Yesterday I wrote about the Best Camping Chair Ever.
Today I’ll take a look at some of my favorite backpacking chairs.
“Wait a minute,” you may be thinking and you will probably want to point out I consistently
Advocate taking the lightest gear possible to stay warm, dry, and safe. This mindset would preclude anything not absolutely necessary and such things as a backpacking chair are superfluous extra weight.
Imagine this… actually if you camp often enough in campgrounds you don’t have to visualize it in your mind’s eye, you have probably seen it many times.
You are in a campground and walk over to the community dumpster to dispose a bag of trash. Your hand cautiously lifts the lid trying to avoid any filth and you peer in for a spot to deposit your bag. And there, there on a small pile of rubble lays a broken camp chair. I have seen this scenario replayed dozens of times over the years.
Why don’t people simply just buy a quality camping chair once and for all time? Perhaps they have fallen for the concept of throwaway goods – does the concept of built-in obsolescence really exist – do companies really make chairs that last for a limited time, knowing you will likely purchase another short-lived chair from them?
Maybe people just don’t know where to look for a quality camp chair. Perhaps they don’t know who to ask. Apparently it is up to me to help out. Today I am willing to help.
Colin Fletcher is known as the “Father of Backpacking” and Robert Wehman has just published the only biography of the reclusive man.
You can purchase the book from Amazon as a Kindle version for $9.99 or paperback for $18.53. I have never heard of the author but the reviews have generally been very good.
I did buy it for a friend, but will pass on reading it myself.
Continue reading Walking Man: The Secret Life of Colin Fletcher (a biography)
In January I wrote that home solar might be lipstick on a pig, and it makes more sense to make a home energy efficient before even considering solar. I also promised to post monthly updates on our utility bills.
Well, we now have 12 complete months of energy usage under our belts after making our energy upgrade improvements. We’ll take a look at:
Continue reading Energy Upgrade Stats: Month 12 (1 year of tracking)
It happened. My faithful dedicated backpacking watch, my Timex Expedition Resin Combo died. I wrote about this watch a few years ago in this backpacking watch dissertation that provided a lot of mostly useless information that for some reason does interest people seeing more than 2,000 people have bothered to read it.
This watch was a little over 6 years old. It lived a good life and is survived by a ‘70s military watch and an original ‘80s Swiss Army Watch. No services will be held and it will be interned at the Riverside County landfill on Edom Hill.
No autopsy was performed. It is an inexpensive timepiece and when a new battery failed to revive the heartbeat of its digital/analog innards, no one was interested in repairing or bringing it back to life – the victim of a throwaway item in a throwaway society.