Leaving on a Jet Plane

Okay, so that title is misleading. I'm actually leaving an a Mercedes-Benz older than I am with a diesel engine and a currently temperamental starter motor...so surprisingly close to a jet plane, in reality. My girlfriend, a clinic teammate and I are all going backpacking in the Santa Cruz mountains starting tomorrow. Spring Break starts tomorrow, so it's pretty good timing. Not like we had it rigged to turn out that way or anything....

Packing was kind of a rush job tonight and I'm going to have to have some discussions with myself and my trailmates tomorrow morning about the distribution of group gear and what really needs to be brought. I'm bringing my SLR camera and tripod, which, admittedly, are luxury items and quite heavy, but I also am saddled with more communal gear than I realized initially, since much of the contents of my pack is fairly static and mostly communal. Let me explain that:

I was a boy scout. I am an Eagle Scout (for those not in the know, you can only be a boy scout until you're 18 in most cases, but if you make it to Eagle then you're always considered an eagle scout in the present tense). This means that I take a lot of stuff with me when I go camping that I never use and never want to use. This includes first-aid kit stuff -- bandages, alcohol pads, and tape -- and more general things like extra rope, straps, plastic bags etc. I leave a great deal of this in my back and often forget about it. I'll have to check with the rest of my group to see if anyone else has first-aid gear or any of this other stuff so I can see what can be left behind as overly redundant.

I say overly redundant because gear does break, and you can't be stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no way to fix it and no replacement. We're bring two stoves, for example. The only meal we actually need to cook is dinner on the first night, but most other meals would be unpleasant to eat cold. We're also bringing 2 water purification pumps which is a bit redundant in my eyes, since I have a bottle of Polar-Pure. Polar-Pure is an iodine water purification that uses a small bottle with iodine crystals to saturate a small amount of water that can then be poured into much larger water containers to purify the water inside them. It tastes better than most iodine systems, but still not as nice as a pump, so my teammates will probably opt for both pumps. I still won't leave the iodine at home, though.

As an interesting aside, the sale of Polar-Pure was heavily restricted in California for a time (and may still be) because it is the only water purification that I know of that uses pure iodine crystals, and people were using the crystals to synthesize meth. Talk about a disruptive few spoiling it for the rest of us. Anyway, I really need to be asleep an hour ago so I can get up to finish last-minute work before spring break.

Look for an update when I get back from my trip, though!

~KMarsh