Saturday, April 5, 2014

Equipment Checklist - Miscellaneous items and the final result.

I'm all packed and thought I would post once or twice more before I head off to the airport.  It is now 4:40pm and I need to leave the house by 7pm.  My prior posts, documented mostly climbing essentials.  The following items are a mixture of essential and non-essential items.  First, let me provide you with a picture...

At the top, I have my water bottles (Nalgenes with the Humangear caps - a vast improvement over the traditional screw-top lid).  The bottle on the left sits inside an insulation sleeve.  I find these somewhat useful but the bottles still freeze when it gets really code.  To the right of my Nalgene bottles are a few freeze-dried meals (Mountain House).  Generally, I like these meals about as much as I enjoy eating cardboard.  MH meals are a bit saltier than cardboard but just about as flavorful.  The big black bag beneath those blue MH meals sits my huge sack (about 10 lbs) of bars.  I like the Lara Uber bars.  They all taste horrible after a few days but these I tend to stomach even when I can barely stomach anything.  Moving down and to the right is my compression sack for my sleeping bag.  The gray thing that sits atop this green compression sack is my inflatable pillow.  I love this pillow.  It takes up no space, weighs nothing but provides a little bit of essential creature comfort that does not exist without it.  Here is a picture of my sleeping bag and the compression sack in action:


Notice that the sleeping bag takes up about 17 board widths of my flooring, the uncompressed sack takes up about 5 and when compressed, my sleeping bag takes up about 3 board widths.  Pretty impressive, eh?

OK, back to the first picture but I will spare you the scrolling and paste it in the blog again.  Here goes:
  The bottom right two bags are my various emergency medications.  These bags contain hypodermic needles (not my friends) and several IV administered medications.  I doubt any of these will be used but it always pays to have the good stuff along for high altitude climbing.  Moving left and upwards, I have the usual suspects of sun screen (oriented in a odd way), lithium ion batteries (AAA), my personal locator beacon (always useful when in dangerous areas), hand sanitizer, USB battery pack to be charged by my solar panels, assorted patches for the groups I represent, and a few flags to take with me to the summit.  In the center of the entire mess is my MSR dromedary ("camel" for those of us who don't speak SAT vocabulary).  Finally, I have my "pee bottle" in the upper left corner.  I don't think I need to elaborate much on its use or purpose.  It is clean and never used.  These flexible Nalgene bottles are inexpensive enough to warrant replacements for each expedition.  

Well, that just about does it.  I packed all those things into three bags and one carry-on.  Actually, two big expedition bags and two carry-ons.  Here is the final product:


Two more hours before we head to the airport.  Now, what should I eat?

Hey!  My dad is here.  OK, gotta go.  See you later.

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