Red Yeti's Blog

Although I’ve mentioned these before, I think they’re so good they’re worth their own posting. I always carry my phones in an A6 Ortlieb Document Case. On longer trips I also carry a second one for the iPhone Nano, cash and passport.

As Needle Sports say, they’re so waterproof they’re almost air-tight.

The really big advantage with them is that you can use the phone whilst it’s inside (even iPhones) and it remains dry. So you can use it in an emergency in the pouring rain.

As an even bigger bonus, the wind noise that can utterly obliterate your voice is all-but removed by keeping it in the bag. Meaning that if you record audio notes or an audio diary,  you can do so wherever you like. But more importantly, if you need to make an emergency call, they’ll actually be able to hear you at the other end!

Phones are rather water sensitive. Over the years I’ve seen many die on the hill (more than ten I’d guess) where people had them in the pocket of a waterproof coat. Pockets simply aren’t reliable for keeping things dry if you’re out in really heavy rain for an extended period.

The cases also last a long time. I think the one I’ve just retired is over ten years old and has been out with me for every single trip during that time, including the seven weeks of the GR5 and three weeks of the GR20.

It’s so old that it has a different “Ortlieb” logo, and I’ve had to use a little McNett Seam Grip to stick down the Velcro that had just started to lift after about eight years. But it really is one of the most reliable and essential bits of kit I carry.

This year’s Big Walk is the Tour of the Jungfrau Region (TJR) in Switzerland. As worked out by the excellent Kev Reynolds and published by Cicerone.

At 10 days of actual walking, it’s a smaller walk than we’ve done for a while (other commitments this year) but the scenery should make up for that somewhat.

This year we plan to actually leave with everyone else who might want to come with us… unexpected parental poppings-off notwithstanding.

Edit 31 May 2011: The “Kümmerly and Frey Jungfrau Region number 18″ is printed on plastic (so no need for Aqua3) and is far more readable than the Swiss Topo – will certainly be taking that in preference!

I’ve picked up a copy of the Swiss Topo 5004 from The Map Shop (1:50,000 “Larger sheets available for certain areas”) but Kev recommends the “Kümmerly and Frey Jungfrau Region number 18″ (which although Stanfords do it, Amazon have it for considerably cheaper). I have a feeling that although the Swiss Topo maps are very good, the Kümmerly and Frey may be easier to read. Once I decide I’ll be sending it off to Aqua3 to have it laminated, making it very resilient and waterproof.

We’re going hut-to-hut all the way so although I may well do an update on the kit, I’ve either covered it already or I have a mostly-written entry for the GR5 or GR20 that does! (There’s also my Alpine Summer Walking FAQ).

We’ve been doing some experiments with drying scrambled eggs and we have a nice solution… but it’s really not what we were expecting.

Each batch was cooked up in a frying pan until firm but still fluffy. They were scrambled with not too much fat (we’re not scared of the fat, but drying fat isn’t so nice) but plenty of herbs, about a tablespoon for six eggs. The herbs are mainly for flavour but as a bonus, there seems to be a good chance that the herbs will reduce the oxidative damage that drying will inevitably do to the egg.

Then we laid them out on a baking tray on some baking paper and left that in the oven at 70C (160F) with the door held ajar with a wedge (be careful, some ovens turn off if the door is opened more than a fraction). We’ve started drying a lot of hill food like this and it works a treat. No faffing around getting the dehydrator out and putting it away again.

Once dried, we’d bag them and freeze them overnight to get as close as possible to how they’d be treated when we wanted to eat them on the hill.

First try:

Dried them for about nine hours. They were hard as nails. We decided on that length of time as we went, since they were getting progressively dryer with each hour. And paranoia said that eggs are potentially dangerous and so should be as dry as possible (in retrospect a lot of that perceived danger comes from the potential for raw eggs, even organic ones, to carry salmonella).

We then poured about 200ml of water into the bag (which was a bag meant for baking chicken, to attempt to avoid too much plasticiser leaching into the egg), and placed that in a saucepan of cold water. The water in the pan was brought to the boil and allowed to sit for about half an hour, as it would be on the hill.

