It was a few years back when Benji Wagner first sent me a box of his hand warmers to my office in Columbus Circle, NY. I was working for American Park Network, writing and collecting information for a collection of 25+ guidebooks to our beautiful public lands. Benji and the Poler team have since become great friends, so it’s pretty spectacular to see what waves they’ve been making since they branched out into backpacks, tents, headlamps and of course, their famous Napsack. Check out their latest video above and help support two majorly lovely guys working their ass off in the Pacific Northwest.
Archive | October, 2012
Have a Good Weekend
The illustration above of yours truly was made by Christine Mitchell. The original photo was taken a few weeks back in Far West Texas by Mikael Kennedy. Making the rounds on the internets today.
Have a real time out there this weekend.
Mount Everest Special
There’s an article on the NYTimes website today, written by Dwight Garner, about the peanut butter and pickle sandwich. If you read this rag regularly or know me personally, you’re hip to the fact that peanut butter is quite the obsession in these parts, so these idiot articles get me a little excited. In his intro, Garner references Ernest Hemingway’s favorite sandwich, peanut butter and onion on white bread, a recipe I’ve been meaning to write about on CS for many moons. The sandwich, which I’ve consumed more than a few times, though unfortunately not on white bread, is a real time. And of course, like always, chunky is king.
Hemingway references PB&O in Islands In The Stream and it makes its way into The Hemingway Cookbook as well. The Mount Everest Special:
“Well, go down to the galley and see if that bottle of tea is cold and bring it up. Antoni’s butchering the fish, go make a sandwich will you, please?
“Sure. What kind of sandwich?”
“Peanut butter and onion if there’s plenty of onion.”
“Peanut butter and onion it is, sir.”
He handed a sandwich, wrapped in a paper towel segment, to Thomas Hudson and said, “One of the highest points in the sandwich-maker’s art. We call it the Mount Everest Special. For Commanders only.
And in honor of the weird Lyle Lovett reference in the NYTimes article, here’s a hell of a Tuesday morning tune:
MJ, Patagonia, Rain etc.
Key Log Rolling
I met the Sisters Hoeschler at Outdoor Retailer this summer, and after a few minutes of chatting about their company, Key Log, we realized we had a laundry list of common friends from the northern regions of Vermont. Small world, I suppose. In any case, Abby, Lizzie and the rest of the Hoeschler family are all log rolling champions (amazing) and have developed a lighter, more portable synthetic log rolling log that you can use to spar while out on the water. I’ve never set foot on a log to do something like this, but after watching the video above, it sure does make you wanna try. Maybe.
Fall Blues
This Kenneth Noland painting, Fall Blues, has been on my mind these last few weeks. After a cold night under the stars, I wouldn’t mind the sun coming up looking like this or this or this. Probably won’t happen though…
Biolite CampStove
A few weeks back, I spent some time at the BioLite offices in Brooklyn, talking to their team about the camping stove they’ve developed and the bigger picture goals they have in the coming years. And it certainly isn’t all camping…
I’ve taken the BioLite CampStove on the trail a few times now, and a proper review of the stove is-a-comin, but I can tell you now that Cold Splinters and fellow hiking companions have been wildly impressed.
Any users out there? What do you think?
Stolen Maple Syrup
On October 5th, Canadian police seized 600 barrels of Canadian Maple Syrup in a Quebec factory. Last month, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers recorded a huge quantity of missing maple syrup after a routine inventory. It’s a bizarre story that you can read more about over at HuffPo.
DeChristopher Released From Jail
Tim DeChristopher, who has been jailed for the past 18 months at Herlong Federal Prison in California for disrupting federal oil and gas exploration auctions, will be released prison on October 24th. That’s good news to a lot of people’s ears. He’ll spend the rest of his two year term (six months if my math is correct) at a Salt Lake City halfway house, employed at a Unitarian Church under a work-release program. Peaceful Uprising, the activisit group that Dechristopher founded, has this to say about the whole situation:
Obviously his friends, his family, his community is excited to have him back here in a halfway home, but we are going to respect whatever time he needs. We will honor that he is still serving time until April 2013.
For those of you who don’t know who DeChristopher is and why he matters, well, I’ll give you the short of it. In 2008 DeChristopher, a climate control activist, entered a federal oil and gas exploration lease auction. The BLM was selling 116 parcels of land in Utah red-rock country and DeChristopher bid on 14 of them (22,500 acres) for 1.8 million. He won, and at the time, had no money to pay, so the feds picked him up for misrepresenting himself. Months later, the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, deemed the auction illegal. In addition to the auction being deemed illegal, DeChristopher had raised the funds for the land and the BLM refused to accept the money. The Jury wasn’t allowed to know either of those little fun facts during the trail and he was found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison.
Be happy about this one. It’ll be a good thing when he’s done with church work.
John James Audobon
John James Audobon is best known for The Birds of America, the book that contains his illustrations of all 435 birds that were known in the United States around 1827, the year the book was first published. But – according to this PBS article – “he lived in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina and New York – traveled everywhere from Labrador to the Dry Tortugas off Florida, from the Republic of Texas to the mouth of the Yellowstone – was a merchant, salesman, teacher, hunter, itinerant portraitist and woodsman, an artist and a scientist.”
Listen to New York Public Library Curator, Michael Inman, talk about Audubon’s early life and the process of getting TBOA pusblished in a two part podcast from Stuff You Missed in History Class. It’s worth your time, I promise.
