On todays to-do-list, make toothpaste dots for upcoming adventures!
It’s gonna be real interesting how these turn out because it’s the first time that I try this… I got the idea from these guys.
Toothpaste dots in the making
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Trail snacks – What do you eat?
Trail snacks are an important part of your adventure to work as an energy booster between meals. Some prefer to only use snacks during the day and just have a full, preferably, hot meal at the start and end of the day. Personally I like to have three hot meals a day to keep the morale up on though, rainy or cold days.
As my previous post pointed out my summer trip is getting closer and closer by the minute and I’m right now on the food section of my list. I’ve experimented with different snacks over the years, everything from the standard nut and raisin mixes to Snickers.
Some taste better than others and some are more “vulnerable” to heat/cold. Snickers for e.g. get frozen quite fast in cold weather and is kind of like chewing on a rock and in the summer heat it melts and you get chocolate all over when you remove the wrapping…
One of my latest favorites are M&M’s with peanuts. 🙂
A few different snack options.
Recently I’ve bought different chocolate based products to compare how they work in cold/warm environments and also to compare how much energy they pack compared to weight. All the bars above weigh in at about 50g.
I haven’t tried them all out in the field but the Starbar works quite well in cold and warm condition and so does the Sport Lunch bars.
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- Double Nougat
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- Snickers
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- Power Break
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- Starbar
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- Chunky peanut butter
As you can see the Double Nougat wins but it’s a fairly even list.
It would be nice to get some feedback on what the rest of you are using on the trail!
Pre-planning Jotunheimen
The time of departure is closing fast on this summers adventure to Jotunheimen, Norway. We had to make some changes to our previous plans and now we’re leaving a week earlier.
Gear-lists are done, more or less, a few grams might shift here and there but everything that we need are on the lists. Before we leave I think I’ll post both of our lists here. And if you already didn’t know I try to keep mine quite updated here on the site under the Gear tab.
We’re still waiting for some stuff. I had to return my Bearpawwd inner-net because they made me order the wrong one for the UltaMid. However it should arrive on time. We also put an order on two bivys from Zpacks, the Pertex Quantum bivy with the detachable screen. This neat little bivy weighs in at only 187g with the net attached! Right now we think that we’re bringing the bivys to save some weight.
Here’s a picture from todays “meeting”. Jon waves his hands around trying to explain how fast we will be walking with our light packs or something 😉
I’m published!
Got the word in the middle of May that I’m getting published in a photo book called “Mitt Småland”. I sent one of my pictures in into the competition and I had almost forgotten about it when I received the e-mail saying that the book was now being printed and that my picture was in it.
Well that was great news! I didn’t know how big my picture was going to be in the book or where it was. I found out that my picture was one of few out of 1681 that had made it out of the selection process, 176 pictures was published in the book.
About a month later in the middle of June I got an invitation to a vernissage that was being held in three different cities and one of them being here where I live. I happily accepted the invitation and went today. There was food, drinks and a lot of mingling going on amongst big prints and such. I walked around the restaurant where it was held looking at different pictures and then eventually I grabbed one of the photo books and started browsing. I opened it some where like just past the middle towards the end and started going backwards. I didn’t find my picture… What? Well then I went from the really end of the book and a few pages in I found it! It wasn’t just a small picture, it wasn’t just on one of the pages but rather in duplex – two damn sides where covered with my picture! Must say that I got a tingly feeling in my stomach at that precise moment 🙂
My better half made this photo collage.
This book is part of a big advertising campaign to get more people to visit Småland (the county where I live) and it will be sold at different places all around Sweden.
New tent manufacturer in the UK – Trekkertent
Go and check out Trekkertent. They’ve just started their production of different shelters and so far so good in my opinion.
They have some really nice looking products that are not too pricy! I personally like the Drift 1. It weighs in at 0.94kg and it basically looks like the Zpacks Hexamid Solplex tent but in silnylon rather than cuben fiber, which makes it a cheaper alternative. The Stealth looks really nice too at only 590g.
My guesses are that they will start making those models for two person too in the future.