Result: Awful! It was edible by virtue of the herby flavour but was like eating hard pencil erasers. We kept them in the water in the fridge and even a day later they were unchanged.

Second try:

Dried them for six hours (The Backpack Gourmet suggests five and a half for a recipe involving scrambled eggs).

We then repeated the water in the bag, in the pan, soaking trick.

Result: Still awful! Perhaps a little softer but not enough to make them good to eat.

Third try:

Started by drying them for six hours as before.

Our cunning plan was to try rehydrating them overnight in the bag in cold water and then reheating the next morning. In the UK the overnight temperature at altitude is generally pretty low in my experience even during the summer so I wasn’t too concerned about them going off.

Result: We shall probably never know! Because, as each time before, we tried some whilst they were dry. Then we tried some more. Then we realised we’d already cracked it! They were delicious little crunchy snacks. And you can wolf-down three eggs in a couple of minutes. It seems reasonable to assume that your stomach acid would cope with them, and it certainly had no discernible ill effects.

We’ll probably be using four eggs each. It will be interesting to see how full they keep us.

As a bonus, the faff-factor of breakfast is much reduced. And if you want to strike-camp and get moving as fast as you can, they can be eaten on the go.

I’ve finally got to play with the video editing I wanted to do since I shot this last summer – just before life got rather busy with more pressing matters:

So we’ve finally managed to find time to sort through all the pictures from the amazing GR20 trip last September.

They’re a mixture of images from LB’s Canon IXUS 980 IS and my Canon EOS 550D (RAW – developed in Lightroom).

The first set is the most cut-down, for those in a hurry, and the second set contains all the first and more besides to give a much richer picture of the journey.

Enjoy!

GR20 Corsica Super Fast Forward

GR20 Corsica Faster Forward

So there you are, in a remote mountain hut, and you’re dutifully flossing… when your crown pops off. Assuming you manage to avoid it disappearing down a soak-away, what do you do next?

Well you could put up with it and simply get it fixed when you get home. However in my case, it was a temporary front crown and although there was no pressing medical reason to glue it back in place, it left me with a truly scary-looking, brilliant-white post where one of my front teeth should have been. It was quite eye-catching.

I have enough difficulty making myself understood in tourist French without them staring in horror at some kind of cyborg-vampire-tooth.

So, I simply dried the crown and post. Then I dried them some more (super-glue only cures in the presence of water). Then I applied a tiny, tiny drop of super-glue to the bottom of the hole in the crown, slid the crown slowly back… most of the way into place… but not enough to reach the drop of glue… and then bit on it hard to seat it properly.

The glue was forced up around the post and set hard whilst I kept pressure on it for thirty seconds. It held it in place for the rest of the trip and well beyond. In fact my dentist hasn’t bothered to attempt to repair it since he says it’s perfectly fine where it is and he was already scheduled to create the final crown anyway (it goes in this Friday in fact…)

Note that I was fixing a crown onto a post and not a living tooth. I am unsure as to whether it’s true but according to a thread on backpackinglight.com, doing so can kill the tooth. I must admit to being very sceptical of that claim though, since my dentist informed me that super-glue was tried as a crown fixative and he didn’t mention it was only to be used on posts. However, I do carry a tiny dental repair kit that has proved very useful for another member of the party whose tooth partly broke in a remote location!

As it happens I carry super-glue for possible blister repair as Ryan Jordan mentions on that same thread.

I’ve always used the “UHU Super Glue Minis” (just search ebay for them) since they are very, very small and only weigh 4 grams each. They are sold in packs of three, with the theory being that instead of opening one large tube and then finding it has all gone-off 18 months later, you can open three separate tubes and ensure you have a fresh tube each time.

The one in my lightweight repair kit came in very handy indeed.

Hendrik Morkel has posted a great review of the FiveFingers. Within the comments, there was a link posted by harttj to the posting in which I mentioned that I’d injured myself as a result of wearing them on very stony ground, with a pack, when my feet were still quite weak.

I just want to be clear about my thinking about this: FiveFingers are very, very good for your feet. Apart from being the most comfortable footwear ever invented, they strengthen your feet and allow them to attain the power and flexibility that they have evolved to have. That power and flexibility is almost certainly not present if you have been wearing “normal” footwear for most of your life.

