Jeep lift

2015-03-18

I know a lot of my readers aren't car people. Don't worry, I've got some more non-Jeep posts coming soon. We processed a roadkill deer recently. I finally made a form of tarred canvas and I'll post about that once I get a chance to test it. I joined a grotto last weekend (a group of cavers). I just got a mountain bike yesterday, took it for a spin around the neighborhood today.

But, since I posted the others, I figured I ought to post a followup since I finally finished installing my lift. Here's the mods on my vehicle so far (in the order they were installed):

• drains: drilled in plastic, floor plugs pulled
• hitch reciever: like factory, forgot the brand
• vacuum pump relo: OR vacuum pump relocation bracket
• fenders: trim, remove liner, spray bedliner for wheel-wells
• programming: turn signal, light timeout, acc timeout
• spare-tire mount: teraflex hinged tire-carrier
• highlift mount: teraflex accessory mount
• headrests: bent back
• CB radio: midland CB, Wilson 305-483 Silver Load antenna
• Winch: superwinch 9500, synthetic rope
• Winch plate: Rough Country, with D rings
• Tires: duratrak 285/85R16
• wheels: 4.25" backset steel
• E-bake: pulled the bracket
• brake lines: synergy
• ABS sensors: rerouted and ziptied
• diff breathers: home-grown
• shocks: Bilstein 5100
• rear sway-bar links: some cheap brand
• front sway-bar links: relocated from the rear
• springs: OEM 18/59 (ebay), replacing factory 13/55's (1.5-2" lift)

And here's what it looks like:



The last 4 items on the list are the actual lift. Overall I think this setup adds ~2" travel to one end and ~4" to the other (I forget which is which), and lifts the vehicle 1.5-2". Due to the fender trim there's no need to extend the bumpstops even running 33" tires. The shocks are just barely not fully compressed at full stuff, so I'm getting the full range of the bilstein 5100 shocks.

So, how do I like my new suspension?

Handling

The stock shocks on the sport model of the wrangler are terrible, as are the springs actually. The handling was really poor. The body pitched forward and backward when I hit a bump, and the rear end would skip really badly while cornering. It felt kindof unsafe. That's a lot of what got me doing the lift now, I had expected to wait a while. I got the bilstein shocks in an attempt to improve the handling, but with the extra droop they provided I was in danger of inverting my sway-bar, so I needed longer links to keep that from happening. I was also nervous about the brake lines and ABS sensors so I did them too.

I bottomed out (almost high-centered) not long ago while out wandering. Given that I was getting the rest I figured why not pick up some stock springs on ebay and see what lift that got me, since you can get them cheap.

I did the brake-lines and ABS sensors first, then the shocks and sway bar links. That did improve my handling, the skipping on the rear got a little better, but not nearly as much as I'd hoped. Also, the sway bars were now poorly positioned (too far from level) so my body roll got worse.

Next I did the springs and the stiffer springs made all the difference. The body pitching is gone, the back skips even less, the body roll is less than ever, it doesn't dive when I turn or brake. I love it.

Difficulty

No-one but me has worked on my Jeep since it rolled off the lot, so I did this all myself. Sorry, I didn't take in process photos like I meant to.

I did the ABS sensors and brake lines one wheel at a time, jack it up, remove the wheel, do the work, put it back together.

The hard part of this was figuring out how to jack up the car. Jacking from the front-wheel didn't work well because the steering wheel turns. Wranglers have no key lockout on the steering column. Jacking off the bumper I would get it up and at some point it would lift the other front-wheel off the ground, at that point it's sitting on just the 2 rear wheels and can fall sideways too easy, and the jack would fall over.

The solution was 2 fold. First, level the car before you start! This should be obvious, but I tried all sorts of *other* ways to compensate for the hill. Leveling the set of wheels that stay on the ground though worked wonders. Second, jack one side a little ways, throw a jack-stand under it, then do the other, jack stand, back to the first, adjust the jack-stand up. Between the two I was finally able to safely get the car up in the air with the axles at full droop and the wheels off the ground.

