I won't need, like, any food hardly. OK, OK, I do need coffee and some snacks. So my food bag only weighs 10 pounds. The only thing that could throw a wrench into this is if spring runoff isn't ... quite ... done ... and cold water keeps the fish down. That actually, would be really, really bad for me. But I'm sure it won't happen.

My breakfasts consist of 4-5 oz of hot cereal (muesli or ground wheat) with freeze dried berries, nuts, and freeze dried whole cream. Dinners are 3 oz of some type of base (beans, potatoes, or fried noodles) with 2 oz of some type of oil-based sauce (on this trip I have a really cheesy pesto and African cayenne). Snacks, about 8-12 oz per day depending on how hard the day is, consist mostly of tamari-wasabi almonds, dried papaya, Walker's shortbread, crushed Pringles, and almond butter. For hot drinks, I have coarse ground coffee (which I make cowboy style over a fire), black tea, and Miso soup. I have a small platypus containing about 8 oz of Ghee as a calorie additive to cereal and dinners, too, and a bunch of fried breadcrumb/potato/romano/whole egg/spice mix for making trout cakes (which are steam-baked in nesting titanium pots).

Pack. I'm taking the Arctic Dry Pack. It's an emotional thing. That, and it works - it's a great packraft trekking pack.

Cooking Gear. I'm cooking over fire so I only need a pot (900 ml titanium) and a spoon, and a 1.5 oz titanium mug (for drinking and steam-baking trout cakes), and some firestarting supplies. I will bring a small alcohol stove and a few ounces of EtOH so I can have coffee and soup when we camp above the treeline (2-4 nights).

Water. We'll probably almost never carry any water, because we'll be traveling along it for about 95 miles. But we'll be high, and mostly waterless, for about 25 miles, so we'll each pack capacity for 3 liters. We'll share a Steri-Pen throughout the day and treat with chlorine dioxide tablets and drops at night.

Journalism and Digital Stuff. I'm doing a lot of experimentation with technology on this trip, in addition to taking along an Olympus DSLR and a nice, heavy lens (either the Zuiko 12-60mm or the Leica Summilux f/1.4 25mm). I have a sat phone and a SPOT, so will be posting geolocation updates and SMS messages to Twitter, and audioblog posts here. I have this picture in my head of what that is all going to look like, but I'm also a realistic and I think it will look different from all of that in the end, because when you're out there, there's this wilderness thing going on. I'm also excited about taking a GoPro WIDE camera with me, so I can get some neat packrafting and trekking footage, from its mount on my head, or on the bow of the packraft. Wilderness journalism intrigues me a lot, and short message services like Twitter make it way more fun that having to haul little computers or PDA's and data phone cables along. And I'm still taking along little paper notebooks, and maybe a few colored pencils. I like to draw when I'm out there.

Other Gear and Toilet Paper. There's some little stuff thrown in, of course, but most of that all fits into a little bag, and is not as interesting as the rest of the kit. I am bringing a little bit of TP along for our hike along the top of the Chinese Wall, I hear there's not a lot of vegetation way up there, and the rocks are pretty sharp.

Audio update from the Bob Marshall-Scapegoat Wilderness

I will be on a short expedition in the Bob Marshall / Scapegoat wilderness area complex in NW Montana starting July 5. We are hoping to travel 120 miles or so via foot and packraft (includes about 8 miles of cheating). This and other audio updates are called in via satellite phone. I'll try to call them in every day or two, probably in the mornings from our campsites or the first wide open spaces with good satellite views of the day. You can also follow our progress via the SPOT map, and by monitoring my Twitter Feed.

MP3 File

Packrafting the East Gallatin River

The East Gallatin River near Bozeman is best known for its trout fishing, although that has declined in recent years as a result of development, overgrazing, and increased siltation from suburban runoff.

Because it's flanked by private lands, and is generally too small for other types of boats, the packraft is an ideal mode of travel.