I really do find that I have far more “muscular” and flexible feet. It’s not over-stating this to say that my feet now feel like extra limbs that I’ve never previously had. I now have something that’s slightly more akin to hands on the end of my legs as opposed to things more akin to hooves which I used to clomp about on. I’m quite serious about this.

Okay, so are FiveFingers “dangerous”? Of course not! But using them for a hard walk across stony ground whilst carrying a quite heavy pack (including food, water and way too much photographic kit!) is dangerous if you do it before you are strong enough to do so.

I’d note again that my right foot was just fine and it had gone through the same conditions (of course!). And that the injury healed as I walked the 550kms+ onwards to Nice. So it wasn’t very damaged, just sore.

I had no arches before all this. I wore custom insoles and had sore arches and knee pain. I have neither now. It was visible in wet footprints on dry boards – my arches used to be in contact with the floor on both sides!

But this summer LB noticed I formed a normal footprint on both sides. And walking through soft peat in the FiveFingers clearly showed a full arch on my right and a more shallow but definitely present arch on my left.

My feet are becoming the biomechanically impressive limbs they always had the potential to be, had I not worn “good, solid, supportive” footwear all my life.

But how do you make your feet strong enough to take such a pounding?

Once we swapped to inov8 Terrocs not only I, but LB and also our regular walking and Big Walk buddy Kev found that our feet were tired in a way that indicated they were working in ways they’d just not been used to. The more “muscular” nature of my feet, I’m sure, started with the Terrocs but was mainly achieved by wearing the FiveFingers.

Will wearing inov8s/FiveFingers sort out your knee/foot problems and give you muscly feet in a couple of weeks? Of course not! That’s exactly like expecting that a couple of sessions at the gym will give you a six pack (many magazines and web sites are sold on such rubbish of course). But the advantage of wearing inov8s/FiveFingers is that it’s something that you don’t take time out to do, doesn’t take extra will-power and is actually fun (sorry, but gyms just aren’t fun to me).

So, if you don’t get along with inov8s for some reason, at least try something very, very flexible indeed to allow the feet to work harder whilst cushioning the poor, slightly atrophied things and preventing injuring them.

Several of the well known walking shoe manufacturers are bringing out “barefoot” models next season (according to Outdoor Retailer 2010 coverage by backpackinglight.com – sorry members only link). I am very, very happy that it’s catching on but I must admit to being rather concerned that many people may put on a pair and expect miraculous transformations in existing injuries and lower limb health. Whereas if they just start walking long distances with large packs, they may acquire more injuries and worse lower limb health. Which may consign the idea of “barefooting” to the list of fads that come and go. It’s all about expectations and whether people will generally understand that they need to rebuild strength in their feet slowly.

On a related note; not only does wearing the FiveFingers strengthen your feet, it changes your gait. I had no pain at all from my knees on the Corsica trip until I started to descend on an easy track (as we joined the Mare-Mare Sud for a diversion in fact). I realised I was was heal striking in descent because the inov8s have a soft heal. But I know for sure that in the FiveFingers I would have switched to toe-striking with smaller steps. So I consciously switched gaits (surprisingly hard to do after years of shoe wearing I can tell you!) and the pain stopped in a couple of steps. Back to heal striking and the pain returned, back to toe striking and it went. Very interesting.

We didn’t wear the FiveFingers on the GR 20 for the simple reason that we assumed the route would be very, very rocky and we weren’t sure our feet were strong enough to cope yet. We also wanted light packs so they were literally tossed out of the bag as the cab arrived to start the journey. It was a knife-edge decision.

But Russ from this year’s Big Walk crew met someone who had walked GR 20 in them. He said he had hiked in them for two years before he was strong enough to wear them for a route like the GR 20.

Bottom line: We both wear FiveFingers almost constantly when it’s not snowing. For everything. Home and hiking. They are not just comfortable, they make walking even more fun. They and the inov8s have allowed me to correct knee and foot problems. Lets face it – 3.5 million years of bipedalism can’t be wrong!

The GR 20 is a truly fantastic route. Gorgeous views and lots of challenging walking and scrambling. I’d highly, highly recommend it.

