Red Yeti's Blog

The Haute Route in August – ah… warm and sunny. Dust-dry trails, roiling heat haze rising from glaring rocks… Here’s hoping!

Sunblock

Sunblock is a no-brainer. The excellent and amazingly comprehensive web site over at Needle Sports (no I’m not sponsored by them – exactly the reverse in fact) has some nice smallish tubes of sun cream that should last for the whole route for one person. I’ve been looking for an alcohol based gel block for the last ten years (since I used some in Australia) but I’ve only just managed to find one in the UK. Garnier have brought out Ambre Solaire Clear Protect Gel that dries almost immediately with hardly any residue. Pretty strong on the perfume though! Not tried it properly yet but next year I might try Lighthiker’s trick of squeezing some into a plastic soft drink bag.

Sunglasses

I’d count sunglasses as essential in the Alps in summer (and winter of course!). Although I’m happiest without them, even I can’t put up with the glare coming off the rock for hours on end. And there’s good evidence that exposing your eyes to that much UV will damage them in the long run. A wrap around pair is preferable of course just to keep the light to a minimum. Also, it’s possible for cheaper specs to be worse than no glasses at all since they may not block the UV properly. Because they’re dark, your pupils enlarge but since the they’re not blocking the UV your eye is getting even more UV exposure than it would have done if you just squinted. So, probably not worth skimping on the price too much.

I’ve just come across the Adidas Evil Eye sun glasses. The interesting thing for me is the versions that come with the ability to convert into ski goggles. The arms click out and are replaced with a head band and there’s a thin foam insert that clips to the back of the frames to form a seal. They also have a clip-in prescription lens available that you can take to an optician and have ground for your eyes. I’m not sure how well they’d work with regard to condensation since they’re only single skinned but the potential weight and bulk savings make them look very interesting…

Hat

I’ve always hated hats but something has just converted me: An LTM6 Airflo Tilley Hat

These things are beautifully put together and thought out. They deliberatly don’t fit closely to your head but instead sit on top of it loosely with a comfortable chin strap to stop it blowing off. The strap works well and has kept it on my head whilst walking over the windy tops of South Wales recently. I read recently that Ryan Jordan reckons his Tilley is his favourite bit of kit (notice he’s almost always wearing one in pictures) and Chris Townsend gave the Tilley T3 a “Best Buy” in a recent TGO review

Extra Water Container

Typically I only carry two litres of water but I’m going to bring an extra bottle in case it’s very warm. For once I’m not about to recommend some cutting-edge, shiny bit of gear for this: an old tonic water bottle is perfect!

Any plastic bottle that’s been used for storing fizzy drink works. They’re made of much tougher stuff than the ones for still water. Wash it out, fill it with hot water and bicarbonate of soda for a couple of days, wipe off the sticky label residue with meths or white gas and your done. Tonic water bottles seem to have the least residual taste/smell from whatever they held before.

In summary:

• Sunblock
• Hat
• Extra water container

You know you’re a gear-head when you buy gear whilst on a trip. But in my defence, it wasn’t extra gear, it was replacement gear.

After a couple of days it became apparent that I just wasn’t hydrating properly. I ended the day more tired than I should have been, very thirsty, with sticky eyes and just generally feeling a bit pants. I wasn’t drinking from the water bottle often enough but would keep pushing up hill and be distracted from my thirst by the views from the top.

So just as I was talking about having to finally give in and put up with a nasty plastic taste from a hydration system I walked into a little gear shop in Champex and found Source Widepac hydration bladders.

They claim to have a “glass like” lining in both the bag and, importantly to me, the tube. After finding that the Sigg bottle tube tasted terribly of plastic I am convinced that’s where most of the taste comes from. Probably an inevitable consequence of the plastic being so soft – it’s full of volatile plasticisers that dissolve into the water.

The bite valve seems to work well in sealing off the water and comes with a cover that slips over the top to keep it from picking up dirt or getting squashed and spraying water around. It’s not cylindrical so if you don’t get the cover aligned with the shape of the valve it will force it open and make it drip. But I found that once I’d noticed it could happen I tended to line them up easily enough.

The rather insubstantial clip to hold the tube to the pack strap was lost very quickly but by tucking it in between the strap and the shoulder padding it would sit nicely without it.

The seal is a fold over top, with a separate orange clip that slides along it to keep the bag folded tightly. I’ve given it a good squeeze and it seems bomb-proof. They come in several sizes; 1, 1.5, 2 and 3L sizes so there’s a size for every pack.

There are no weights on the site but I make it: 2 Litre; bladder 108gms and 1 Litre; bladder 92gms. Plus a hose and bite valve+cover 66gms.

The one really odd thing is that there’s an extra layer of plastic on the side of the bottle that has the tube, forming a sort of pocket. I can see no use for this whatsoever. It’s even got a hole through it that the tube joint pokes through so it’s not as if it’s intended to protect that.

So, I simply cut it off.

