Fire safety and cotton backpacking gear

2016-10-15

Most people are not aware, but most camping gear is required to be covered in fire retardants to be sold in most states in the U.S. This is also true of furniture and other things, but for this post I want to talk about camping gear.

If you weren't aware, back in the eighties a researcher discovered that the fire retardants in children's sleepware was carcinogenic... very carcinogenic. The fire retardants were banned a while later, but companies were still required to make all these products fire retardant. So, they changed the non-active portion of the chemical a tiny bit, so it counted as a different chemical, then that was banned, etc. This has been going on ever since with no meaningful change. So, in short, most things that are flame retardant are a problematic...

That was a bit off-topic, getting back to the point, I've been playing with all of this gear made from bed-sheets which I *believe* don't contain fire retardants, though I could be wrong.

I decided to run a quick test to see how paranoid I should be about accidentally lighting my gear on fire, so here we go:

This is 800 thread count egyption cotton which *probably* doesn't have flame retardant. One wastreated with bees-wax, mineral spirits, and a small amount of pure unboiled linseed oil, the other was just the raw material.

First I tried dropping a spark on to both materials, neither of which lit on fire. Here's the treated one afterwards.



Next I got out a lighter and lit both of them, it took a few seconds actually. On the left  is the treated one, on the right is the untreated fabric.
I lit the matrial on the left first then a bit later the material on the right (it took me a couple tries).




So, contrary to what I've been hearing on the internet, this treatment *improves* the fire retardancy of the material... THAT is pretty interesting. The untreated cotton burned about twice as fast.

Next, just as an interesting cross-check I cut a patch (the inside of a pocket actually) off an old worn-out raincoat. This rain-coat is a fancy membrane style water-proof breathable jobby:



This burned in (by my estimation) about half the time that the raw fabric burned, and lit more easily.

I was pretty surprised by these results, so thought I'd share them. I'm still going to be careful, but now I'm going to be less paranoid about non-flame-retardant treated cotton than I am about flame-retardant treated nylon.

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Alpaca Fur sleeping bag

2016-09-29

In my search for a lightweight set of backpacking gear involving no plastic, I've been looking for something that works as a sleepingbag.

My thought had been to go with a twined rabbitskin blanket. There's research showing these are incredibly light, and that one in the 4-8 lb range can likely outperform a 0 degree down sleeping-bag in raw insulation ability (ignoring shape issues). They've been used for many thousands of years (we've found them in archaeological digs from near the last ice-age), so clearly they work. There's only one problem, to make one large enough for me to wrap up in would require ~70 rabbit-skins, and I don't have easy access to that many rabbit-skins. Traditionally people would have plenty of skins just from their regular hunting for food, but I've yet to hunt rabbit.

While I was working on finding a good, ethical (by my standards) source for these hides I went to the Big E (a large agricultural fair in Massachusetts) with Angie, and ran in to someone selling alpaca skin blankets. I couldn't resist and bought this for $400:



Surprisingly, no alpaca are harmed to make these alpaca skin blankets. Alpaca are worth WAAAY to much to kill for their skin (we're talking 10's to 100's of thousands), so these blankets are only made from scraps of alpaca hide from alpaca that have died of natural causes, sewn together in a patchwork.

Alpaca are a species of Camelid. Closely related to Llamas they've been bread in the Andies for thousands of years as a source of wool to keep warm in the high mountains. This is in contrast to llamas which were bread as draft animals. Alpaca fiber is actually warmer than sheep's wool, and most importantly for me it's hypoallergenic (I have a mild allergy to normal wool, sadly). It also sheds dirt crazy well, and basically doesn't slip from the hide at all.

To make it usable as a sleepingbag I took some buckskin I tanned and used that to add some ties so I could tie the foot closed and bundle the rest around me. The idea is to use it like a backpacking quilt, where the joint between the two sides ends up under me so it won't leak much heat. I can open it up of course as well or use it in other configurations in warmer weather. The hide was already backed with a fairly open weave cotton canvas to add a little wear resistance, so I'm leaving that on for now.

So, how does it work?

I tested a couple of nights ago. I slept in it naked and at 3:00am it was 40F and dewy, and I was definitely warm enough. The biggest issue was drafts through the foot box. I think with a little more fiddling to bundle the footbox tighter and seal out drafts it'll work down below freezing pretty well. I'm guessing I can take it to ~25F without trouble, which is good enough for my purposes.

I'm about 5'6" and I bought one just barely long enough and wide enough for me to keep the weight down. I also bought the lightest one the lady had (made apparently with juvenile hides, which are thinner)  The whole thing weighs just a bit over 5 lbs, and rolls up to about the same size as my current 5F down quilt. Here's a photo of it rolled up, with my hand for scale.



