Date: 2010-02-07
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

First let me congratulate the Boy Scouts of America. Tomorrow will be their 100th birthday. I spent this morning with my Scouts at a church service where they were recognized. The Troop Committee had calculated they had performed close to 1000 hours of community service in the last year. That was the fun part then I spent the afternoon with the Patrol Leader¢s Council adjusting the schedule for the next month. Yea that was fun too, just more like work. However the most fun is when the boys take me backpacking. We re-scheduled the trip to the Foothills Trail to the last weekend of this month. That will be my last trip with the boys for awhile. It¢s a real experience watching them grow up. They start out the first year after Cub Scouts complaining about spiders in the tents at summer camp. Before I know it they are begging to sleep with the mice in an AT shelter. Oh, I how hate the shelter mice.This week the weather has been pretty bad here. We have either had snow or rain all but a couple of days. So one day I¢m bundled up and the next I¢m back to shorts. The trails are sloppy and yesterday I discovered a new way to the bottom of a hill. It¢s called the mudslide. It¢s fast but not a great ride. Fortunately the initial fall was into snow so it didn¢t hurt that bad. The rain has helped me check out a couple of pieces of gear. The first one is a pair of Seal Skinz socks. Weighing only a couple of ounces they kept my feet drier than any other barrier I have tried. After five miles of walking in mud, slush, streams and ice my feet had no wrinkles. The other was using a wind shirt and rain jack in combination to stay dry. While not perfect at least I was warm in the near freezing rain.I cooked a pot of lintel chili Friday night using my alcohol stove. While I had planned to do it outside as Icepack suggested in his journal, I did it in the kitchen instead. He is right, all gear needs to be checked out under adverse conditions. Fortunately I have used all of this gear in cold wet conditions so I not worried about it. Last month in the Uwharries I had to warm the lighter just to get it to work. I also added a warming pan to my stove for really cold weather. A tomato can top works well.   Anyway the chili turned out great. The goog thing about my stove is with the simmer ring I made for it I can lower the heat to simmer and conserve fuel.Postcard wrote today about the importance of every ounce in your pack. I could not agree more. My first trip up Springer Mountain was with a 45 pound pack. This time it looks like I will be below 23 pounds. Heck after reading his entry I went back and found another 8 ounces I can drop. I still have over a month to go through my gear so maybe I will find a few more ounces that would prefer to stay home.Hopefully this week I¢ll get to work on a few more recipes. What I am aiming for is a number of four day meal plans complete with shopping list so when Martin and I hit a grocery store we can pull one of the plans out and pick-up what we need and hit the trail again. I¢m thinking three of these plans would give us a pretty good variety of meals. These will be for suppers. For breakfasts and snacks I¢m still looking at the NOLS plan of food by weight. One of my Assistant Scoutmasters called a little while ago. He wants to go on a mid week backpacking trip. I¢m pushing to stretch it to four days. It should be a good test for the meal planner. Until next week.