1600 Posts

Today marks my 1600th post here at The Ultralight Hiker. Quite a milestone. And time maybe to recall the last hundred or so – or roughly the last year.

A year ago in February (2022) I finally ‘bit the bullet’ and had that pesky worn old left knee replaced with a shiny new titanium one. See A New Knee. Three months later ( a little early) I was trying it out on a short hiking trip into the Vic Alps something like the one in the post

A River Somewhere

It takes a long while (at 73) to fully recover from these major ops. Over the last month I had my eyes done as well. I am not really quite ‘up to speed’ yet, but I am getting there.

We have essayed the Dusky and Kepler Tracks in NZ in the last month and had a wonderful flight over the fiords in Wings Over Fiordland.

Over the least two days I pack rafted a section of the Mitchell River from Castleburn Creek to Angusvale (10 hours) over two days.

Yesterday I paddled seven hours and drove four to recover my motorbike and travel home. After a relaxing night spent in the wilderness in a prototype of my new (silnylon version) Deerhunter’s Tent, I think that is good enough for 73 1/2! Just hope you can do better when/if you get there.

Around the farm we have still not quite recovered from the disastrous flood we had on 10 June 2021. There is still much work to be done. It is amazing how nature can destroy overnight the work of many years.

This was our tiny creek on that awful day. See Droughts and Flooding Rains. Again however we are getting there.

Many kilometres of new fence have been built and a lot of clean-up work accomplished, but there is still more to do. As part of this we acquired a couple of acres of really rough weed-grown landslip so we could move the inappropriately sited boundary fence which was destroyed.

There is still much landscape and water control work to complete there and elsewhere. We will fence and keep the foxes etc out and make a haven for rare critters like this one we found in our garden  (The Tale of a Rail)- as well as plant hundreds and hundreds more trees. This place will be a paradise before we are gone.

Well, it already is compared to where most people have to live, but strangely those ‘most people’ would have turned their noses up at it big time when we settled here – maybe still would.

When I look around it seems like we still have years of work ahead of us on the farm. Probably right. We both work a lot slower than we used to do, it’s true. Still, it is actually edifying to have useful work to do which we can then look back on with satisfaction.

We hope to get the house finished in the next year or so (after 30 years!) and finish off the new ‘Buggy Shed‘ which had to be replaced when the old one fell down (after 100 years!) There are major repairs needed to other sheds and the old cottage as well.

So many of our posts over the last year seem to have been about our doings at home round the farm where most of our (life)time has been spent. Like this Gang Gang cockatoo eating our pears recently.

or this: Merrin’s Wriggly Stick

Since I did the the posts Wilderness Hut and Debris Hut I have been thinking more and more about The Ultralight Wilderness Hut. I hope to make a couple of these myself before I am spent, and encourage others to do likewise.

But the point is that people need to be more widely dispersed in the back country, the very opposite of the (Nuts to) Leave No Trace folk, who have got it all wrong. I have just posted a longer explanation what I mean in  Spreading Out.

“Theirs is a city-based philosophy, one utterly parasitic on such huge cancerous growths – and all the opposite of leaving no trace they involve. My philosophy is more a Thoreau-ean rural and village concept, with folk living in and engaging with the wild.

It seems astonishing to me for example that folks can espouse ‘leave no trace’ and yet mandate gas canister stoves and all the massive industrial and environmental complex that an enormous fossil fuel industry (not to mention cities) implies.

How much worse is cooking your meal in a billy over a $4 DIY twig-fired hobo stove!” – which I recently ‘invented’. Yet to perfect – a new version soon, I hope.

I know some of you won’t like divergent opinions, but seriously they are good for your soul, and generally a civilisational good too. A world where there was but one viewpoint would be the most unimaginable tyranny. Think ‘1984’. I fear we are rapidly approaching it, but I still hope (and work) to ensure that it will not come to pass.

In (roughly) the last year I completed the design (and testing) of my new tent/hammock fly combo the prototype of which I styled The Deer Hunter’s Tent #2 and  The Grey Flyer. You can see it in use in High Flying and a floor for it in Steve Intent.

I believe this is an important step forward in hiking, as so far as I know no-one has done this before – ie made a tent which actually doubles as a hammock fly, allowing you the option to camp on or off the ground as circumstances dictate. I expect that this will save many lives.

In the (recommended) .93oz/yd2 fabric (@US8/yd) I estimate the ‘roof’ (of the smallest version) will weigh just 250 grams – 330 in the larger format. I may devise a middle version too. (You can just use an Ultralight Ground Sheet  at 25-50 grams for a floor or you can make a fitted floor. I have made one.  (Out of the same material a bathtub  floor will weigh less than 150 grams).

Only tonight I have conceived of a DIY Ultralight Sprung Tent Pole Extension for it and others (which I will be making tomorrow) which will keep a tent wonderfully taut instead of its slumping overnight like this:

Throw in some pegs and you have a sub 500 gram tent which will house two people, a couple of dogs and all your gear very comfortably and which at need can be used with a couple of hammocks (eg to get you away from rough ground, snow and ice or flood waters). I have also devised a better way of double hanging for hammockers (also coming soon).

I will be offering patterns of this tent for sale  on a Store which I am constructing on the website soon. Other patterns which are nearly complete are the 7 x 7 Poncho Tarp, a New Pack Suspension System and the silnylon version of the Deerhunter’s Tent pictured here which I am still working on.

It weighs around 200 grams in the material above and comfortably sleeps two and all their gear. It takes a lot of time to work out detailed patterns, instructions etc. What I intend to do (with the store) is very different from the ‘grab something and sell it’ modus operandi of most people.

I will not sell or recommend anything which I don’t think is very good – and I am seriously discerning about that.

Covid (and the operations) severely limited our excursions over the last year or so, though we were little affected ourselves living on a small farm by the nature of whose business we were usually able to shop.

Similarly as we normally care for our grandchildren the family contact never entirely disappeared either. We have had fewer camping or canoeing expeditions to post about. A pleasant few days Canoeing Into the New Year, The Joy of Closed Roads, Birthday Walk, & etc aside.

I have continued to offer advice to beginning hikers/hunters which comes from 70+ years’ of experience and so is hard-won. I know it means reading, which seems to be increasingly difficult for the young. I recently had a comment ‘TL;DR” on one of my posts = ‘Too Long; Didn’t Read”.

I think this is a sad reflection on the (non) reader rather than on the content, which in some cases might have saved a life, or suffering, money etc.. I know that a couple of young fellows we met on the Dusky later regretted they had not paid a bit more careful attention to my track instructions – as have people canoeing the Thomson River & etc.

Some of these ‘advice’ posts over the last year have included Secrets of Shelter, Ultralight Survival made Easy, Experiment First, Be Prepared, Find Your Own Places to Explore, Responsible Sambar Deer Hunting, Free Power Bank & etc.

Of course as usual there have been reviews of all sorts of things: What a Bogler, Ultralight Towel, Nano Flashlight & etc.

Anyway, as you can see, I am still here and still going ahead with a variety of ideas and projects – hopefully for many years yet to come.

Cheers,

Steve & Della.