Red Yeti's Blog

Since we’re going “hut to hut” the huts (refuges) and hotels provide dinner and breakfast so this is pretty simple overall.

Breakfast

The breakfasts in French and Italian huts are usually little more than yoghurt with French bread and butter plus gallons of coffee and hot chocolate. We’re hoping that the German influence in Switzerland might mean some things like cured meat being available but we’re not banking on it. We find the bread and yoghurt only lasts us for a couple of hours before we’re ravening for some “proper” food. Which is usually where the first mini-lunch stop occurs.

Lunch

For lunches we generally intend to buy some dried sausage, cheese, nuts and of course Swiss chocolate. For some of the sections we’ll have to carry enough for a couple of days or three.

Some huts will happily make up a packed-lunch but I’ve not found them to be very substantial so I’d always plan to have some extra food to hand.

It’s definitely worth bringing a recently sharpened knife for cutting up cheese and dried sausages (and pack it in the luggage in the hold of course!).

The bags that the cheese and sausage come in usually get destroyed after a couple of days or three of shaking around in the pack so a couple of good freezer bags and an Aloksak or two is a good idea.

You can of course bring a stove and heat up something for lunch. Although LB and I aren’t doing that one of the people we’re with will be and will be home-dehydrating some things to heat up.

Dinner

Provided by the huts of course but if you have a special requirement it can often be accommodated with as much notice as possible. I’ve even found that hut guardians welcome cooking something different to the usual fare but I may just have been lucky there of course.

Hot Drinks

Neither of us are big fans of “normal” black, English tea but we both like green, red, peppermint etc so we’ll be bringing a few bags of those. There’s never usually a shortage of hot chocolate and coffee in France and Italy so I’d assume something similar in Switzerland.

So that’s:

• Sharp Knife
• Couple of freezer bags and a Aloksak or two
• Tea
• Optionally lunch food and stove

Although I try to go as light as possible I still carry more than an “Ultralight Hiker“. Partly this is due to enjoying my creature comforts. Partly perhaps due to having spent time in mountains often as a slightly more experienced, and therefore more responsible, member of a group rather than solo hiking.

But it’s amazing how by concentrating some thought on each bit of kit, or rather on each function that a bit of kit provides, you can shave off a really significant amount of weight.

A couple of summers ago I started carrying a DSLR camera and the extra weight tipped the balance from awkward to painful. But with a little thought and not too much spending I managed to shave off the weight of the camera and more besides.

With a lot of thought and rather a lot of spending, last winter, I dropped something like five kilos off my previous overnight winter kit. Going from around 18 to around 13 kilos. A hugely noticeable amount!

Another good reason for trying to reduce your pack weight that I can’t recall being mentioned, is in case you have to carry someone else’s gear as well. I’ve had to do so on two occasions where a minor injury left someone able to walk but not bear much weight. Once it’s been the other way around and LB took most of my pack weight whilst she helped someone with a sprained ankle and I sped off to a road to hitch a lift back to our car.

This kit list assumes that I’m carrying just my own kit but of course I’ll be taking a fair proportion of LB’s too for obvious reasons.

The weights are from my digital scales. I’ve been very forgetful about adding weights into the Blog so far. I also plan a final weighing next week…

HR Kit List

Passport
Flight documents
BMC Insurance card
European Health Insurance card
Driving license
BMC Card
Credit card
6″X9″ Aloksak for documents 18gms
Local Currency
6″X9″ Aloksak for currency 18gms

Nokia 6233 Phone 112gms
Earphones for phone 22gms
A5 Ortleib bag as wallet and phone case 20gms
Silva Expedition 4 compass 44gms
Silva Field 7 compass 24gms
Swiss Topo maps 84gms
Guide book 252gms
GPS 87gms

Head torch 68gms (inc. Lithium batteries)
Spare torch 60gms
Emergency shelter 428gms
Spare bits bag (SilFix, needles and thread etc) 60gms
Whistle (six blasts in the Alps and the UK) 6gms
First Aid kit (including blister kit) 308gms