For the test I ran a couple nights ago I used a normal closed-cell foam sleepingpad on top of an oilcloth tarp I treated. Along with fiddling with the footbox I need to do more experimentation with pads. Depending on how badly it absorbs water, and how insulationg it is to lie on I have to work out whether I need a ground cloth, a ground pad (and what material to use for that), or both. That'll have a big impact on my final weight.

In other news, the oilcloth worked great as a groundpad, and when we took it up in the morning the fabric was a touch damp, but it hadn't wicked much of anything through. I need to run more tests on it still, but hopefully I'll have some good news to report on that front as well in a couple of months.

So, I'm going to say I've solved the problem of a light enough sleepingbag for my "no plastic, AT-style backpacking kit" project. Woot!

Oh yeah... and it's SOO COOOZY!

UPDATE:
I've added draw-strings to either end by simply punching holes in the backing fabric and running twine through. This lets me draw the foot up nice and tight, and draw the top up around my neck, making it MUCH warmer, this probably gained me 10F worth of warmth.

UPDATE 2:
I've now actually slept in ~28 degrees, and a bit windy. I wrapped the alpaca in my waxed cotton poncho, and used no ground-pad, though I did wear a hat, warm tights, and a sweater (I took off my second sweater and put it under my hip, for extra insulation).
Surprisingly I was actually quite warm, particularly for my toes. The draw-strings make an enormous difference.
Overall, This should be plenty good enough for an AT kit.

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Backpacking in the Aderondak High Peaks

2016-08-30

Angie and I decided to go out backpacking in the high-peaks. It ended up being an awesome 5 day trip, with one zero day due to a minor sprain to Angie's toe, and a sore knee.

Just to give it a try I decided to skip the sleepingbag and just bring puffies, and see how that went. I also decided to go with only 1 pint of water capacity, just to give that a try on some non-trivial mountains (well, for the east-coast anyway). Here's the gear I carried:



I have a sleepingpad because we were staying in the Adirondack shelters along the way, though we did have my poncho as a backup/emergency shelter should it be needed (and Angie had an emergency bivy as well). Here's the gearlist:

• Sleeping:
• Puffy pants
• Down vest
• Linen sheet
• Closed cell foam sleeping pad
• Pack
• External frame pack
• drysack
• belts/twine to tie things to pack
• Food/water
• ursack (they require canisters)
• 1 pint kleene-kanteen food container
• folding spork
• ... food
• Clothing
• Sweater
• shorts (worn)
• cotton dress-style shirt (for bugs/sun)
• Tilley hat
• silnylon poncho (with a mesh bag)
• run-amocs (minimal leather moccasin with rubber sole)
• 1 pair wool socks (worn)
• bug headnet
• Other
• bandana
• benadril, ib profen, and pill case for them
• inhallers (I'm asthmatic)
• kindle (with drysack)
• Belt knife (tied to pack)
• Headlamp
• Pocket altoids-tin kit (not shown, carried in shorts pocket)
• Keys with backup pen-light, himilayan rock-salt in pill container, and mini leatherman

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Gear Disassembly: Climbing harnesses

2016-08-30

My climbing harness was looking pretty worn, and it's pretty old, so after much research I gave up and went out and got a new one.

After buying the new one, I started looking the old one over more carefully as to how it was built. I had my suspicious, but I wanted to see for myself, for sure. Seeing how it's built makes it a lot easier to see what spots really matter, and thus evaluate a harness for wear. So... without further ado, here's the photos I took as I disassembled the harness.

Note that this is just my muddling through, thinking, and playing around. As always don't take anything said here as advice, and certainly not EXPERT advice. Make your own decisions, I just thought it'd be interesting to share.

Here's the harness prior to disassembly (well, I'd cut a few stitches, but you get the idea):



Here's the most interesting image. Fundamentally the belt is one piece of webbing with stuff sewed to it. The rest is just padding:



Here's how that's assembled (or disassembled in this case).



Note the single bar-tack holding the gear-loop in place. The gear-loop is really just the webbing inside the plastic tube.




Before this time I had never throught critically about the structural integrity of the belay loop assembly. Note the webbing is wrapped with another layer of webbing at the critical point. Until that outer layer is worn through it seems pretty hard to wear through the webbing beneath. I'd seen stitching wear where the protective layer is sewn to the structural layer and gotten worried, in retrospect I could see how this was built and should've seen it was still sound.



I was surprised at how well the rear haul-loop was attachaed. 4 bar-tacks and it goes fully *around* the belt. The bar-tack to the belt is just to hold it in place, and is fundamentally non-structural... interesting!



