Tent and Sleeping Gear

My reasoning was: What happens if we have to pathfind at night? What happens if a torch gets left on and flattens its battery? What if the electronics or batteries fail? All good questions and critical in certain circumstances, like alpine climbing or other situations where you can't really camp just anywhere and have to make it to the next campsite or perish. However, in summer, when daylight is plentiful, where being caught out in the dark isn't going to kill you, perhaps a single torch (especially if reliable and rechargeable and you are carrying a charger) is sufficient.

Clothing maketh the man

Clothing was something I got wrong this time, too. As well as mandatory hiking shorts and tee shirt (or a quick drying long sleeved shirt like Gordon took would have been better) and down puffy jacket for night-times and secondary use as a pillow, I thought I'd need an extra jacket and trousers, as well as thermals to sleep in. I tossed in the down booties as well. They are light and, on a really cold night, very comfy. So far, so reasonable. Then I wore a tracksuit for the drive up to the start and didn't want to leave it in Heather's car, so I took that too. OK, so an unplanned change of warm clothes, so what? I'd appreciate it if it got a bit wettish. Except that I didn't realise it weighed 700g. I've been forced to become a gram-weeny in my dotage and that much extra would have horrified me. The very first night at Black Sallee Lake seemed to justify my choices as it was cold enough for the down booties and thermals under the summer sleeping bag. However, in the end, I only used them that one time and at the halfway point, I was happy to stuff about a kilo and a half of unnecessary clothes into a drop-barrel for later retrieval. (Actually, on a

wet night a few days later, after my raincoat had left me a bit dampish, I would have liked to have had that spare dry jacket...).

Forty days and forty nights, it rained

Speaking of raincoats, I got that wrong, too. I have a range of coats, from a heavy-duty 3-layer Gore-Tex monster, good for blasting Antarctic blizzards, down to ultralight things for running that might stop a shower, maybe. In the middle, there was the choice between a long Torrent jacket from One Planet and a shorter Gore-Tex jacket from Kathmandu. (Model unknown, but it had waterproof zips, pit zips, high pockets that are good when wearing a pack, nice hood, etc. and a 'Guaranteed to keep you dry' label. Clearly designed for this purpose, so I thought...). The Kathmandu one was a few hundred grams lighter, so I chose to take that. It was a mistake. One morning of bashing through the wet bush and hours upon hours of drizzle, and the 'Guaranteed to keep you dry' Kathmandu jacket proved inadequate. Not cold and saturated or anything, but definitely on the dampish side. And before you start down on the 'but you sweated inside it' path, no, it was only a 16 degree Celsius day, and I was not hot enough to sweat much. Mind you, if I had, the jacket fabric had well and truly 'wetted out' (the so-called durable water-proofing treatment had lasted all of 1/2 an hour), so the sweat would have had a hard time getting out. I'll keep it for day trips or bike riding from now on, not serious stuff like this. I think the (obvious in retrospect) moral of the story is to take the raincoat you'd rather use in a bad situation and not the one you'd rather carry if everything goes perfectly.

About bush-bashing in the wet. I forbore to take waterproof trousers, so naturally, my shorts got saturated when pushing through soggy bushes. No biggie, they dried out quickly, but I was envious of Gordon's rain