After a great weekend in the wet weather, my friends have had a chance to upload the pictures they took (at least a good handful of them) to their flickr accounts. Molly and I decided to leave our DSLR’s at the house being that there was another DSLR and a Point&Shoot already packed with the other guys’ stuff.

For the most part we followed the itinerary I outlined in the “Planning for a Backpacking Trip” post. Though, because we purposely didn’t take watches or cell phones we didn’t exactly stick to a schedule which meant we had to cut a couple of the bigger hikes out of the day(s). Part of it may have also been due to the literal downpour we received on Friday evening and Saturday morning. We’ll go back later one or two weekends to finish up the Cloudland Canyon trails.

With the successful trip, I’m going to be planning a “car camping” trip for sometime in Mid-December or Early/Mid-January so more of my friends can come along, and enjoy some better camp-cuisine. I’ll have a couple of posts related to that coming up soon enough.

View the full post for the pics from this weekend. (more…)

Thanks to StumbleUpon, I have managed to come across multiple plans for DIY Lightweight Alcohol Burning stove. I finally decided to combine the knowledge I gathered from each of the articles and put one together myself.

After getting my first one together I modified the plans a bit and made a second one with the goal to have it hold a bit more fuel (for the longer cooking time). Version 2, as I’ll call it, was able to produce a 7-minute boil time, and a 20-minute run time before dropping down to a simmer. I used a windscreen and Heet as my fuel source.

Instructions after the jump! (more…)

620-O1 crew training in the Cohutta Wilderness

The easiest way I could centralize the planning and distribution of information for a light backpacking trip I’m planning for October 9-11, 2009 was to put it in my blog.  So I might as well expand on it and turn it into something that will generate traffic, right? Right. The trip I’m going to be expanding on was originally a thought back in January/February for me and my Fiancee, Molly Locklear. However, she got ill immediately before the trip resulting in her being hospitalized leading to her being one organ (her gallbladder) shy of a full body. I never got back around to planning it out again, but another friend Nathaniel Foster expressed some interest in going on a short trip. So, I’ll rehash my ideas and start the planning again.

Picking a Location. The first thing that crosses my mind when I’m planning a trip is how hard do I want the trail to be. I’m taking a couple new (to backpacking) people along, so I don’t want them to be so tired and frustrated that it’s not a good experience for them. I also wanted to pick a place that was fairly scenic because everyone going along has a variable amount of interest in photography. Not too far away from Chattanooga/Dalton area is a fairly easy set of trails within the Cloudland Canyon State Park. In looking at the map available here. It doesn’t look like there are any crazy elevation changes on any of the trails except for the Sitton Gulch Trail, but it doesn’t have any camping sites. (more…)