We often meet some great people on the Big Walks but this year seemed particularly rich in that respect. Which was great since we ended up walking it two weeks later than this year’s Big Walk crew! Though as a bonus Russ, who was part of that trip, managed to meet us to ascend Monte Cinto, the highest peak on the island, just before he flew back.

There were people on the route who had done some of the more interesting routes around the world too. Some we’d done, some we’d heard of and some we noted for future reference…

We actually doubled back to miss the last stage (taking the standard GR20 instead of the Alpine Variant we’d used the day before)  to allow us to turn south for a day’s walk to connect to the Mare-Mare Sud. We joined at the half-way point and walked into Porto-Vecchio, thereby saving a day of bus rides out of Conca (the actual end point of the GR 20) and giving us another extra couple of days of walking.

The Mare-Mare Sud is nice enough but suffered somewhat from the “Green Tunnel” effect that is apparently prevalent on the Appalachian Trail.  There were very occasional views as we popped out of the forest but for long stretches it was just trees. Regardless, it still beat the heck out of spending the day on two different buses!

The GR 20 has a reasonably scary reputation and is often referred to as “The hardest way-marked route in the world” (note – that’s “way-marked” route – you can make up your own routes that are harder than this of course). But it’s all very subjective, so all I can do is relay our own experience and perhaps a little of the feelings of others we met along the way.

Overall, we certainly thought it was very hard work, but never more technically challenging than an easy British Grade I scramble. What’s that? A scramble is “A walk where you need to use your hands” and on a grade one you’d not expect to need a rope (it’s rather ill defined, but from what I’ve been taught; there are three grades, grade three is essentially very easy climbing, with a rope and a very occasional bit of leader-placed protection – attachment to the rock).

If you’re used to scrambling, nothing on the route poses a problem. There are a few sections that feel exposed, but there isn’t much that has the potential to really mess you up badly. And any parts that do have that potential are protected with chains and cables to hold on to.

But the point is, the GR 20 is damned hard work!

To give you some idea, we walked most of the route with a great couple of Scottish lasses, one of which has been a full time walking and skiing guide for around twenty-five years and she found the route hard work (she’d done it before so she knew what was coming). But note, that’s hard work, not hard technically. As we agreed one evening over some local Corsican red wine, it’s the sustained nature of the broken terrain. On some days you rarely get into a regular stride. It’s small step, large step, larger step, small step etc. For sections, it doesn’t let up for hours.

That being said, we met people carrying fairly “impressive” (large!) pack weights who’d never, ever done any walking with a pack before and they were coping. More of an endurance exercise in their case perhaps and personally I’d have chosen something that wasn’t so punishing for my first GR, like a section of the GR5. Of course there were more experienced walkers with lighter packs that were doubling stages. They said it wasn’t at all easy, but it was clearly doable.

We also met people that were accomplished long distance walkers who were finding it very tough because they’d not scrambled before and they had thought the days mentioned in the guide book looked too short: they are not! One guy had walked the Appalachian Trail, among other long distance paths, and had decided to double-up sections of the GR 20 – and said he was regretting it! The sections are short in distance because they’re simply very tough walking.

It’s probably worth saying that many people had the impression that the second section is easier than the first. Well, to us it wasn’t very much easier at all. There are still sustained sections of broken terrain. And there are also very many beautiful sections in the south. As Russ put it “There wasn’t a day I thought I could have happily missed out”. For instance, the Alpine Variant on the penultimate day, ending at Bavella (the picture above), was one of the absolute highlights.

There are several accessible peaks just off route that are well worth doing as part of the days (though Monte Cinto really requires a clear extra day). We did Monte Cinto, Monte Ritondu, Monte d’Oro and Tower III (which is tiny, but a great scramble). But we missed Paglia Orba and Monte Renosu due to the fact the routes have a reputation for being tricky to find and the weather wasn’t good on those days. The scrambling on the side peaks is often a little harder than the main route (with Paglia Orba being particularly tricky apparently). The route marking for the peaks (usually yellow blazes) is rather sketchy at times to say the least but the red/white blazes of the GR were excellent throughout.

