PTC*

Well, I got my answers: “Normal”. I kind of expected that, but it’s still something of a relief.
Maybe I have to accept that I am a little older, I can’t fit more than 24hrs worth of stuff into day. I need to sleep sometimes, I have to let injuries heal at their own pace, not mine, and pause between things, just for a minute.
So like the man told me to, I have taken some time off, and I was even in my bed at 2130 the other night with a book. Magic.
Hell, it’s been a few years since I last took my last kamikaze flight, this time though I missed the target and landed an an allied airfield. I’m learning.
So, tomorrow.

The new Keen Pyrenees looks a bit different doesn’t it? Think of Keen and you think of the big toe bumper, sculpted layers of leather and fabric, lines of stitching and fancy styling. What we have here is a very understated looking, all-leather, mid-height walking boot.

The sole unit is the same as the current Targhee, but the upper is all-new. The leather has minimal stitching, is soft and flexible and is backed by a Keen-Dri waterproof membrane. The ankle cuff (and footbed!) are lined with a material which feels like calf leather, the cuff has a large padded area and a rear notch for keeping your achilles tendon free from pressure, so they’re thinking ankle bone protection and keeping the water out rather than that old favourite “support”. The lacing fittings are all beefy, and you know it all adds up the the Pyrenees feeling very familiar, British even.

Have Keen tried to address some of the criticisms leveled at them from over here regarding the uppers on the being vulnerable and the waterproofness being fragile? It does look like it.
These will be going into use when the snow recedes a bit, the fit’s good, they should be plenty tough for the hills and they’re also bendy enough to drive in.
More in a wee while.

Joycee spent the day in Luss finishing off her sculpture in time for it’s dedication at 1500hrs, and in true Macfarlane style she did it in the nick of time.

The 10th of March this year is the 1500th anniversary of St Kessog’s arrival from Ireland to the Luss area where he was a missionary until his death ten years later death at the hands of druids. He trained under St Patrick and was the patron saint of Scotland until the 10th Century.
He played an important part in our national and local history and it’s good to see an effort being made to raise his profile. We’ve got so much else to learn about our past beyond the popstars such as Wallace, The Bruce and Rob Roy MacGregor.
Joycee was commissioned by Dane Sherrard, the minister as Luss Parish Church to make a sculpture in time for the anniversary.
And like so many of my stories on here, it has a familiar opening line. It was late when I started…

Joycee tries to use reclaimed and recycled materials where possible, and our workshop has that stuff in spades. Three ex-Clyde shipyard keel blocks were picked out (our workshop used be part of Scotts shipyard, these keel blocks are old) , chalked up and chainsawed into rough shape.
Jimmy lent a hand with some of the rough stuff, and indeed at one point that hand got a little close to the action resulting in it needing six stitches, which he got out yesterday, and immediately burst again when he got back from hospital by getting straight ack to work. You can’t stop the man.

Over the past two weeks a 7 foot tall pile of rough wood has become a figure, and the tools used to do it were often over 100 years old, belonging to a carpenter from Dumbarton who used them back at the turn of the last century.
How many of us will be passing on our Argos battery powered drills onto future generations to benefit from?

Dowelled and epoxyed, St Kessog went in the pickup and we took him up the road to get him into place. He is a heavy boy indeed, even chiseled down he’s still a six-footer, and he went by sack barrow and cart to his spot by the trees, and there was welcome help waiting from the church folks too.
The soft pink evening light lit him up and he was suddenly, starkly, red and white, the red pine and douglas fir looking highly contrasting. Joycee and I both knew that by this time tomorrow it would look very different, but I’ll bet there were some worried thoughts in Luss last night. It just goes to show that you should never view an unfinished job!

By the time Holly got to say hello to him today, St Kessog was the right colour and was standing there in the sunshine looking quite pleased with himself.
The dedication was well attended by local folk and school children, the press were there too, even a fella over from Russia to film the days events.
It was a good day, there had been more on besides the sculpture, lots of smiling faces on happy folks. I got to meet some folk I don’t see too much, including my headmistress from primary school in the 1970’s! 
Good on the organisers for doing something when it’s easier to do nothing, but most of all for me, well done the wife.