Care Plus alcohol based sunblock 80gms (might also take an extra tube between two of us)
Care Plus lip sunblock 14gms
Tilley Hat 108gms
Sunglasses+ case 94gms (possibly SportEYZ but I’ve not tried them yet: 9gms plus an Integral Designs 4gms silnylon stuffsac)

Granite Gear Vapor Trail rucksack 1056gms
Silnylon rucksack rain cover 75gms

Rab Drilium waterproof jacket large 353gms
Montane Atomic Pants (waterproof trousers) large 178gms
Jack Wolfskin Gecko micro fleece large 244gms
Montane Lite Speed wind proof large 186gms
Icebreaker 140 weight Tech T Lite merino wool t-shirts X2 XL 180gms each
Silk gloves 30gms
PHD Minimus down jacket 570gms

Silk boxer shorts X3 large 82gms each
Rohan double-convertible synthetic trousers medium 342gms
Integral Designs Shortie eVENT gaiters large 70gms
Smartwool socks size 11 UK medium weight 86gms
Sealskinz socks size 11 UK 106gms
Montrail Hurricane Ridge approach shoes size 11.5 UK 1124gms (inc. Superfeet insoles)

Silk sleeping bag liner 108gms
Ear Plugs 4gms

Wash kit 253gms
Towel 30gms
3 packs travel tissues (in 6″X9″ Aloksak) 88gms
Multi vitamins
Swiss Army knife 128gms
Tea bags
12″X12″Aloksak for food 32gms
Freezer bags for food X3 44gms total
Re-used Indian Tonic Water bottles X3 42gms each (for water)

Canon EOS 400D DSLR camera + 10-22 lens 1070gms
Canon 17-85 lens 496
Foam camping mat cut and gaffer taped to form a cover for the above 40gms
22Gb (yes gigabytes) of memory 98gms (7XCF cards at 14gms inc. case each)
Lens cloth 1gm
Camera batteries X7 (not 5 – I bought 2 more!) 44gms each total 308gms
Camera battery charger with shortened lead 142gms (saved 44gms by shortening the lead)
Ortleib Aquazoom waterproof camera case 224gms

Kestrel 3500 (measures wind, temperature etc) 65gms +37 for the case (which I may change)
Binoculars 288gms

I’ve been experimenting with alcohol stoves for a little while and to be honest, of the four I’ve tried, only one puts out enough heat for two people’s food: The White Box

Named for the white box that it comes in, it’s a very simple and robust little stove. There’s plenty of information about them on the Internet already so I’ll concentrate on how efficient they are and how I’ve been able to use mine down to -10 Celsius (14F). It’s often said that you can’t use an alcohol stove in freezing conditions, but with a little care, you can.

I’ve wanted to replace my old faithful MSR Whisperlite Internationale with a lightweight alcohol stove for a while but to be honest I’ve so many other things going on, I don’t have time to fiddle around making my own. Besides, from what I’d read, unless you get your design and build dead right, they can be rather inefficient. So I thought I’d buy a couple from people who make them all the time.

I tried a beautifully made Penny Stove from The AC Aircraft Company (Bill doesn’t seem to show them on his site now for some reason). But the heat output never managed to boil the 900 ml (about two pints) of water I want to use for porridge + tea in the morning or rehydrating buckwheat pasta + soup in the evening.

I then tried a Sith from Tinny at MiniBull Designs (his blog is always fascinating). It struggled to maintain enough heat in the presence of a cold pan of water to even stay alight. Tinny and I never did get to the bottom of this – it may be that “normal” methylated spirits in the UK haven’t got as high an alcohol content as something like Heet in the USA (I am just guessing here – anyone know for sure?). Even holding the pan above the stove a couple of centimetres never allowed the water to boil before the fuel ran dry.