Note that I'm doing this to work on one end of the car at a time, leaving the other on the ground. Getting the whole thing on jack-stands would be significantly more difficult.

In theory you can install the shocks without lifting up the vehicle at all, but I couldn't get them in while compressed. With it off the ground it's much easier. The first time I did it I actually levered them in to place (compressing them) using a screw-driver so I didn't have to shift anything after pulling the stockers off. That worked prety well.

Once you can get both wheels off, the sway bar is trivial. Disassemble it, put it back together. I did notice that there's a actually a spot for a wrench next to the ball fitting, which is way easier to use than a hex-wrench.

To get the springs in I jacked the car up pretty high and pulled both wheels off. I took off one end of the sway-bar link again. I then placed the factory sissor jack (with an extra block under it) under the axle and lifted it just a bit so it wasn't hanging on the shock so I could unbolt the shock again. Then I just lowered the axle down. The axle stopped dropping at some point due to the control arm bushings, I just shoved it a bit further and popped the spring out, then popped the new one in. Jack the axle back up, reassemble everything, and then do the other end of the axle.

So, very very easy... if you can figure out how to get the jeep up on jack-stands or have access to a lift

Cost

• shocks, ~$300
• springs, ~$180
• sway-bar links, ~$30

So, this comes to ~$500.0 for the lift and suspension components. Given how much it improved the ride, with the bonus of improving my entrance, exit, and break-over angle and significantly improving flex, I'm pretty happy with it.

When I went looking for kits that get those gains with only a small lift all I could find were kits advertised as e.g. a 1.5" lift that actually lift it more like 2.5" and cost more like $1500.

Planning a lift

It took me a lot of research and thinking to figure out where to *start*. On the Tacoma this was pretty simple as it's independent front and leaf-spring live-axle in the rear, but Jeeps use a live-axle coil suspension which makes for a lot of different moving pieces. All of the components need to work together. If you're planning a suspension modification I have a suggestion: Start with your tire size and how much you want to trim fenders/bodywork/etc, and let that decide your bumpstop.

Once you have your bumpstop height, everything else chains from there. That's because your bumpstop height decides how long a shock body will fit when everything is fully flexed. You need to hit the bumpstop and not the shock body, so you want a shock that's just a little bit short, that way you get to use all the travel the shock gives you.

Once you've chosen your shock, your shock is likely to be the limiting factor on your droop. Now you can use your maximum droop to decide how long your spring needs to be uncompressed. If the spring is shorter than this you'll have to limit your flex by attaching the springs to the axle and the vehicle, or using limit straps. The droop is also what matters for brake lines, breather tubes, diff locker wires or air-tubes, exhaust relocation, it's a factor for driveshafts, etc.

Now that you're picking your springs you can figure out normal ride height. Note that nothing above was impacted much by ride-height. You can have the normal ride be basically anywhere in that travel . It's just a matter of how stiff your springs are.

Now you'll want to pick sway-bar links that accommodate that droop, but also come out near level at your normal ride height. You may have to give up on getting them level.

If you're going more dramatic you may also need track-bars to recenter your axles, this is mostly based on normal ride-height, but may be impacted by trying to avoid tires hitting the body at full flex. Driveshafts are also mostly based on ride-height, since they get most of their wear at normal angles, but I'd imagine that not having them bind too badly would still be important even with a low ride-height and a lot of droop. Control arms are based on ride-height as you need them to correct camber, and that's all about highway driving.

I'm not expert in the area, and you may note I didn't do ANY of the complicated stuff... but I found this model to be a useful way to work through planning a lift. The internet would have you thinking that tire-size decides your ride height, and everything else stems from there. But ride-height is actually one of the more independent variables, while bumpstop is really solidly fixed by tire-size and fenders, and due to shocks a lot stems from that.

Just a thought.

Conclusions

While I definitely used the large knobby tires this winter to get in and out of the driveway (and get Jess truck unstuck once), I haven't taken old blue offroading since I did the lift (I finished it last weekend). So, I'm really curious to see how it all performs. I can't use all my flex right now since I don't have sway-bar disconnects. I believe that the sway bars will lift my wheels off the ground even though I have suspension play left, so discos will likely be the next purchase. I'd rather get a more multi-setting front sway-bar, but those are *expensive*, so I'll probably just do discos for now.



