Red Yeti's Blog

What’s it all about?

Well it’s not really a “blog” in the classic sense of being a “web-log”. In other words I don’t intend this to become an online diary.

I just wanted an easy way to stick a few things on the web to be able to point friends at when I mention something down the pub or up a mountain.

It’s unlikely to be regularly updated!

At the moment I’m considering a couple of bits info on kit. Mainly of interest to people wandering about in mountains or on long walks or wild camps.

Maybe a mention of photography here and there… who knows maybe something utterly different!

Enough blather – I’m off to find out how this blog thing works. If it takes me more than five minutes it’s not what I need and this posting will never see the light of day.

So if you’re reading this – I’ve worked it out. Otherwise – well otherwise I could say anything and no one would ever know. Moldywarp.

So, a couple of months to go until we set off walking the Haute Route. “We” being my girlfriend LB, and three friends.

It’s less “technical” (marginally!) than what we usually get up to given a chance to get to the mountains. I think of it as “luxury mountaineering”. In that you get to walk through mountains carrying very little gear and having meals and a bed at the end of the day. Hardly mountaineering at all!

We (that’s LB and one of the three) have done the part of the route where it shares a couple of days with the Tour of Mont Blanc. Breathtaking scenery.

I’ll be putting a few posts up about what I think is worth carrying (and what I don’t!). These posts are really meant for the people that are coming but I’ll write them in a way I hope might be interesting to others stumbling in here!

In the mean time – check out Wikipedia’s article on the Haute Route. It was a bit of a muddle so I spent a while editing it with a bit of help from our guide (writer!) on the route, Kev Reynolds.

Wild camping in the Black Mountain range in South Wales at the weekend (not to be confused with Black Mountain which is in the Black Mountains a few kilometres to the North East – easy eh?) and I had one of those moments that remind you to keep your wits about you.

We were coming off a ridge down to where a friendly farmer had allowed us to stash the car in his barn for a very reasonable sum. It was one of those rolling South Wales ridges with a sharp scoop out of the Eastern side formed by glaciers during the last ice age.

I was carefully picking my way down a steepening grassy slope and sure enough called back to the others behind me that it looked like we’d started down a too early and had met a little rock-step.

I could see the top of a rowan poking its branches above the grass a few meters down-slope. They often don’t get much more than four to six meters tall in the mountains, since they’re blasted by the weather, so I figured it was a four or five metre drop.

There was a fast running stream, a few meters to my left and slightly behind me so I went down another couple of meters to look at it running over the edge.

And froze – I was about three meters above a vertical cliff that was around thirty meters high. Easily ten times higher than I’d guessed from the rowan.

I wasn’t in any appreciable danger, I was already “highly averse” to falling off what I’d thought was a four meter rock-step so wasn’t pushing my luck. It was just a bit of a surprise!

The waterfall had a very reliable “counter slope” just beside it that was bedded on very solid rock. So I went back up, before coming down onto that and stared down at the water pouring into space. Which really was one of the most impressive sites I’ve seen in a while and therefore, to me, well worth being in that spot. (Believe me – the picture shrinks the drop massively!)

As usual when looking at a drop like that, some words from a Summer Mountain Leader (“ML”) course came back to me. “One of the particular dangers of the Welsh mountains is their convex slopes. Meaning that as you walk down, you can’t always see the terrain ahead of you getting steeper and steeper, until you fall off it!”.

It just made me think that without being subconsciously aware of that particular danger and without consciously keeping my guard up as we happily ambled back to the car things might, just might, have ended up rather differently.

On the way there we’d listened to one of Podcast Bob’s offerings (Mountain First Aid 27/2/07) where he interviewed Wayne Thackery of Woodhead Mountain Rescue Team. Wayne said that in his experience although many, many people go in to the hills without proper gear most of those get away with it “by the skin of their teeth”.

Whereas, of the people who go in with experience and proper preparation, the ones that get caught out are generally coming off something after achieving their objective for the day. They just let their guard down (which might sound familiar to one of the this year’s HR crew…)

So there I was writing a simple entry on hot weather kit that I thought would take me twenty minutes and an hour later I’m still on it (trying to make it smaller!) and I started to wonder “Why didn’t I just send a kit list?”

Well, I have done in the past and it has proved useful to people, so that’s fine. But it doesn’t get across why I’m choosing the particular kit I am.

Good kit is very enabling and poor kit can literally be disabling – poorly fitted footwear can mean blisters that make it near impossible to walk.

Good kit can make the difference between having a fantastic time, despite extremes of weather, and having a miserable time or even worse.

And really good kit is “invisible” you hardly even notice it when you’re using it. You just get on with whatever it is you really came for.

And I’ve spent so much time (probably far too much time!) looking at, reading about and even occasionally finding time to actually use lots of it that I know what works for me and can take a reasonable guess at what should work generally.

Kit lists have their place. Without one to tick off I would constantly forget to bring things! But exactly what should be on that list and why? Well, that’s why I’m blogging it.

I hope it helps!

To me, the best thing about Blogs is that you find some amazingly useful stuff written by some fascinating people.

The worst thing about Blogs is that you have to keep going back to each web site to see if they’ve changed.

But there are tools out there, very simple ones, that can make that a no-brainer.

I’ve started using “google reader“.

It’s free although it needs you to follow a very simple sign up – how else would it know who you are next time? Note that’s “sign up” for a google account, not a gmail account (but if you have a gmail account, you already have a google account).

It shows you all the Blogs you’ve added in a nice clean easy to see screen. Most importantly it shows which ones have new, unread articles on them. That’s the single feature that makes it invaluable to me.

It even lets you read the Blogs from the google reader page itself in a plain text view or with pictures.

On a side note, it also recently saved my “HR Kit: Cold Weather” posting from being lost when I left my home machine logged in to the site and carried on an edit from work (if you use WordPress to produce a Blog – always log out of one machine before logging in on another!). Google had cached a copy and I retrieved it from there. Phew!

There’s another tool that looks very nice as well but I’ve not used it very much: Net Vibes

It’s a bit more richly featured (it has the weather and allows you to add other things like your ebay watch list) but I find myself preferring the simple google reader interface.

Oh, and if you’re looking for an outdoor related posting – the picture is from a walk we did in the Low Arctic (sounds exciting that eh?). It’s from near the Abisko Hut in the far North of Sweden, at the start of the Kungsleden. I must put up a post about it later in the year.

Might be a bit quiet on here for a few days since we’re off to Sweden to see the out-laws (we’re not married).

Hoping to fit in a couple of days of open-canoeing (sorry Kev!) with a wild-camp on an island, weather permitting!

None of us have ever done that before, so it might be interesting…

Should find a use for the huge Aloksaks too.

But at the very least I expect to fit in some wood chopping, cooking on a range in the Sommarstuga (Summer Cottage) and rowing about in the boat.

All good prep for the Haute Route… sort of…