So I ordered an Atomic from him. And with its pot-stand it managed to pack enough of a punch to get the water hot, but still not boiling.

At this point I gave up for a while. But listening to Bob on one of his podcasts singing the praises of the White Box made me decide that it was worth one last go.

And I’m very glad I did. The White Box is very small, tough and light; 68gms. 30 for the stove, 10 for the aluminium square it stands on and 28 for the wind-shield.

Critically, it can boil my required amount of 900ml of water in about nine minutes from sparking up to rolling boil. Slower than the MSR, but a lot less dangerous for cooking in the porch of a tent.

I’ve cooked in the porch with the MSR, but no matter how much the rain was falling and the wind blowing, I’ve always sparked up with the door wide open and only zipped back up once it’s settled to it’s usual fearsome jet of blue flame. LB has had to hold on to the sides of the tent to stop wind damage caused by leaving it wide open in a hooley a couple of times. (I know I could light it outside and carry it inside carefully – but where’s the fun in that?)

Great – so it works and it boils lots of water. But how do you get it working in the cold?

The critical point is to make sure that both the alcohol and the stove itself are warm by keeping them within one thin layer of your skin for about ten minutes.

I keep the alcohol in a small MiniBull Fuel Bottle (the AG fuel bottles that Winwood stock look very similar). It’s important to have a small amount so it’s easy to heat.

When I wake up, I grab the bottle from the tent pocket I put it in the night before and stuff it inside the sleeping bag but outside the silk liner. At -10C that’s a bit of a wake-up call but with a quick fumble you can keep it away from you whilst it warms-through enough to allow it to come closer to your skin.

Once I’ve got most of the cooking stuff together, but before I fill the pan with water and get out the porridge, I throw the stove itself inside the sleeping bag to let it warm-through as well. It doesn’t take as long since it’s a small hunk of aluminium.

In the evening it’s similar, keep it between your down jacket and your t-shirt. Though when wearing a 260 weight Icebreaker long sleeved T (expensive – but worth every penny) I have to finish by keeping it right next to the skin. Otherwise the merino just wouldn’t let it warm up enough.

Once you’re completely ready to start cooking, pan filled and fire-steel waiting, whip them both out, fill the stove and spark up.

Then, hold the pan of water (or ice slush if you have it) a couple of centimetres above the flame. That way you’re letting the stove prime as usual whilst also “priming” the pan of cold water. Otherwise, even though the stove might have blossomed to its beautiful chrysanthemum of flame, the cold pan can suck the life out of it.

Nine minutes or less later, a couple of pints of boiling water enthusiastically fills your porch with steam.

As a relatively recent convert to hydration systems, or platypi (it seems Platypus is to hydration what in British English, Hoover is to vacuum cleaner) I’ve had to learn how to look after them when they are not being lumped about in my pack.

It might sound strange that they need any “looking after” at all, but they do. Or else you end up sucking mildew flavoured water through a black spotted tube.

The usual handy hint to prevent that is simply to store them in a freezer. But in a small kitchen, with a very small freezer, the food has to get first priority. So no freezing for our platypi except in-use on the hill (for which a neoprene cover, that covers the bite-valve, combined with blowing back into the bag, works very well for preventing a freeze-up even at minus-a-lot Celsius).

So I’ve got in to a very simple routine for making sure they stay mould free:

When you get home, fill the bladder with really hot water from the tap. Not from a kettle. It might work, I’ve not tried it, but I have a feeling that boiling water would damage the bag (anyone know different?). But use very hot water never the less.

Hold the bag above the sink and squeeze the bite valve until a lot of really hot water has had a chance to clean out the tube. It needs to run for a good ten seconds I reckon, since the first run through the pipe will cool by the time it gets to the bite valve.

Then drain it out and shake out the excess drops of water.