Overall the lift was pretty cheap, it handles far better than it did on road, and it should be strictly better off road. So, I'm really happy with it. It's also always fun using things you've really spent some time and energy on. A car is no exception. I'm looking forward to getting it on the trails again... possibly this weekend!

UPDATE

Later on I did adjust my drag link, by about 1/8 of a turn. This corrected my steering wheel by maybe 5 degrees, probably less. I did this by taking a 15mm wrench with me and driving back and forth down a stretch of fairly straight highway, and just tweaking it until I found just the right setting.

Also, I've now taken this setup off-road, and indeed it performs very well, I'm extremely happy with it. I think the height came out just right, significantly improving break-over angle. I bottomed out once, and that was on my diff, so that's a matter of tire-size, not lift height.

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Roadkill deer today!

2015-03-08

I found a roadkill deer today!

I found her while out on a drive in GW west of here. It was a young doe killed primarily by a head strike. The only other notable damage were some broken ribs, and she was a bit bloodshot on that side.

I'm not sure how long she'd be been there. She'd definitely been frozen in the snow, but the scavangers hadn't gotten to her at all. We just finished butchering her. The meat is good excepting the skirt stakes, which had turned. We decided to bail on the organ meats and buried them with the other offal. We could still eat the skirt steaks but we wanted to give some to the dog anyway, so let her have those cuts.We've got ribs in the oven with a barbeque sauce I mixed up. The legs are still out in the garage hanging in pillow-cases to keep the flies off, they'll be fine like that for a few days. We'll get to those in a day or two. Jess sliced up the backstrap and it's jerking in the dehydrator.

I tried scraping the hide green and the hair was tearing, so it's soaking overnight. I threw in two handfulls of hardwood ash just to avoid getting staff when I work the hide tomorrow. My plan for the hide is to try a method a friend of ours told us about a while ago. He claims he can do an elk in 6 hours of work with this method. If we're recalling right you start with a green hide, scrape the grain off (which I'll do tomorrow), then acidify it with tanic acid, and then soften it after the tanic acid has made the glue all loose and easy to remove. Then smoke as normal. I had hoped to skip the bucking step with the ash, but the hair just wasn't slipping.

So, another hide to work on (a second thin one, so I've probably got enough to make a shirt or something) and enough meat for several months for Jess and I. Death is always sad, but it also brought us joy, thank you deer.

It's been a beautiful day. It hit the 50's, the 10" of snow is mostly melted off. Jess and her guest went on a hike while I was off driving, and now we're exhausted and chilling out with wonderful smells wafting through the house.

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Leaves as sleepingbags

2015-02-09

Recently Jess heard about a technique for sleeping out in cold weather where you use trashbags filled with leaves as insulation. This sounded pretty cool, so we decided to give it a try. In addition, we wanted to cover a little bit of ground, just because neither of us had done a longer-distance backpacking trip in a while.

I'd also been playing with the idea of doing trips without a cookpot, by cooking sausages over the fire as warm food. If you've been reading this blog you know we've also been trying ponchos as shelter, so there's no separate tarp. Well with no sleepingbag, no cooking gear, and no tarp, that's the bulk of the gear, so we were pretty excited about this itea.

We weren't sure exactly how it would work, so we brought both emergency bivies (I actually had 2 as I had one that had already been used), and contractor trash bags. We also had sleeping-bags and extra coats as backup. Despite actually needing so little, with all the backup gear our packs still came out looking about normal. You'll see at the bottom though that the gear-list is a bit odd.

Selecting a site

We walked in a pretty long way. At some point we were talking about tea and I realized that I'd forgotten it. So we stopped to get some tea fixings. Fir is usually pretty good.



