Recent content by Mason

What's gotten better? Having money and time. I bought my first solo canoe in 1983--even as a dealer getting it wholesale, I couldn't afford Kevlar. However, at 51 pounds, it's still useable and is a delight to paddle. I'd rather carry my current 36 pound Kevlar boat. Wood bent shaft paddles...

I paddled the Eno while in college in 1979, with my geology professor (and wished I had taken more geology!). And then went to the Eno River Festival and listened to Doc and Merle Watson, may they rest in peace! Fun times.

Very true! However peering from x thousand feet over rapids of interest sure is fun! Here is the rapid that killed Art Moffatt on the Dubawnt River in 1955 (see "Death on the Barrens", by George Grinnell, or Skip Pessel's "Barren Grounds: The Story of the Tragic Moffat Canoe Trip"). With lots...

Good info. For those of you interested in the variety of satellite images for planning, here's an interesting comparison. I'm looking at a series of lakes with a thin stream (aka river) connecting, wondering how reasonable this trip is. Here are three available satellite images referenced in...

I use printed maps almost exclusively for onsite navigation. A standalone GPS is used only for lapses of befuddlement. However I'm currently planning a long trip in Nunavut for this summer. For this planning, I've recently started using CalTopo (on my desktop), as one of the other paddlers...

But can you do it in semaphore?

He also skied down K2, a much more technical mountain. K2 Ski descent. And Jim Morrison recently skied the north side of Everest (Morrison ski), after his partner Hilaree Nelson, died skiing Manaslu with him. And for the old timers, there's The Man Who Skied Down Everest (Everest ski) about...

And then there's ski mountaineering (not to be confused with skimo!). Ropes, harnesses, ice axes and crampons come to mind. Oh, and sometimes carrying your skis, perhaps for miles......

More Yep. BC skiing can take you to some wild areas! And to think all that snow eventually turns to water, which flows into rivers and lakes. Everybody wins.

Yep!!

I've used a pyramid tent (Black Diamond Megamid, similar to the Seek Outside) as a backcountry ski trip cook shelter, and the largest CCS Lean on long canoe trips as a bug/rain shelter. The pyramid tents are popular for winter ski trips and mountaineering, where you can excavate under the tent...

Canada probably has/had its targets too! Abandoned/repurposed DEWLine station on the Arctic Ocean coast, near the mouth of the Horton River, NWT. It would suck being somewhere so remote and getting nuked.

Although it's been a looooong time, I've handled both copperheads and various water snakes. Water snakes have much more strongly keeled scales than copperheads (or most of the other snakes of the Southeast, most of which I handled in my youth, venomous and non-venomous). They have a decidedly...

Can you provide a pic of the gunwale? If you don't flip the canoe by pulling on the yoke, and you have a light and narrow boat to boot, most of the force from any clamping system is to keep it from sliding once it's on your shoulders if the yoke sits on the gunwales. On both my PakCanoe (37"...

My point about the (much heavier) PakCanoe is that it has no inwale/outwale (and no central thwart) and that a modified conventional yoke may work, mostly to give you an idea of what might work with a little ingenuity. Apparently my point was missed.