I originally saw the new Jetboil Flash at the KORS trade show last summer, and it caught my eye, so here’s a fetching Violet version in for test.

No, not just because of the colours, but because it was lighter than the regular version.
I always pack my cook kit in a modular fashion, I take a pot and inside it goes the gas, the stove, firesteel, spoon and maybe some drinks sachets all wrapped up in a Buff.
The Jetboil does all that on it’s own, and I have to admit a bit neater too, but usually with a little extra weight against most combinations I can make.
But it’s selling some extra stuff against what I usually pack.
The pot is insulated which is good from an efficiency point if view, but it’ll keep what ever water’s left warmer too, giving quicker re-heat and make it more use for mug and spoon washing.
The stove section looks very robust, it’s neatly put together, the plastic feels strong and the piezo ignition looks to be sensibly mounted, but as with such things will still need care when packing and unpacking. The burner head and valve body are familiar-looking, most likely outsourced parts, and rather than a cop-out, that lends an air of reliability for me.
The heat exchanger on the pot will add efficiency and increase the speed at which I can access a hot cuppa, always a good thing.
The dark flashes you can see on the side will turn orange when the contents reach 60°C, I have no idea if this will be useful or just a bit of fun. We shall see.
The kit also comes with the orange canister feet which I like as it is quite a tall arrangement, and that cup should be both useful (I like the handy deep lids on my Optimus pots) and it’ll protect the heat exchanger when the Jetboil is in my rucksack.

It’s all new to me this style of stove, I know it’ll work, and it looks cool, but the big test for me will be to see if the little increases in packed size and weight are outweighed by the performance and usability gains that the Jetboil is offering.
More soon.

It’s a big day tomorrow. Joycee has biggest of the bigness though, it’s the unveiling of her sculpture of St Kessog in Luss on Loch Lomondside. There’s a whole day of events leading up to it, and she’ll be burst by the end of it. We dropped him into his hole earlier tonight, he’s looking good for a 1500-year-old. Both Holly and I shall be waving and grinning as Mummy does her stuff.

Me? I’m expecting answers, although to be fair I might have to wait until Thursday for them. Whatever those answers are will mean I’ll have to do one thing or another. It’s a bugger not being able to bluff my way through everything I do.

The Loch Lomond Wild Camping er, demonstration(?) is now confirmed, we’re just looking at A and B dates, April or May.
A couple of folks from the Park HQ will be joining me on a wild camping trip on Loch Lomondside, we’ll be looking at where and how to pitch, water, waste, and all the ways to make wild camping low-impact and responsible, and maybe most importantly possible. That of course is the easiect thing in the world to do, we all do it, but with good coverage it’s a chance to show the man in the street what the difference is between wild campers and informal campers.
Maybe the difficulty will be scaling that difference down enough to fit it onto even the biggest wide-screen TV?

Xy Weiss gave me a shout recently, “Your gaiters must be shredded, I’ll send you some new ones”. And that was some smart thinking, because upon inspection my old purple-flame pair were indeed looking a little tired.
So here we have two new pairs of Dirty Girl Gaiters to get me through another summer on the trails without getting crap in my shoes.

These are genius. Simple weightless spandex cuffs that clip into your laces at the front and stick to your shoe at the back. How do they stick? There’s some Velcro for you to attach to your heels (enough for three pairs if you’re careful). They keep out dirt, mud, bits of heather, wee beasties and snakes, probably.
They are available in every colour and pattern you can think of, are $22 including shipping to the UK and will brighten your day when you sit down at camp and remember that you’re wearing psychedelic spats.

Marvellous.

I hate doing this kind of admin shit, but I’m adding a new thing as I try to gradually improve the indexing in the warehouse of unmarked cardboard boxes I call my blog.
So “Gear Diary” is a new category, and what I’ll do is update all the progress of test kit that I use during my Kilpatricks trips and general fannying about. I’m aiming for a weekly thing, but it’ll fall on it’s arse quite quickly no doubt, but Jimmy loves a trier.
Also, it means there’s always a random place on the front page for unrelated comments to be posted from anybody who wants to post comments unrelatedly. That 500-comment gear page isn’t getting repeated and having some king of forum plug-in will only lead to an embarrassingly empty hall where I’ll play to an old man who came in out of the rain for a little while with his dog, and the bar staff.