A while later we found a nice spot next to a stream. When using possibly marginal setups site selection is really important. We ended up on the south-facing part of a west-facing slope quite near a stream. This surprised us a lot actually. As a rule you want a south-facing part of an east-facing slope and you want to be relatively far from water so the humidity is lower. But, the spot we ended up in was quite sheltered and felt easily a solid 5-10 degrees warmer than the general average at the time. The stream didn't matter as it was steep enough that the damp air could fall down the slope and didn't build up near our campsite. All in all it was a pretty perfect spot.

After some discussion we decided that we were concerned about wind only from one side, so the smart thing would be to sleep on the lee-ward side of a log, in case the wind came up that way. Having finally selected our site we started building.

Making the beds

Our first task was to build insulating matts to sleep on. After a bit of consideration we decided to start by building platforms out of branches, this would supply us a solid separation from the ground even before adding leaves as padding and insulation. This is when we were about half complete.The near bed is mine, the far bed is Jess'.



As you can see my technique isn't working quite as well as hers, I switched to something half-way in between her technique and mine after this photo. We also both placed branches as "rails" that sat higher on the sides and ends to help hold the leaves in.

Next we gathered leaves... lots and lots of leaves. We heaped these on to the beds until the beds were mounded high. Then we'd lie down on them squashing it all down and repeat. I found it helpful to gather into one of the contractor bags I had brought actually, as a way to gather from the best areas. Sadly, I didn't take any photos of this stage.

Once we had our beds we started on our sleeping-bags. Jess and I had slightly different ideas for this. I have tried sleeping in an emergency bivy several times, e.g. http://www.blog.smalladventures.net/2013/08/bushcraft-in-lassen-national-parkforest.html , and every time I do it I end up waking up soaking wet. To make it work I have found that I have to wait until I can't stand it anymore and *have* to use the bivy, to minimize my time in it. Otherwise I'm so soaked by the low around 4-6 am that I end up really chilled. This happens basically no matter how cold I am. Jess doesn't have this problem, she generally sweats very little while sleeping unless she is overheated.

As a result, Jess decided to use an emergency bivy, fill it with leaves, and then climb in to it with a silk liner. I decided instead to use my bivy like a quilt. I flipped it inside out (so the shiny part is out), filled it with leaves, swashed it flat, tied one end off, and used it like a quilt. Here's the bivies filled with leaves.

Shelter

Next, we pitched our poncho/tarps. The weather here has been very unpredictible lately and there was a predicted chance of rain, it kept shifting. We decided we really didn't want to get wet, and that the tarps might help a little with heat. This turned out to be the single hardest tarp pitch either of us had ever done, due to having to precisely locate the tarps over the beds. As a note, I find I need 50ft of twine (that I never cut) for a normal tarp, but I prefer to have more for a poncho-tarp. We intentionally hadn't brought stakes, but with a few carved stakes and some ingenuity we got it up and had a nice shelter.

Dinner

The leaves were so dry that I used them as tinder. I struck a spark off a faro-rod into a bit of cotton from the top of a pill bottle and that lit the leaves. Within minutes we had a nice roaring fire. Next we gathered wood and bucked it up using my handsaw.



The sunset was spectacular. We dined on sausages roasted on sticks jammed in the ground, and some bread we'd brought with us.

How did it work?

We were both pretty surprised at how warm our setups were. We figure based on feel an local weather reports that it was maybe ~40F that night. Jess' was definitely warmer, as she had no air-gaps she said she was actually almost too warm, and that her setup would've worked down to much colder temps.

My quilt setup worked pretty well, but not perfectly. The emergency bivies are really too narrow to use like a quilt, because they don't droop over the sides enough to seal in the air. That said, throughout the night I slowly sank in to my leave bed, so the leaves around me started to seal the gaps from below. I could also snuggle up to the log a little letting me seal one side and in effect gain some width. Overall it worked just fine, and I would've been comfortable 10 or 15 degrees cooler easy, it's hard to say if it would work colder than that though, as it's a very odd feel. Some of the leaves are damp, and the mylar was against me, so it felt colder than it was.

One big advantage of the quilt method is that you only need ~4-5" of loose leaves. shoved in to the bag, more and it makes it stiffer and harder to use. With the sleepingbag method the leaves get crushed down easilly, and you need them to be densely packed enough to keep some on top of you. As a result, Jess found she needed several times more leaves than I did, making the setup take quite a bit longer.