Floater beware: the East Gallatin has its fair share of wood, barbed wire, and bankside willows. It's a twisting stream that at the high flows required for reasonable packrafting (at least 250 cfs), requires fast maneuvering, quick decision making, and a bit of fortitude for wading fast channels above big strainers and sweepers. Rating is PR2 at 300 cfs or less, and PR3 at 400 cfs or more, not because of wave size, but because of maneuvering requirements.

On June 19, 2009, I explored the river on a quick float on the upper river between Bozeman and Belgrade, and used an Alpacka Scout with the Alpacka Ultralight Paddle - a setup with a total weight of only 4.6 lbs.

For a complete expedition, the packrafter can enjoy a remote and rural float all the way from Bozeman to the confluence of the East Gallatin with the Gallatin River near Manhattan, MT. Expect two to three long days, and wait until the river drops to less than 400 cfs so you can bivy on the gravel bars. Respect the Montana Stream Access Law, don't build fires, and enjoy the solitude - the fisherman don't hit the river until flows drop to less than 250 cfs normally.

A 35 gram Trangia-Like Titanium Alcohol Stove

In spite of - and I mean this literally - hundreds of iterations of alcohol stove designs available commercially and in the public domain, the Trangia still remains one of my favorites. It's durable, has plenty of fuel volume for large boils, the design is aesthetic pleasing and elegant, and is just about as idiot-proof as you can get.

Its primary disadvantages are its weight (a whopping! 100 grams), which means that there's a lot of mass to heat up (prime), resulting in boil times for mountain cold streamwater creep beyond 12 minutes from the time to light. Another advantage of the Trangia is that it's ill-suited for use without a pot support. Placing a pot directly on top of the stove quenches the flame.

One thing I really like about the Trangia is that it contains a screw-on lid that keeps unused fuel inside the stove, eliminating the need to proactively meter in some precise quantity of fuel required to boil some certain quantity of water. But this isn't a deal breaker for me (I appreciate this most on overnight trips when I only need to boil water for two meals and don't want to take an extra fuel bottle).

In August, yet another company will enter the commercial alcohol stove market with a Trangia look-alike - made out of titanium.

Upon testing it this week, its performance blows away the Trangia - starting with a 20 second prime time (the stove itself weighs only 33 grams, so it heats up fast). This means that combined with its large fuel capacity (about 85 mls), it remains burning at full tilt (by using a pot support that doesn't partially squelch the flame) for twenty five minutes (plenty of time to boil, say, two LITERS of water). If you place a pot directly on it, the burn time exceeds 35 minutes.

The neat things about this stove are that (1) you don't need a pot support, (2) it only weighs 35 g but has 85 mls of fuel capacity, (3) you can boil large volumes with it, (4) its performance doesn't degrade at small volumes because of the fast prime time, (5) its manufacturing quality is impeccable, and (6) you can stand on it (in fact, I can jump on it!). By themselves, these statistics aren't remarkable. Combined, however, it makes for an impressive product.

What this stove doesn't do that the Trangia does is store fuel (it doesn't have a threaded cap), and may not be packaged with a simmer ring, like the Trangia.

Stay tuned at BPL for more about this stove, to be released on ... August 19 or so.

Drinking Horse Mountain

Sam has a nice story about eating a cheeseburger at the top of Drinking Horse Mountain, and I thought about him because I too was craving a summit cheeseburger there tonight.

Drinking Horse is one of those little places sorta off the grid that provides an experience that is short enough to make a last minute decision to go ("Hey! Let's go to Drinking Horse!") but longish enough to relieve the senses of the awful stimulation that has contaminated them all day.

So that's where we took our hike tonight as a family.

For National Trails Day 2008, I taught an ultralight backpacking clinic on the shoulder of DHM to about 20 folks in Bozeman, and then we started the process of working on the trail - clearing old barbed wire fencing, cleaning up some trash, and sorting out the heres and theres of where the trail might go. Chase was with me then, and BPL helped sponsor the events that day for the GVLT who was instrumental in getting the trail done.

So it was pretty neat to hear Chase reach the top tonight and say, "Drinking Horse Mountain really means a lot to me." And we replied, "How so?"

"Because we helped build the trail here."

How cool is that.