So my first update is that I have removed the swing tags from the new arrivals and it went very smoothly.

There’s one name that’s comes up a lot when I’m talking about top-end kit: does the quality compare; is the fit as good; are the fabrics the same spec; are the features as purely technical? I’ve never had a answer to that.
So, it’s with real interest that I’ve casting an eye over the batch of test kit from Arc’teryx.
I’ve got a good cross-section of their clothing, so hopefully I’ll be able to get something of a feeling for the brand. I can say already that it’s very individual, from the styling, to the construction, to the fabrics and even the colours.
I took a size large in everything, and that looks to have been the right choice, the fit being slimmer for a given size compared to other kit from the brand’s living across the Atlantic. The sizing seems to be graded too, each layer being slightly wider that than the one designed to go underneath it. Nice.

Above is the Delta LT Zip, a simple lightweight midlayer in a pullover style.
It’s a basic as you can get, it’s fabric, stitching and a zip. The zip is a good length for venting, the collar is a medium height, the arms and body are nicely long. It’s very soft, being made from Polartec 100 MicroGrid and there’s some nice subtle shape manipulation in the construction to give freedom of movement without lots of extra fabric causing bunching up.
It feels light, packs down small and should give good warmth for winter layering and better weather bimbling.

Above in fetching “Mahogany” is the Rho LT Zip. It’s a baselayer, but I can see it as a midlayer as well, the fabric has just enough thickness that it’ll do both, so I’ll layer it over merino short-sleeves and vest as well as wearing it on its own.
The fit on me is great, long and slim, skin-tight in fact, but the Rentex Powerflex fabric is so soft and stretchy there’s no feeling of pressure or restriction.
There’s a good length zip, medium height collar, and unusually for a baselayer, a pocket. This is a small laminated affair, and would be handy for keeping lip balm and camera batteries unfrozen, this winter has brought such things to the fore.
The construction echoes that of the Delta LT Zip, free movement with neatness.

Arc’teryx have the Gamma LT Jacket billed as “…wind and moisture resistant softshell jacket for everyday use”, and as mountain-appropriate as the the thing is, I can see what they mean. It’s got a slightly more relaxed fit, less overtly technical styling compared to many softshells and of course, no hood.
The fabric is Burly Double Weave which has a good bit of stretch and feels pretty beefy (I resisted the temptation say burly there), the construction is an interesting mix of lamination and stitching, the zips are the chunky YKK’s that I like (are big zips coming back?) and there’s pockets that’ll carry hat, gloves and Buff as well as my bacon rolls and a danish when I’m at my work. Aye, it does have that cross functionality, and most of the kit I get sent has too, as almost all of it goes to work with me at some point.

The Gamma LT Pants above are dead simple to look at, but as with all the Arc’teryx kit, the detail is where it’s at.
The Fortius fabric a light and soft, sewn and laminated into subtle shapes to ease leg movement. There’s two hip and one thigh zipped pockets (no rear pocket, hurrah! pointless bloody things most of the time), zipped fly, integral belt with a velour inner waistband, clever ankle adjustment and again some nice fabric work to keep the profile neat and the comfort good.
They feel nice on, and the understated looks are quite unusual for me, they’re as technical as you need, but won’t have folk looking at me like I’ve just got off the plane from Kathmandu.