The last trick relies on having a bite valve that will pop off easily, or at least dissemble without too much of a struggle (like the Source variety – whose bite-valves I favour) and a bag that opens at the opposite end from the tube (like a Platypus Big Zip or Source Widepac): Remove or dissemble the valve to get a good airflow up the tube, stick the tube out of a window (perhaps a second floor window, in case you forget its open and leave the house!) and prop open the bag with something.

The breeze blowing through the window will get pushed up the tube, and usually dries the bag in a few hours even on a still day.

With a bone-dry bag, there’s nowhere for the black mould to grow – and you get a happy, healthy platy.

White gas (Coleman Fuel) is hard to get in Iceland. Although we did find it, it tends to only come in 5 litre containers. Since we’d run into that exact problem in northern Sweden a couple of years ago, and ended up leaving the hut-shop staff with lots of free fuel for their own trips, we decided that it wasn’t worth using the MSR.

One of the Iceland crew did bring an MSR and we had some fun trying to work out how to get a pump to dispense a very small amount of unleaded fuel into it.

Another factor in my not bringing it was that I had one empty, dry MSR pump pinched by the nice people at Copenhagen airport on the way home once (must remember to wash it with detergent and put it in an OP Sack next time!). So I am rather wary of that happening at the start of a trip. Also, overall MSRs work out heavier than canister stoves.

My one objection to canister stoves was that I used to end up carrying more than one canister because I couldn’t tell when one was close to being exhausted. But with the arrival of kitchen scales it’s easy.

Weigh the canister when new, and write the weight on the bottom. Weigh it when back from a trip and write the weight on the bottom again. The net weight of the actual gas is given on the side so you can tell how much you’ve used for a given trip. From that, you can tell how long the remaining gas will last you.

Having read the excellent Carbon Monoxide related articles on BPL, the bushwalking.org Stove FAQ and the BPL Canister Stove FAQ I decided that since it was very nearly the lightest stove and it had extremely low CO emissions I’d go for the Snow Peak Tifrom a US based ebay shop: Camp Buddy. Though the current weakness of the pound probably means it’s as cheap to buy in the UK now.

All gas canister stoves warn of dire consequences if you use a wind-shield. Cooking without any kind of wind-shield seemed crazy to me but I thought I’d try it. We burned through 54 grams of fuel per 900ml of water (our standard drinks+food requirement).

So I made up a heat reflector and wind shield that fits around the burner. It’s made from the aluminium foil from the best Swedish Ostkaka available in the shops (just about my favourite dessert).I’ve also used a strip of stiff foil as a wind shield around part of the gap between the casing and the pan (not shown in the photo).

It’s more like an MSR set-up than a “normal” wind-shield since it doesn’t reflect heat back on to the gas canister.This is specifically what the manufacturers are warning against since heating a gas canister hotter than you can hold, means it might actually explode (that is the golden rule – if it’s more than “Ouch” hot then you’re in danger).

Ryan Jordan also came up with something similar.

With that in place we consistently only got through 18 grams of fuel per 900ml over the whole summer and in all kinds of conditions. It works as much as a heat reflector as it does as a wind-shield and is worth having regardless of how windy it is.

I found I had to make sure it had plenty of air coming in. Sealing it by running the strip of foil completely around the base of the pan (as Ryan Jordan’s version showed) would almost extinguish the flame. In fact any change in the flame from blue to orange should very likely be avoided. As Chris (one of the Iceland crew) observed, blue is an efficient burn and orange isn’t. Inefficient burning produces CO. CO can produce death!

For sparking up the flame I used my trusty old Spyderco Ladybug (the old model) and the excellent Mini-FireSteel that Ryan Jordan commissioned for the Arctic 1000 walk but that’s now in normal production from Light My Fire.

As for the gas, you can’t take it on a plane so it has to be found in Iceland.

We shared a cab (for six it worked out almost the same as a bus) from the BSI bus station (where you arrive from Keflavik airport) to the Kringlan shopping centre to visit a supermarket for food.