One mistake, that’s hard not to make, is to leave too little time. There really are 15 stages and travelling on Corsica can take a long, long time. Check online and be aware that timetables become even more sparse on Sundays and after the end of September, and that strikes are not unknown!

If possible you’d ideally have 15 days’ walking, plus 1 day for Monte Cinto and 1 day’s rest somewhere. Then at least one day each side for travelling between home and each end of the route (probably more). It can be done in less time of course but it’s a harder proposition and can make the final stages far less relaxing than they could be. If you have to double up, I’d avoid doing so for the first few stages to allow your stamina to build.

Also, the inov8 Roclites coped absolutely fine, including the extra peaks, and have plenty of mileage left in them. I would hate to try this route in restrictive, heavy “clod-hopping” traditional boots. They’d make it way harder and increase the injury risk. But that’s really another posting…

Overall, if you can cope with having to put your hands down on the rock to negotiate some of the trickier lumps, you can cope with this walk. Just don’t underestimate the stamina needed to walk it. But above all, don’t miss it!

So, we’re going to Corsica after all.

Amazingly we may even meet up with one of the Big Walk crew to hit the highest peak, since he’s spending some more time on the island after he completes the GR20.

Packing has been interesting since we were mostly packed, but we can’t really be sure just how close we were to finishing since rather a lot has happened since then… And things like batteries need to be charged again, the fridge cleared out and the half packed bags emptied to see how much kit made it inside before we got the phone call.

We hope the weather will hold, the huts will still have some food left and the public transport will still be running!

And whilst we’re walking, we’ll be lugging the old Spot tracker with us (I may be tempted to the new, lighter one next year).

This page should contain the track logs and stats:

Red Yeti’s GR20

Edit: Updated to correct link

Edit: Removed flash version, as it didn’t work, and second link, as that’s now above.

Edit: Oh and I may be trying the Twitter whatsit as well – just have a look here and I may have sent a text on what we’re up to:

http://twitter.com/RedYetiDave

My mum had been a little bit unwell for a few days recently. But to my surprise, a few hours before we were due to board the plane to Corsica and the GR 20, I got a phone call from my dad telling me that she had died, very suddenly indeed.

The doctor was equally surprised, since she only arrived a few minutes after my dad had found my mum lying peacefully in the hall.

It was very hard for my dad to find her that way, but we all know that it was the way she much preferred to go. She absolutely hated hospitals and doctors and the idea of ending her days in a hospital bed filled her with horror.

Everyone thinks they have a great mum I’m sure. My brother and I are no different. But the fact is, she was a great mum.

She was endlessly kind and self sacrificing. Despite being very grumpy about anything in the world that wasn’t done the way she thought it should be, she let us do exactly as we liked, whenever we liked. Never judging us harshly, no matter what daftness we got up to. For that, I have often been very grateful. There is no substitute whatsoever for being allowed to make your own mistakes, and your own successes.

And she always cooked proper, nourishing, traditional British food. Every day no matter how she felt.

I remember when her mum died, she still couldn’t be persuaded from putting a good plate of food on the table. I know now not only how hard that is to do every day without fail, but just how important it is for health and happiness to eat real food, not some rubbish from a packet.

And it wasn’t just us. She was always feeding some animal or other whether it was the succession of pets we had over the years or the birds and other wild-life wandering about in the garden. It’ll be a leaner time for many a creature around the Wood house, though dad is already planning to carry on where she left off.

And with my dad having a back injury and having great difficulty balancing, she took on more things even as she found it more difficult to get about herself. It wasn’t that dad asked her, she just did things, and couldn’t be dissuaded from doing them, even when unwell. He has a lot of adjustments to make and things to learn in the time ahead but he’s already working out plans to cope with daily things that mum used to do for him. It’s very impressive to see.

In the mean time, the Big Walk crew are making their way across Corsica on the GR 20 without us. After a great deal of agonising we’ve decided to go anyway (two weeks later than planned), and might even catch up with one of them to bag the highest peak on the island.

For now, we have the usual melee of things to work through and work out in the days and weeks ahead. Things that must be done when anyone leaves us like this. But once that is over, there will always be an awful gap in our lives where once we had mum.

(Those that knew her probably know that Mum hated money being spent on flowers at funerals and always preferred to make a charitable donation instead).