The Alpha SL Pullover below is an interesting mix of throwback and cutting edge. A pouch pocket smock? That’s as old school as it gets, but we’ve also got micro seam-taped Paclite, laminated construction, water resistant zips and a colour that would stun a donkey. I think it’s one of the most individual looking shells out there, but the features are right on the money, so this is no novelty item.
It feels good on, smocks are like that, they don’t piss about making the few seconds of getting it on and off the focus of design, they’re all about the wearing. The pouch pocket is right there in front of you, it’s huge and will be very handy indeed. The hood is a pulls in nicely round a bare head, velcro cuffs and there’s pit-zips, one of which extends to the hem to split the jacket, so I will be able to take it off inside a Laser Photon Elite. The pit-zips also allow you to get your hands inside the jacket for warming and pocket rummaging.
It’s a lightweight smock (322g they say), but it has more features that most, the pit-zips and adjustable cuffs being the the items usually missing, and I can get a loaf of bread into that pouch pocket. Smocks aren’t known for their cargo carrying prowess.

It’s an interesting collection of kit, and it’s good to be testing something that does feel quite “different”.
I’ll report back as I go, so more soon.

Just in for test in Montane’s new Dyno Jacket. This impressed on a showroom visit a while back and I’m glad to say the production version looks plenty nice and large is a nice fit. Oh I hate having to wedge myself into a size medium sample…

What have we got? Well, on the face of it, a General Issue softshell with regulation features such as hood and two chest pockets. But as ever, there lurks within, facts and features at which one can raise an eyebrow, purse lips,  even place a hand upon the hip and throw ones head back to the sounds of a theatrical laugh.

The fabric they’re using is a good talking point, it’s Pertex Equilibrium ECO. It’s got great moisture management, whether it’s coming from inside or outside, and decent wind resistance with a little bit of stretch. But that ECO tag means that’s it’s both recycled and recyclable, surely the way forward for any “man made” fabric?
There’s more here than a green stamp of course, it’s got the no-frills practical spec that you expect from Montane too.

Those chunky red YKK zips are nice for a couple of reasons. All we seem to get these days are the water resistant types, or fine toothed/coiled reversed zips, so a change is good, and it’s the sound they make too: ZZZZZRRRRRPP! They say “I’m a big zip, get oot ma face” without apology. Refreshing to see and reassuring in the hand.
The cut is good, Montane are increasingly dialing the whole range into an athletic fit, I hope this follows through to the older models like the Featherlite. I’m no Hen Broon, but slimmer fit is always better, and lighter too mind.
The hood below has a wired peak, so the Dyno is intended as your all-day outer layer. It’s a good hood, nice fit with good protection, good adjustment around the face, a wee velcro tab for volume adjustment at the back of the head (which really should be a drawcord these days) and it rolls away , secured with a velcro tab.
A lovely wee touch is the soft lycra patches against your wrist. It feels nice and gives a close fit without any pressure as well.

I haven’t weighed it yet, but Montane’s 375g doesn’t sound over-optimistic, and at £90 I reckon this is going to put the frighteners on a few folk whose similar models are well past the ton.
It’s got the new embroidered logo too. Aye, much better.

More later.

A 1500-odd feet peak isn’t really a test, I know that, but it’s worth mentioning a few things because it was bloody cold and the conditions were, well, wintry.

First up are Kahtoola Microspikes, I never used them when they came out because I had Icebugs, and the overlap to Aluminium KTS’s looked like too much, but on frozen woodland trails and the patchy ascent to Ben A’an they were magic. So okay, I’ll carry them more.

I had the Karrimor X-Lite 35, and like it’s bigger brother I’ve got on test, it both delights and confounds. The body, lid and stretch pocket are brilliant, the shoulder harness is very comfortable, the hip fins are overbuilt for the capacity and are annoying and there’s no bottle pockets. I fitted the cracking Inov8 bottle carrier to a shoulder strap, so water was to hand, but the hip belt needs to be softer. And have pockets. The chest strap doesn’t have a whistle buckle either. I don’t even know here my whistle is, all my other packs have one on the buckle. We’ll see how this unfolds.

The Haglöfs Lizard Top won the toss over my planned outing for the Montane Extreme Smock as I thought I’d be too warm (I’d have been fine as it turned out), and over a longsleeve merino top the Lizard is proving to be very good indeed.
When moving in the weather we’ve been having there’s enough wind resistance and insulation for me to feel “just nice”, even when running , but when stopped I do cool quite quickly, but not instantly as expected.
Breathability is outstanding, I stay dry in this, even when it’s not the top layer. I know there was some “What’s the point?” with this, but it really is a magic bit of kit.