Overall I think if I'd sat down and really *looked* at my harness I would've kept it a lot longer before replacing it, there really wasn't anything wrong with it yet. Oh well... that said I got a good deal on a new one, and the new one is sweet and comfy, so at least I didn't waste all that much money.

Again... this is just my own analysis of my safety, and of course other harnesses may be constructed differently. My intention is simply to help other people understand how their gear is built so they can make educated decisions as to when to retire them (or maybe even what to purchase in the first place).

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Primitive Leanto

2016-08-30

Angie and I decided to try building a primitive shelter. I've built a couple of debris shelters before, but, it being warm and not needing to block wind or similar we decided to try a leanto. The thought was that if we could build the angle low enough, the leaves might stay on it better, and thus not require quite as many leaves as a standard debris shelter.

Before you go copying this shelter, note that it didn't really work... but probably could. More detail coming.

Construction

Step one was to put up the main frame. Sorry I didn't take in progress photos. Using an axe I felled one tree carefully chosen way off the beaten path, and as being too close to another tree. There was deadwood, and most of the construction was done with that, but we needed 2 large beams for the main structure, and those just weren't to be found.



Using a folding saw we cut a couple of vertical poles with forks in them, and then using the axe I sharpened one end to a point and hammered them in. We cut the main trunk of the tree I'd felled in to the two main beams running from the ground and sitting in the forks.

Next came the cross-beams. Most of these were deadwood (those that weren't were limbs of the small tree). We considered lashing these on and tried several approaches, but then realized a better method. By breaking sticks with y's in them to the right length and placing them against the ground we could use the y to hold the cross-pieces in place... Here's a close-up to give a better idea.



This method took a lot more pieces of wood, but we could use some real junk wood and didn't need twine of any kind. Pretty cool.

Once we had all the cross-pieces in place we started laying on the leafed branches from the tree we'd dropped, trying to cover the whole shelter with leaves attached to branches. This gave us a layer that should shed water better than normal leaf-litter, and gave us a base on which to pile litter so it wouldn't just fall through.

Lastly, we started piling on leaf litter from the surrounding area, spreading it evenly across the roof.



Time to build

This was surprisingly fast. We're guessing maybe 5 hours? Knowing how to do it though I think we could get what we got done here done in about 3 hours. I was very excited about this. Most shelters I've seen would only be useful on your *second* night out, because generally you spent most of the day getting to where you now want shelter.

Tools

Gransfors small forest axe and a folding bow-saw.

We could've easily done it with just one or the other, without much cost to time. The saw would be my first choice in that situation, but the axe would work fine too.

Results
There was a light rain early in the evening and it was working mostly okay, but dripping a little in the middle. After some thought I realized why. Since branches well... branch, the center of the shelter is necessarilly more layered with branches than the edges. I think what happened is that we tried to make it nice and even when we were *done* resulting in a fairly thin layer of leaf-litter over a thick layer of branches in the middle, and a thick layer of leaf-litter over a thin layer of branches on the edges. Thus the edges are more water-proof than the center.

After dark the rain hit *hard*, we're talking serious buckets of rain. After a bit the shelter started leaking all over, it wasn't long before we saw this was not going to cut it and we abandoned the shelter to sleep in the truck like usual. The flaw was predictable... not enough leaf coverage. I've heard before that you need 3 feet of leaf litter. We were hoping the leaf covered branch layer, with all those leaves layed on flat just right to shed water, we could get away with less. That was probably accurate, but not with THAT much less. Another foot might've worked, and 2 more feet would've been a sure thing.

If you've ever built a debris shelter you know how hard it is to gather a lot of material. Initially it goes quickly with the material being right near the shelter, but as you exhaust that resource you go farther and farther afield until you've cleared 50 foot diameter circle around your shelter of leaves, and you're hauling them in from the edges. We spent maybe 1-2 hours covering this shelter with leaves, because of the distance from the shelter this time isn't linear with the amount gathered. So we're looking at about 6 hours hard work (given experience) to get a good shelter. That's on-par with a standard debris shelter... BUT, I don't think we actually had to get as much debris, and the shelter was solidly usable/re-usable by 2 people. The area we were in had a fairly thin layer of leaf litter, and in an area with thick leaf litter you could probably cut the leaf gathering time in half. I'm hopefully this method could yield total construction times of 3-4 hours... but I've yet to test it.

Oh, and lastly... dropping a tree was crucial to making this a relatively fast project. Doing it entirely with deadfall would take a REALLY long time. As it was we were foraging for wood 1/4 mile from our build site. So... pretty cool as a survival technique, but not something you could do routinely while out on trips.

Anyway... this was a pretty fun project. Some of the techniques I'd be very interested to try again.