Overall, given my sweating, the next time I try this I intend to use the quilt setup again, but with a bag that's maybe twice the width of the emergency bivy.

The rest of our trip

In any case, we both slept in comfort and woke up refreshed in the morning. After getting up we cooked up some sausages on our still going fire (I'd gotten up and tended it 3 times in the night). Once again I was reminded of how much longer large slightly damp logs burn than small dry ones do.



The next day we had a long beautiful and slightly more round-about hike home. Beau had a blast the whole trip, with her winter fur she was completely content the whole time.



Gear

Here's the gear I brought and expected to use. Note that this is absolutely everything... I took this photo after I got home, and stripped naked to take it :P.


This is the stuff that I brought as backup and didn't use (actually, the gators were brought as another experiment, but it didn't end up raining on us).


Gearlist
Worn:

• canvas pants
• wool sweater
• canvas shirt
• warm boots
• wool socks

Used:

• belt knife
• wood saw
• steel water bottle
• steel thermos
• emergency bivy x2
• contractor bag (only used to speed gathering)
• poncho w/ 100ft twine
• backpack w/ drysack
• ursack w/ food
• Warm rabbitfur hat
• warm work gloves
• sparker
• tinder (cotton)
• bandanna
• personal drugs (for medical condition)

Unused (planned as backup):

• wool jacket
• down sleepingbag w/ drysack
• gators (intended to test in the rain)
• contractor bag

Unused (would normally bring):

• scarf
• tights
• med kit (pills)
• knife sharpener
• repair kit (needles, floss, steel wire, etc.)
• headlamp (battery was basically dead)
• sighting compass
• lighter
• fatwood
• homemade hacksaw-blade backup knife
• backup personal drugs (for medical condition)

Conclusion

Overall it worked! Jess' technique worked well for her, and mine worked well for me.

In really cold weather if I'm worried I think I would go with the "sleeping-bag" model. If it's cold enough than the Mylar bag won't make enough difference and the temperature at the Mylar bag will be below freezing. In this case the sweat will condense there and then freeze solid, thus keeping you dry. I would also recommend this method in other weather for folks who don't sweat much. Note though that this technique is trickier to get in and out of.

In warmer weather I think I want a bag that is twice as wide as a normal emergency bivy. This would be much faster to stuff with leaves than the sleeping-bag approach (despite being larger the leaves can be fairly loose), is very easy to adjust for temperature, and is super easy to get in and out of. This seems to me like the more general approach that I'd like to understand better and persue, as it should work in fairly cold weather as well.

Note that this technique only works when there are fluffy dry'ish leaves about. If we had a bought of freezing rain that soaked everything and then glued it to the ground, the leaves won't be very insulating. It remains to be seen what weather allows one to still get good enough leaves.

That said, in VA I suspect this technique works quite a bit of the time. It's especially tempting to adjust gear for day-hiking a little to allow for doing this, as it would allow one to voluntarily or not, actually have a fairly comfortable night in a fairly wide range of circumstances, while likely adding almost no weight to your normal kit (since many of us already carry the necessary components).

The sleepingbag for me has proven to be one of the hardest pieces of gear to substitute for or drop so far. So, I'm really excited about the possibilities this opens up and I'm really curious to see just how wide a range of weather I can get it to handle. I'm toying with the idea of making a bag for this purpose, maybe something like a "survival scarf": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LElsE3kseQM . Given that and a poncho I could sleep out in a lot of different weather while carrying a very very small pack. Also, it's one more step towards dropping plastics out of my kit.

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Jeep plans (lift, gears, and lockers)

2015-01-22

I've got this Jeep, and it's pretty cool. But, I want to make it cooler.
My plan from the start has been to build a not-flashy daily-driver with a moderate lift, that performs well on road and better than it looks like it should on the trail. Because it's a neat challenge.

To that end, I've been looking in to:

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Winter overnight

2015-01-18

Last weekend I had a free evening, so I grabbed my pack and lit out. I didn't go very far at all, maybe 2 or 3 miles in from a trailhead near my house. I was taking care of Jess' dog at the time, so she came to.