And they now weigh 88gms and 76gms respectively. Meaning that, plus the hose, the 2L weighs in at a total of 142gms. Not all that light when you consider a Platypus and hose is apparently 100gms but as I say, if it doesn’t taste of plastic I’ll carry it.

But unfortunately, they’re not completely without plastic taste. Although they are better than others I’ve tried (although it’s been some years…). After a night soaking in a sink of hot water they were even less flavoursome and with cold spring water it’s almost undetectable even by me.

As an experiment – I took off the soft plastic and from the bite valve and chewed on it for half a minute or so (nothing is too much trouble when researching a Blog entry). To my surprise I couldn’t detect any plastic taste. Next I filled the bladder with warm water, left it to soak for overnight and sipped from the top; very, very slight plastic taste. Almost undetectable.

So, I stuck the end of the tube in a cup of warm water and sucked some up – yep – slight plastic flavour. The tube would seem to be the culprit once again.

Overall I like the strength of the materials, the wide neck for easy filling from streams and the very solid seal mechanism. I don’t like the weight, the odd bit of extra plastic that doesn’t help with the weight or the fact that I can still detect a plastic taste, albeit not too much.

The taste is still less than the last Platypus I tried and far less than the last CamelBak I tried. But, it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to bring myself to try either of those. But I’ve just heard that Platypus have inserted a “taste free liner” into their tubes so even though both Platypus and Source use a PE liner to achieve this “taste freeing” I’ll have to give Platypus another try. Since having a hydration tube to sip from has definitely sorted out my hydration problem.

My search for a “taste-free” hydration system is, for now, at an end.

I mentioned before that I bought a Source Widepac hydration system on the basis of its advertised lack of plastic after-taste. But unfortunately, although it was better than anything I’d tried before – it was by no means taste free.

Having taken it apart and taste checked each part I discovered it was mainly the hose.

So LB and I have been experimenting with Camelbak and Platypus,variously drinking directly from the bags, sucking warm water out of cups through hoses and chewing bite valves. All in an effort to see which ones tasted the least of paddling pools.

Overall the winning system is a hybrid between the three: a Source bite-valve, a Camelbak tube and a Platypus bag. Which is also the lightest system since the bag is the heaviest component and the Platypus Big Zip seems to be the lightest bag at the moment. As it happens the Camelbak tube is fractionally lighter as well.

I’ve not actually bought a Camelbak Omega bag (sorry, I can’t link directly to their own page since it’s an awful Flash site) since they’re pretty heavy, so I can’t comment on them. However my brother has tried both and in his opinion the Platypus definitely has the edge (he never walks anywhere if he can avoid it – but he hang-glides, and dropping a Nalgene bottle from several thousand feet whilst simultaneously letting go of the bar might have unpleasant consequences, so he uses hydration systems).

Assembling such a system isn’t too hard as the parts are all available separately. Swapping out the Platypus bite valve for the Source version is something I’d definitely do since I think it’s a better valve. To want to spend the extra to swap the tube as well you’d have to be pretty sensitive to plastic taste… but I am.

The Source Z-Valve never leaked when sat in the kitchen attached to a bag that was soaking. Which is more than can be said for the Platypus valve that I first I tested. It was the basic, non-angled non-tap-type rubber valve and it just kept on dripping water. It also tasted terrible whereas the later one doesn’t taste quite so bad. However the angled valve doesn’t always work; a friend who we walk with all the time has had two and both have leaked.

I was surprised to find such a difference in taste between the tubes from Source, Platypus and Camelbak since as far as I can tell they each use the same PE liner technology. The Source tube has a definite taste but although the Platypus tube is reasonably taste free the Camelback Tube Extender kit we tested was almost completely without taste.

As a side note, I would be wary of where I bought a Platypus Big Zip in future since the one I was supplied with from Go Outdoors, despite (still!) being pictured as having the new blue “taste free” tube and angled valve turned out to be one of the older, cardboard packaged, non taste-free, clear tubed ones with a bite valve that tasted like TCP. Go Outdoors have since promised to refund this but it shows it’s worth checking by phone that the stock held really is the newer Platypus. I got the one that I finally tested from Snow & Rock in Brighton.

Finally (if you really want to get into it!) here are the notes I made during the testing:

Just as I thought I’d settled the hydration system tasting business – someone goes and launches a new product that looks worth a try.

BackpackingLight.com (not UK/Bob and Rose but USA/Ryan Jordan) has just started selling something that looks very similar to a Platypus, the Evernew Collapsible Water Bottle.

Evernew are a Japanese company that I’ve not come across before but they apparently do a fairly large range. The Collapsible Water Bottles appear on page 66 of their 129 page ebook catalogue. Though the size of that might be a bit misleading since the catalogue isn’t all their own equipment.

They also have a surprisingly involved looking drinking tube and bite valve in the catalogue that’s not so far available from BPL.At 43gms (42 if you read the ebook catalogue!) it’s 12gms heavier than the Platypus 2L Reservoir but if it tastes even less of plastic I’ll be carrying it. Some more taste testing to be done – but only a little – this is stretching even my patience with gear testing!