Whilst there we went to a rather large (but rather “high street”) gear shop for the canisters. We’d contacted the shop in advance and had them reserve some for us since we were unsure of whether the demands for gas canisters from six people might exhaust their supply. They certainly wouldn’t have done on that day.

Since we stayed in a hut one more night than planned and we double-dayed the last day we had gas left over. So we just left them with Thor at the Three Sisters Guesthouse as he said people were always happy for some free, half-used canisters. Easy.

We’ve spent Xmas and New Year with LB’s folks in Sweden and have been very lucky with the weather. It hasn’t quite managed to get above freezing for the whole two weeks. It’s generally not been above -3 or -4 C and even touched -13 C overnight (and looks set to beat that tonight in fact!). And with little snow, we’ve therefore had some excellent tour skating conditions. So we’ve picked up from where we left off last year.

Ice is not always skatable apparently. If there’s a layer of snow or if the ice was roughened by being formed during heavy snow fall you can hardly move. Gliding strides simply grind to a halt.

But for us the ice was nearly perfect. With occasional sections of glass-like smoothness allowing us to glide and glide.

I’ve even managed to go out four times and only fall over once and that was only a sort of sliding, resigned laying down.

And I’ve now bought my very own tour skates. Unlike the ones I used last year, these have only got snow-board style bindings at the toes meaning that they fitted my Montrail Cirrus GTX even more easily (I miss my inov8 terrocs very much already this winter but they’d be little use for this).

The huge advantage with having my own skates is that I can set them up so that they are balanced specifically for me. The skate must be right in the centre of the heel and right in between the first and second toes.

Each day I’ve come back and spent some time in the garage tweaking the adjustment and it’s helped massively. I imagine that for a better skater it would be less critical but for me it’s made all the difference.

Until today when I spent twenty minutes wondering what I could have adjusted so badly… at which point I noticed I’d put them on the wrong feet! Well it is New Year’s Day. I’ve had a late night.

The other thing that has made a huge difference is wearing protective pads on knees and elbows along with wrist-protectors. Add in an old riding helmet (a childhood skating rink accident when I landed on my head still haunts me!) and my confidence, and therefore posture, improved enormously. Though I’m not sure it would have avoided over-stretching my shoulder somewhat last year when I tried to punch a hole in the ice with one elbow!

I also learnt a few more tidbits of tour skating lore. Like it’s best for the skate to be adjusted to protrude behind your heel for half an inch (1.5cm) or so, or else the skates want to shoot out forwards if you lean too far backwards. And that the skate blade itself is not straight but is in fact a section from a notional circle of around forty metres in diameter.

A smaller diameter circle obviously gives a more pronounced curve (if you can call it pronounced when you need a steel-rule before you can see it’s not straight). A more pronounced curve is apparently better for turning quickly whereas a straighter edge is more stable in a straight line.

A tiny extra bit of kit is the clips that can be used to hold the skates together to make them easier to carry and prevent the blades being blunted accidentally (my simple blue ones are visible in the picture along with the more elaborate red ones with velcro straps to ensure the skates stay together).

Skating clubs (who may do several tens of kilometres in a day) will have a leader who typically skates twenty metres ahead of a second leader with the rest of the group another twenty meters behind them. So if the leader misjudges the ice and “plurrar” (“takes a bath”) then the group has plenty of time to stop.

The specialist rucksacks that tour skaters use have a crotch strap so that the bag doesn’t rise up if you have a bath and thereby acts as a float with all your spare clothes in a waterproof bag. They also have a throw-line to be thrown to the swimmer (rather like in kayaking).

As you skate, you must be wary of weaker patches seen as odd patterns. They become safer as the ice thickens. But at the marginal end, when the ice is only just skatable at around six centimeters, then they must be avoided.

Finally, once off the ice, a nip of something very alcoholic from a hip flask that’s been chilling in the day-pack along with some Prinskorv heated over a fire is hard to beat.

Though some mince pies warmed over the embers made a thoroughly British addition to a very non-British pastime.