This was the perfect time to test some things and just muck around. I recently bought an Opinel folding saw, which I picked it up from the mailbox on my way out. I also grabbed my little Gransfors forest axe, and my new bush knife that I bought from the maker at a gathering.

Cutting implements

This is a lot of cutting tools to carry, but I thought I'd bring them all and play around, to see how each fared at normal camp tasks. I actually also have a true Nepalese Kukri, but I didn't bring that on this trip.



I usually carry your typical Mora knife. They are great knives, very easy to sharpen being Scandinavian grind, etc. But, while you can baton with them (hit them with a stick), the blade is a little bit thin for it. I got this bush knife with the idea that it could do heavier tasks more safely than the Mora is capable of... so, it starts encroaching on Axe territory. It's a great knife, and feels really nice when whittling and the like, but I haven't had it long enough to have a well informed opinion yet, but it's looking good.

The Opinel folding saw was a new idea. Since it's winter here I've been reading and watching videos of people who do bushcraft in the Alps. One thing I noticed is that these folks often carry folding saws. Watching them and thinking about it I realized that almost everything you do in the winter involves cutting sticks, usually in the 2-3" diameter range. Being able to cut sticks cleanly to specific lengths makes things easier, building a quick shelter, building a stand for your fire, cutting really short pieces of wood for a small fast fire, instead of having to burn the pieces in half, etc. You can always cut sticks with rocks but the rocks may be buried under a bunch of snow making that less effective. You can break sticks for sure, but it just makes some things harder, and winter is challenging enough for me right now. So, I decided to give a saw a try.

Overall, I am REALLY impressed. This is an amazing saw. A saw is really the right tool to be using when bucking up your normal deadfall firewood, much better for that than an axe. As a result it was significantly faster than the Axe.



I cut about 2 armloads of wood with it, so I could keep the fire going most of the night (more on that later).

Axes and machetes and the like are quite heavy and bulky to carry. This saw is much lighter. It's just a little to big to stow in a cargo pants pocket.

If I was building shelters, I would prefer to have *both* though. If you take a small, say 18ft dead pine tree and lop off all the branches until you just have the trunk, a machete is by far the best tool for the job. Next best is an axe which is a bit slower, but compared to my machete doesn't wear out my pinky finger as badly. The saw would be a pretty distance 3'rd in that category. Given the choice of either the saw or the axe for shelter building, I think it depends on the forest I was in, but I'd probably pick the axe.

After I had a fire lit and was just hanging around I decided to make a spoon, because why not make a spoon right? The first step was to split a stick (if you're paying attention you'll note this spoon is not going to work very well). I could do this with an axe, but it's extremely gross. A knife, hit on the back with a stick, is an extremely accurate tool for splitting small branches. I then whittled this into the beginnings of a spoon shape to get comfortable with how I wanted it to come out.



Next I cut a green stick and split that, again using the knife (this step would be much much harder to do safely with an axe). I bent the stick over to make a set of tongs



Then using these tongs I fished a coal out of my fire, placed it on the spoon and blew on it. After it got nice and chared I'd scrape the char out with a rock, and repeat. This is the process used to make what's often called a "burn bowl", this is a burn spoon I guess.



After a few iterations of this, with a little care to how you place the coals, you get a nice bowl shape



I carved it a bit more until it was sufficiently spoony that I could've used it... but there's a key flaw in this spoon which should've been obvious initially. It includes the very center of the wood, which almost always checks badly (meaning it splits while it's drying). As a result this spoon is already splitting badly, and will fail very soon, so I gave it to the dog to shred instead of saving it. Oh well, it was good practice.

Cold

To get the fire lit I first tried out a method I saw a video of someone in Switzerland using. It just made a lot of sense. It's called the "3 stick method". Well... it requires sticking the 3 sticks in the... snow... err... yeah, suffice to say that it didn't work in ground that was frozen solid. One more learning experience!

