A few days ago I tried to make a brief case for backpacking quilts. The idea is this: any insulation that you lie on doesn’t insulate very well. If it doesn’t insulate it’s wasted space and weight in your pack. Of course if you wiggle around in your sleep you’ll …

They say a humming bird beats its wings 600 times a minute and can fly up to 34 miles per hour. These amazing creatures rely on their rapid strokes beating against the air to keep their tiny bodies afloat. That is why I was astonished when I crested the 4300 …

First off a big thank you to Permaculture Magazine (http://www.permaculture.co.uk) and Tree Hugger (http://www.treehugger.com) for featuring a DIY video I did about a year ago on a DIY backpacking high efficiency wood stove. It’s currently getting over 1000 views a day as a result. To all those who found the …

This one is for all you out there that sleep like a log. A log that doesn’t roll around. In the pursuit of lightening the pack load and saving my back while carrying my kids’ backpacking gear I’ve been doing a lot of reading on backpacking quilts. They’re lighter and …

50 and sometimes 65+ below nights, snow drifts breaching 15 feet as a commonality, charging bull moose, forest fires forcing the horses to cross the lake and mosquitoes, horrible, horrible mosquitoes. And for what? You could say for some beavers, but really it was the restoration of an overly trapped ecosystem that, without their …

So one of our friends and followers Rich Kolb mentioned a successful attempt at making Marshmallows on twitter and I was intrigued. He agreed to write about his experience and share how it went. Now that snow is falling around a lot of the USA and Canada, this could be …

Not to long ago I asked for advice on what to take on a survival trip in May in the BC mountains. Keep the ideas coming! We’ve had some great ones. One thing that I picked up from Sierra Trading post and am considering taking a long on a trip is …

I’ll be honest. When I first bought this, I was NOT thinking about taking it hiking. To me, the Fold-A-Cup fell into the category of dollar store gifts. The concept was cool and I figured that my kids would love the idea of a cup that folded up very small …

Ok, so this isn’t a how-to of tee-pees, but rather a recollection of a fun trip we had with our kids a few years ago, in the middle of winter, on a mountain, in the snow, on a frozen lake, in a tee-pee. I had been talking to a friend about going ice-fishing (something …

UPDATE: The event was a success, read about part 1 here. Feel free to leave comments though and we’ll try to integrate them into next year’s trip. This is it, New Years. With it we normally hear about resolutions and goals. I like plans and I need your help for it. …

Well, this year we wanted to do something special and have a few friends over for New Years and after a week of prep my wife decided on a sucking pig roasted in the oven with the trimmings. Things were going off well, but when she went out to buy …

This December marked our first year in the blogosphere and I just wanted to give a great big thanks to all the readers who read our posts,contributed or just plain stuck around to see the site grow. I figured it was a good time to look at the year in …