Socks, cushion, sole, O.D. green.
Try and keep your feet dry when we’re
out humpin’. I want you boys to
remember to change your socks wherever
we stop. The Mekong will eat a grunt’s
feet right off his legs.

Forrest Gump

These are pretty much the essentials that you need when traveling the backcountry. You wouldn’t necessarily need these if you’re doing a front range San Gabriel hike or parts of the Santa Monica mountains. When I go backcountry though, I make sure that I carry these 10. Except for the compass. That’s been on my desk for the past 2 months :/

But if you’re somewhat experienced hiking the backcountry, you probably already know what to expect in terms of weather, water requirements, terrain, etc. However, if you’re new to hiking, then this post is for you.

First of all, if you’ve been hiking the Santa Monica’s, the front range San Gabriels (Mt. Wilson, Echo Mtn, Jones Peak), or places in LA (Griffith Park), and are feeling like a challenge and have decided to check out what’s in the backcountry, then Congratulations! Not only have you stuck with getting outdoors and back to nature, but you’ve also decided to kick your adventures up a notch. Welcome to the club. When you bag your first backcountry peak, I’m sure you’ll get addicted.

Ok, back to the essentials. On a “normal” hike pre-backcountry, you would probably pack something like:

1. Water – Hopefully enough. If you’ve run out on these hikes, then reexamine how much you’ll need. Look for my upcoming post regarding water requirements.

2. Sunscreen – After your first hike, you’ll have realized the red painful skin tone isn’t natural.

3. Food – If your hikes have gone from 2 hours to 6, then you’ll probably have started to carry a lunch around.

Those are all I could remember from my short day hikes. Now onto the big dogs…

1. Map - With the absence of any towns, or a large metropolitan area such as LA to guide you back to civilization, a map would be necessary should you get turned around somewhere on the trail.

2. Compass (optionally supplemented with a GPS receiver) – Unless you’re familiar with the area, your map would be pretty useless without a compass. What you could do though is wait about 20 minutes and try to get a direction using the sun.

3. Sunglasses and sunscreen – I didn’t use sunglasses for a good year and a half. But since I’ve started, my eyes have never felt better. Sunscreen for the obvious reason.

4. Extra food and water – This is crucial. Carry a Clif Bar in your pack as a last resort, and pack half a liter of extra water as a reserve. You could either (a) pack enough water, or (b) learn to pack enough water the hard way by running out and becoming severely dehydrated.

5. Extra clothes – This is good for winter. Especially if it looks like it’s going to rain. But summer it could be helpful if you need to change a shirt or your hike runs into the evening.

6. Headlamp/flashlight – You never know what might happen. The night is a scary scary place in the woods.

7. First aid kit (use in case of emergency) – Just need a simple one. Band aids, Tylenol, sterilization wipes, etc. Good for simple cuts scrapes. Also, include a set of tweezers and mole skin for blisters.

8. Fire starter (use in case of emergency) – It’s always a bad idea to start a fire anywhere in a southern California forest if it’s not Winter and possibly raining. Fire danger is always pretty high. But if you’re able to and know how to build and control one, then do it to stay warm.

9. Matches (use in case of emergency) – Matches are better than a fire starter. A bit more efficient I would say. But the same as number

10. Knife - It’s good to have a sharp edged tool for cutting things. Also, if you’re hiking alone, it’s a good psychological booster. But I haven’t had to use the knife for anything other than to cut apart a watermelon.

Here are some other “essentials” that I carry regardless of weather, season, or distance:

1. Chapstick
2. Extra Clif Bar
3. Socks
4. Hat
5. Toilet paper

That’s about it. Hopefully you won’t have to use these essentials, but they are essential for a reason.

Read more about it at Gizmodo. And check out the 15-Below Jacket which is linked on the same page. That’s a pretty cool idea too. It’s also a good way to carry reading material.

Sure it’s about 4 years old, got a small 2″ screen, and only squeezes in 5 mega pixels. But age doesn’t matter, small screen means less likely to crack, and mega pixels are overrated anyways.

What I love about the camera is its compactness which kind of makes it light. It’s got a metallic body for strength, and a cool little wrist strap for the just in case moments. Also, the controls are on the right side which makes one handed shots a breeze. This is especially useful when I’m balancing on a rock or doing some scrambling.

A cool feature that I just found out about a month ago was the 1 – 15 second exposure. I’ve had it for almost 4 years and just barely figured that out. Simply amazing.

Like most other cameras, mine takes video too. Something that I’ve only started recently doing. I would also like to take this moment to show the differences in quality between Vimeo and Youtube. I have no idea what Youtube did, but they butchered the video pretty badly.

My Camera from john quan on Vimeo.

These shoes have taken me up to Iron Mountain, Baldy, the climb up Strawberry Peak, and even in the snow. However, these aren’t meant for the snow or for rain, so if you go out in those conditions, count on getting wet feet. Frankly though, I love these shoes.

As a trail running shoe, it has everything that you would expect: toe box, foot plate, and reflectors. The only concern that I had when I started wearing these was how the laces were connected with the shoe. I thought these would have been the week link, but after 10 months of weekly use, they’re still holding strong. But I’m considering getting another pair, but may hold off and get some real boots for some upcoming trips.

So as you can see from the above pics and below, the outer stitching was the first to go. This outer black band doesn’t affect the structural integrity of the shoe. The soles and shoe are still well connected.

As mentioned above, the lacing system is a bit different. The eyelets are replaced with external loops.

The soles are what you would expect as well.

As for overall wear, some of the mesh has started to get frayed on the outer portions of the beginning of the vamp. The laces themselves show no sign of age. I think I’ll have to keep those when I toss these shoes.