I had carried in a few bags of tea with me, since we have so few evergreens here, and I knew it would be cold. I also had 2 stainless steel water bottles (kleen kanteen brand). One is a 1 liter bottle, the other is a 1 pint thermos. This was great, as I could boil stream water in the 1 bottle, then transfer it to the thermos and sip tea while I was working on my spoon and whatever else.



Then I cooked dinner on the fire, and just hung out. When I left home it was ~15F and I believe it dropped to maybe 5F that night, so it was pretty chilly. Beau didn't care at all though, she was running in and out of the water until this happened:



It'as a bit hard to see, but she has balls of ice on her fur all up her legs and across her belly, almost 1/4" across. She picked them out slowly, and didn't really mind much.

I was also experimenting with clothing. I decided to minimize my use of modern tech and was wearing a wool 260 weight ice-breaker sweater as a base layer, a 5.11 canvas shirt over that, with a thick wool jacket over that. My hat was wool. I had on underarmor running tights (I don't own wool tights, something I'd like to fix someday), and 5.11 canvas pants. Wool socks, and fancy modern waterproof hiking boots, lightly insulated. On my hands I had wool liner gloves and thinsulate lined 2 layer gortex mittens. In reality I would've been fine without the mittens... now I know!

Interestingly, even sitting around at 10F or so this was plenty of clothing. I was quite comfortable, especially sitting on a closed cell foam pad, and drinking hot tea. Very pleasent :D.

I carried in an extra pad for Beau, as I was worried about her getting cold at night.



She was definitely thankful and slept on it the whole night. Unlike this picture I had it folded in half so she'd get 2 layers of insulation.

While she was sleeping on an my old beat up one (this pad has done 1500 miles on the AT, 240 on the JMT, was my bed all last summer, and has been on countless other trips), I was sleeping on my much newer pad, otherwise identical. I also made a pile of of leaves to try and get some more insulationg, knowing just the 3/8" pad (even from gossamer gear, which are better than most) wouldn't quite cut it.

Well, the dog was just fine that night, she curled in a ball and slept great. I checked her ears and paws occasionally, and they were always warm, I never once saw her shiver.

Me on the other hand, I was cold... especially when I got nervous enough to bring the dog in my bag for a few minutes to let her warm up (which was totally unnecessary). My 5 degree quilt is well used and isn't really 5 degrees anymore. It also has a hole in the bottom of the foot that I usually plug with my down vest, which I hadn't brought. I was using the quilt and my ultralight MLD bivy, another piece of gear I've been experimenting with more lately. I was in no danger by any means, I just wasn't as snug and warm as I had expected to be.

I managed to keep the fire going for much of the night... except the coldest part of course. Oh well. I also melted a small hole in my bivy and sleepingbag. This would upset me more if the bag was new, or the bivy was waterproof, but I do need to do some patching. It turns out you can't use a down bag AND warm up by a fire. I knew this, but tried it anyway. I had build the fire in a pre-existing fire-ring that raised it up somewhat above the ground, this made banking it nigh impossible, especially combined with the ground being frozen solid. The wood there is a very fast-growing oak that burns almost like a softwood. So, that's why I failed to keep the fire going.

The next morning the dog had ludicrous amounts of energy and was so manic she was playing tug-aware with the backpack after I got it on her... it looked just as hilarious as it sounds, sadly I didn't get photos. I got enough sleep to be pretty happy, and had a nice pleasant walk out.

Conclusion
So, lessons learned:

• A good folding saw is an amazing tool, and I'll probably bring one on future winter bushcraft trips.
• To make a spoon, find an unchecked stick, or split a larger stick and use it off center
• The 3 stick method doesn't work without a soft substrate
• A stainless steel thermos and bottle is a wonderful combination of water bottles for winter trips
• Beau basically doesn't get cold, I won't worry about her again unless it's well below 0F
• Wool and cotton/nylon canvas blend layers are entirely reasonable for winter backpacking
• For colder weather, I could really use a warmer bag, and maybe a warmer sleeping pad

And... best of all, I got to spend a nice 20 hours or so outside instead of inside. It was beautiful both days. It feels so good to wake up in the forest, and have the first thing you do be to pack up your stuff and start walking.