The Montane Flux has been about a fair bit now, and I love it. It’s slimmer fit (for an insulating jacket) makes it great for instant warmth as there’s no air gap to heat, the mobility makes it great on the move and the features are outstanding. You could argue that it could have more fill and be warmer, but it wouldn’t be so wearable as a general piece, as it is, just add a down gilet and you’re laughing.

Also dug out the Haglöfs Iguana softshell pants for a wee change, and my phone fell out of the stud fastened pocket into the snow, so maybe they were right to can them after what, one season? Great pants otherwise though.
On the feet were Keen Oregon PCT’s, unsung heroes of sorts. A magic boot of which I’ll need to update properly at some point.

I finished early on Monday. A site visit got moved to the next day, and I couldn’t resist making a dash for some sun and snow.
The Kilpatricks were too easy, 900m was too much, Ben A’an was just nice.

The Road Closed sign at the David Marshall lodge both goads and annoys. It’s just laziness, the road is usually passable with care, and leaving the signs there from November until Easter is going to make folk take a chance on the road or divert them via Callander where they’ll drive too fast to make up time and both versions are unnecessary risks. Electric signs and proper road monitoring is what we need. Plus you can’t see the signs from the back very well, and placed as they are in the centre of the road means missing them at 60mph in the dark is a bit of a lottery.

The climb up is always steep, I don’t know why I expect it not to be, but it heaves you into the forest, which this time had frozen snow for a path. Definitely Microspikes terrain and I crunched by wobbly descenders with a mix of smugness and a distinct conspicuous feeling, being overdressed for such a bimble.
The sky was super blue, ultra blue even, and wispy feathers of cloud drifted over and away from me.

When I got to the top there was another like-minded soul waiting for the end of the day, and not long after another face bobbed into view through the heather covered snow.
We stood and waited for the sun to sink. Gloves were donned, jackets zipped up and although the warm alpenglow spread across the landscape behind us, the cold was biting deep already and we were only two before the sun hit the Arrochar Alps.

The cold pressed on as the sun dragged the last of the warmth the with it over the horizon and I was now alone waiting for something to happen. The clouds burned red for a moment and then all was dark.

The descent was through shades of indigo, silver and black. The forest was silent.
The Duke’s Pass with my full beam bouncing off of the snow cover was like a PlayStation game with consequences other than Play Again? But it was uneventful and short the homeward drive was occupied by visions of phantom food, ghostly sausages, poltergeist pies and undead donuts. I’d spent a lot longer up there that I’d planned.
I stuck the oven on when I got home and jumped over to the harbour where the moon was shrugging off the last of the cloud.

It’s now Wednesday as I re-write this from memory after the blog died, taking this wee story along with it, and was revived by skills well beyond my own. I was right with what I originally said, never play your ace on a Monday. The rest of the week is invariably the three of clubs and the Joker.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past week with maps and books, even looking back through the blog and packets of my old photies for ideas for new Trail Routes. And you know something, my enthusiasm and excitement for this stuff has never been higher.
No matter how much gear I get sent to test, or how many outdoor-related distractions appear, none of it is taking anything away from the simple joy of heading out there.
Something changed for me last year, and it was on that final successful trip to Sgurr nan Ceathreamhnan. I had that feeling of re-discovery, an awakening of sorts after a long doze maybe, and it hasn’t gone away.
I’m planning trips where I’m pointing at the map and walking through the contour lines in my mind and grinning away to myself, I’m thinking about what colour that lochan will be, indigo or algae green, where will I pitch to feel the sunrise warm the tent and waken me gently. I’m sitting here typing, but if I blink I’m also on a top breathing in the cold air and pulling up my hood as the light dims and thoughts (once again) turn to hot cuppas and dinner.
I can be awfy faddy at times, but the Highlands have been a constant for me and as I grow older their grip is tightening. No, not a grip, an embrace.
To find a little thing like that in life, that feels like it’s just enough, I just couldn’t ask for more.