GoPro Hero3+ mic mod
Having a GoPro Hero3+ Black and comparing it to my Contour cameras the audio out of the box is anything but good. Quite sad as the camera otherwise is great…
As I want to use it for when I’m out and about I needed a solution for audio that meant not bringing something big and bulky like my Rode Videomic Pro. I Googled a lot and found this small mic from Edutige, ETM-001. The mic is omni directional which means that it’ll pick up audio basically from all directions. And it’s a stereo mic. Some will probably argue that it’s better with a shotgun-like microphone as the audio is only picked up from the direction that the mic is facing, hence removing a lot of background noice. And there are microphones for that too in the same size as the ETM-001.
As the new GoPro’s don’t have a 3.5mm jack anymore like the Hero2 you need a adapter cable for it to work that connects via mini-USB. I didn’t want the mic to just be hanging from the camera body I needed something to hold it in place. At first my plan was to glue it to the GoPro Frame and/or the waterproof body but then I couldn’t use it stand-alone with the camera or if it breaks you’ll have to replace it and that will be quite hard so that plan went out the window. I tried a few different places before I saw that the USB-adapter had a part that wasn’t flat but rather rounded where the 3.5mm jack could be glued and fixed in to place.
This is the final result! Works like a charm! I want to get a deadcat (windscreen) for the mic too but I guess that will be a problem. I don’t want anything showing up in the bottom left corner of the picture. I haven’t tried every video setting but 1080p works but 2.7k wide shows the windscreen. I guess that if I don’t use it the problem will be solved. However I nearly ever shoot in 2.7k wide other than for timelaps and stuff where I don’t need sound so for me that’s not an issue. If this is not the case for you then this particular mod won’t work. If you place your adapter so that it’s aligned with the USB-plug it won’t be seen in 1080p at least.
Made a short timelaps where you can see the mic in the bottom left corner of the screen in 2.7k wide.
Here’s a short video in 1080p and you can see a little bit of the windscreen at the bottom. So if I just make a small adjustment on the image crop it won’t be there and I won’t be loosing much of the picture anyway. If you make yours so that it’s aligned with the USB-plug you won’t have my issue. I bought 3 of these USB-adapters so if I get annoyed with this I’ll just make a new one. You can find them really cheap on eBay like four dollars a piece, just follow the link above. Make sure to buy the one that’s not a 90 degree angle USB-adaptor because that one is all flat on the USB-plug and gluing the 3.5mm jack to it will be harder, but not impossible.
Looking through all my test footage I can see that I don’t have this issue with the windscreen showing in all my videos. I guess that the windscreen just came of the mic just a little sometimes. But like I suggested, glue it so that it sits aligned with the USB-plug and you’ll be just fine!
Hopes this helps 🙂
The weekend in review
Had a nice weekend with some friends. Many laughs, great food and some beer.
I also managed to get a nice burn on both of my thighs. This is now a standard operating procedure for me as you can see in this old post… Forgot the sunblock at home so I had to go to the store on Sunday.
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- The Cabin
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- Vintage Fjällräven jackets.
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- View from the lawn
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- Nice burn…
My friends parents that own the cabin has got some nice vintage Fjällräven jackets. The fun thing is that the design hasn’t change much over the years. And the best thing about them is that they’re used pretty frequent and are still in great shape!
Will Wood meets Bambi
He’s thru hiking the Appalachian trail, AT, and posting videos as he goes. This one was quite odd…. 🙂
Check out the rest of his videos. He has some nice gear-vids too.
Save Ojnareskogen
At Gotland, an island in the Baltic sea, a unique forest and valuable drinking water is threatened by mining plans of the MNC Nordkalk. The company want to make a limestone quarry of 170 ha in the middle of the forest and the drainage basin of the largest and cleanest lake of the island. Sweden is the cheapest country in the world for the mining industry to exploit, as they are free from taxation. Billions in profits leave the country while the locals are left with the savaged land. Check out Ojnareskogen at facebook for more info. Save Ojnareskogen now!
CleverHikers new approach
CleveHiker has over the past few months built an entirely new website, completely changed their approach and radically shifted the vision for all future CleverHiker content.
This includes that they stopped selling their Lightweight Backpacking Foundations and Gear Guide and instead posting these for free on YouTube!
They’re hoping to release 2-3 episodes per week over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.
Lighter Packs 