Lastly, I tried on 6 different pairs of trail runners before getting these. This pair fit well right out of the box. Normal break in time was about 4 day long hikes. But even then it was a little stiff. These shoes also accommodate my wide feet as well, so that’s another plus. For my next pair of trail runners, I’m looking into New Balance. But should those not fit, I may just go back to these.

My first use was on Iron Mountain which looking back now was a bad idea. A couple of reasons why I think they were a detriment:
1. They worked my upper body which wasn’t used to these movements,
2. They made me go at a faster pace.

For number 1, my arms and upper body never did much on the hikes except sway back and forth. Now I found myself using up extra energy. As for going at a faster pace, that pace was only maintained for a very brief time. This only got me winded faster.

However, now I only take one pole with me and use it primarily for steep downhill ascents and a spear when hiking alone. Although, I’m not sure how a $15.99 pole would hold up against a cougar or bear. But psychologically, it helps.

On to the product…

I got both of mine from Target for only $15.99 in September. For the first 3 months, they saw barely any use. But for the last month, I’ve taken one with me to Baldy, Mt. Wilson, and to do some exploring over steep terrain. So far, they’ve been great. Only once did the locking mechanism unlock. But that was in the snow and the pole got wedged in pretty deep and it me twisting the pole loose that probably unlocked it.

The pole came with a rubber tip protector, a basket, and that’s all. It features a anti-shock section which actually helps I think.

The carbide tip as you can see and suffered some wear. When I first got it, it was flat and toothed. Now it’s been worn down to a ball point tip. You can buy replacement tips, but for the price of the pole, it would be easier just to buy another one. Plus, I tried to unscrew the black plastic end to no avail.

The grip is a bit thin for my hands. Wearing gloves I’ve found improves grip. Plus with gloves, I don’t have to worry about blisters. It also has an attached wrist strap which I find to be more annoying than useful.

Like most other poles out there, this one has a two step locking system. The upper and lower portions extends to 135cm before the “STOP” warning is given. For my height of 5′-11″, this is plenty. I normally extend both sections to 125cm.

My last hikes have covered steep terrain with scree, loose dirt and rock, and snow. Each of these times, I have used the pole to help me on the downhill. This “third leg” lets me dig in and gives me something to hold on to. I’ve avoided a couple of slip-and-slides because of it.

I would recommend using a pole for downhill portions and very steep inclines where loose dirt and rock present. Otherwise, keep it packed away. I don’t like using them for the aforementioned reasons on the uphills. I prefer to give my legs a workout.

I would also recommend using these if you have knee or other legs issues. Using them has saved my knees great discomfort on even the slightest of declines.

I would not recommend using these in dense foliage as these could get caught up and become a tripping hazard. And speaking of hazards, if you are using these, be sure to keep a good distance between the person fore and aft. These can be dangerous to them.

Also, you wouldn’t want to use these while negotiating a rock climb. Once you get to the rock faces of Strawberry Peak, these would only get in the way. So pack them away and start climbing.

That’s all I’ve got. If you have anything to add, please do so.

Of course, by looking at topo maps we can certainly get a good enough estimate of how much elevation gain there will be, but with GPS devices people have taken to assessing how much gain they have done on a hike based on what the device spits out.

Now, I have a Garman GPSMAP 60CSx, and probably like most others, Garmin has its own algorithms for taking data and trying to remove the error. However, when people upload to sites like MotionBased, they will spit out a report with extremely high numbers. For example, a hike up to Mt. Diablo in the Bay Area probably takes up to 4500 ft gain, but I was reading some people’s comments that they did over 7,000 ft gain! This is problem, what will this person think when someone says they are going to hike a real 7,000 ft hike?

Anyways it’s fun to have control over your own data. I looked at the data I collected for the Register Ridge hike from last weekend. I took samples at every second, the highest rate that the device would allow.

Here is an elevation plot of the hike:

Now, let’s zoom in on one area, I believe on the saddle between Mt Baldy and West Baldy:

The numbers in the legend indicate the number of points used in averaging for that color line. So the blue, with ‘0′, is the raw data with no averaging. The purple ‘60′ averages using the 60 points to each side of the current data point, and the others use a # of points in between.

Based on visual inspection, we can obviously say that the raw data needs to be smoothed. However, the purple line is too smooth. It looks like the red and cyan curves, with 5-20 points smoothing, gives results that are reasonably smooth without loosing too much information.

We would expect then for the red and cyan curves to give the most accurate estimates of total elevation gain. We would expect the blue (raw) to overestimate and the purple to underestimate. But by how much?

This figure plots the estimate total elevation vs. the # of points used to smooth the data. We can see clearly that as smoothing increases, our gain estimate decreases.

We can also see that as we decrease the smoothing, the estimate increases and at faster and faster rates. Without any smoothing/filtering, the calculated gain would have been some 9,000 ft, around 4,000 ft over the likely actual estimate!

The region is the box is probably the sweet spot where the ‘actual’ elevation gain lies. I mean ‘actual’ in the sense how being close to a calculated value based on topo calculation, maybe with a bit more accuracy. The left side of the box shows where the line looks to slow down. 6,000 ft is definitely too high, while 5,000 might be pretty good. Between 10 and 20 looks to give a stable & reasonable estimate.

To go back to the beginning, we need to at least make sure we aren’t overestimating or underestimating the gain by 1,000 ft. We are more safe by smoothing with more points than less, but we still want to analyze visually to make sure we aren’t smoothing unnecessarily high (60). I believe my gps estimated something like 5300, which in my opinion is a bit too high.

Most of this may only be of interest to a few of you, but the general take home message is: don’t automatically trust someone’s information on the elevation stats of a hike until you know how they calculated it. With new technology, it’s actually more likely that error in reported stats increases.