We are constantly amazed by the innovation that arises from the confluence of adventure
travel and technology. To wit: the new sport of geocaching,
where treasure hunts are staged using the net and GPS devices. If this isn’t a recipe for the next Mark
Burnett reality show, I don’t know what is. The amazing (or maybe obvious) thing is how quickly geocaching
has caught on all over the world. From Australia to
Germany, the sport has hit big. And needless to say, it has got
the GPS equipment makers all hot and bothered.
Banff Festival Underway
The Banff Film Festival is underway in Banff,
Canada. This is one of the top outdoor film festivals in the world and always promises a ton of great work. The
schedule is here, should
you be making the trip (and why not? Banff is amazing this time of year). The
book festival opens tonight with
Alex Huber, who did the first free ascent of
North America Wall on El Capitan. Film-wise a couple of things are notable, including The
Snow Walker with Barry Pepper, and The Man Who Jumped Beneath the
Earth, by Dylan Griffith, about the oldest person to BASE jump off Venezuela’s Angel Falls.
Then, don’t forget this Friday is the well-known Adventure Film Seminar with a couple of pretty interesting topics,
should adventure filmmaking be your forte:
-
The Making of Touching the Void
-
Supersonic Strategies: How to get the most impact with sound in your film.
-
Creating (and Coping with) a Buzz – Panel Discussion
-
Scripting: The Condensed Master Class
Check it out.
Culinary Delights in the Outback
Doug Gantenbein, an experienced outdoors adventurer and freelance journalist, gives
Food for Thought in a great article
on eating well when packing lightly.
We all know that cooking in Mother Nature’s kitchen can be a challenge when you’re carrying everything but the
kitchen sink (including the stove) on your back. But Doug makes the good point that if your cooking skills are awful at
home, you can’t expect results on a mountaintop to be any better.
By learning to cook well (or at least palatably), you’ll know more about ingredients and have a better idea of how
to make good food for eating well outdoors. If you know how to make pancakes, for example, you can
measure out the dry ingredients you’ll need for each portion at home, and add water and oil on site for a campfire
breakfast. (I actually got out my kitchen scales for y’all: a cup of flour weighs 4.8 ounces, so Doug’s pancakes come
in at 7.2 ounces and should be enough for two people.)
Obsessed by Patagonia
I can’t get Patagonia out of my mind. Last night I was lying there thinking of all the places I really wanted to go
this winter, and my mind kept coming back to Patagonia. And so in the dead of night, I flipped open my laptop and did
some looking around. REI Adventures provides several great trips down there to both the
Lakes Region and down to
Torres Del Paine, one of the most beautiful places in
the world. Think Yosemite without the tourist hordes. Of course, you could just go down there yourself, rent a car in
Punta Arenas, and have the time of your life camping throughout Torres del
Paine National Park. The choice is yours.
All We Are Saying, Is Give Peas A Chance!
One of the drawbacks of long trips in the back-country is that you often have to pack in your own food. Sure, you
can Rambo it, bring along your compound bow and hope to drop Bambi from 50 yards, but most of us end up just firing up
the Whisperlite, boiling up some water and pouring it into a bag of freeze dried gruel. I’ve done this my share of
times and while it’s never quite as satisfying as a Chateaubriand, the taste of pre-made food in the wild is
surprisingly pleasing, especially if you’ve been on the trail for a few days. So where is the best place to get this
kind of food? Well, why not directly from the source? Mountain House makes
some of the most popular pre-made camping meals available and you can buy right off their site. They have provided to
the US Military and to the Boy Scouts, not to mention to REI and other major outdoors stores. The pouches stand up
nicely when water is added and open easily…all key features of this type of grub. Anyway, I ate the
beef stew way
back when and was pretty surprised at how beef stewy it tasted. And try the
peas, they’re
good for you.