As I Xi It

Went to Black Park last Monday for a cycle. It was good cycling weather and not too busy either.

Went hiking around the South Wales/England border over the weekend and figured I’d take advantage of the sunny weather and do some IR photography. I’m pretty sure I’ve processed them incorrectly, you can see some posterization here and there. I suspect I need to extend the shutter speed.

Pine trees on top of May Hill

More trees

Apparently, you can see 12 counties on a clear day

More trees

West Sussex again, this time for some camping in Graffham.

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This Saturday, Bone and I went back to Burnham Beeches for a spot of cycling. While we were unloading the car, a dog appeared from nowhere and presents Bone with a stick, eager to play fetch. Of course, she obliged.

The dog (Kerry) followed us for a bit into the woods and I guess got bored and went back home. I suspect she lives in one of the houses nearby.

Last week, we took a fairly gentle stroll around the woods, this week, it all started off pretty well until I decided that we should go off trail and ended up cycling through some thick fallen leaves, past a broken fence and suddenly we arrived on an island of scrubland full of heather and gorse.

More Dorset than Buckinghamshire. As we negotiated through the heather, we arrived on some tarmac roads and came across a whole bunch of european foreigners. They looked like a tour group, pretty far from central London. As we cycled past, one of them was collecting horse turds. I can’t imagine manure to be that expensive to buy anywhere in the world. Bone suggested that perhaps she collects turds like how I sometimes like to collect moss, lichens and rocks. But turds? I can’t imagine scatology to be a particuarly popular field. I guess different strokes for different folks or as Bone says “different horses for different courses”.

As we kept cycling along the tarmac, I found that it’d take us onto a main road and as we’re not road cyclists, we turned back into the woods. We retraced our steps (wheels?) towards the scrubland only to find that we had gone in circles and ended up where we entered. According to a plaque we’d past, the island of scrubland has a moat around it which would explain why we we kept coming across stagnant water. Upon consultation with my GPS, we eventually found our way back to the track which we had veered off. Things soon went downhill…literally.

So, we continued on back towards the car when I spot a steep descent and decided to zoom on down only to lose control and somehow get thrown off my bike, into the mud and ended up being pinned down by my bike over my head. Miraculously, I didn’t suffer any major head trauma, just cuts and scrapes here and there. I was just covered in mud, of all the spots I could’ve crashed into, it had to be that one patch of mud there. I suppose it was a softer landing than had it been on compacted dirt.

Tracks

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I’d brought this tent a while ago some months ago but never had the chance to properly pitch it up. I tried to in the living room, but there just wasn’t enough space. According to the instructions, it’s suppose to take 12 minutes to set up but took me about 20 minutes solo.

Had a picnic of sorts and a ramble in the woods with Bone this weekend.

Picnic utensils

All quiet, even on a sunny Saturday afternoon

Broadleaved deciduous woodlands

Polyphore fungi

Beech (Fagus sylvatica)

I thought it was about time I retired my elderly headtorch of 10 years and pick up something new, shiny and super bright. Seeing as it’s something I rarely purchase, I figured I might as well go for the upper end of the Petzl Tikka series and settled on the aptly named XP 2.

LED technology really has come along in leaps and bounds in the last decade. The light on the old one (original Tikka) is like candlelight compared to the new one. I don’t even know what the lumens on the old one is. I think it was at a time before lumens were the industry standard for comparing brightness.

There’s a whole cornucopia of features in the new one. It has white and red lights. The white light has high, economy and strobe mode, while the red light just has one light level and strobe. Great for aurora shooting and alerting others to where you are should you get lost. The new one also has an integrated whistle on the headband, takes more effort to blow than some regular whistles though.

New toy

Face off

Whistle

Since the post about my impromptu stove, I seem to have developed a bit of an obsession with testing out different hand sanitizing gels and built up a mini stove kit.

That delightful Aladdins cave also known as Poundland, tend to have a veritable selection of hand sanitizers at low low prices. I picked up a few bottles and also some small stainless steel pots.

It seems that the runnier the gel, the easier it is to ignite and leaves less of a gooey deposit behind.

A visit to Blacks turned up a solo cookset and I also ordered a Ti stove off eBay for a few quid. It claims to be 13.5g and seems mighty small and light to me. I also managed to dig out a small metal tin which used to contain mints that I had picked up from one of the many careers fairs back the in day. It made an ideal recepticle to hold the gel and once used, I could pop the lid back on to stop the residual goo from dripping all over my bag.

Since it was snowing today, I tested it out in the garden and noticed a few things -

1) You can’t tell if the gel’s lit or not, you just cannot see the flames, unless you stick your hand over the top to feel the heat. A bit dangerous really, not for the accident prone. To solve this, I sprinkled a few grains of coarse sea salt (NaCl) onto the gel. The sodium when burnt gives off a yellow flame indicating whether it’s “on” or not, a bit of GCSE Chem for you there. It doesn’t leave any soot behind. Addition of salt also separates out the ethanol from the water and seems to enhance the performance of the gel. I actually saw larger and more vigorous bubbles in the pot.

2) Making a windshield from the snow without gloves leads to very cold hands.

3) It takes longer for the water to heat up while in the cold outdoors than on my desk. Not surprising as there was a bit of a breeze outside this morning.

4) It’s pretty good at making boiled eggs and heating up baked beans. As this set up isn’t that hot, food tends not to get burnt onto the pan which makes cleaning a lot easier.

5) I miss real camping.

The whole kit packed together is quite compact for what it is. I could easily take it with me out photographying out in the wildness for a quick hot brew.

So, I was thinking about disaster preparedness this afternoon. What to do if I needed hot water and there was no kettle or cooker about. This is what I came up with -

Yes, I am that resourceful!

Heats galvanised steel mesh red hot.

Hot choc.

It’s basically the metal casing from a used tealight, a tealight holder and some bent galvanised wire mesh. I used some ethanol based handgel which I’d had for some years (it’s de-gelled and gone liquidy now, that’s how old it is). The metal casing was filled up to just under 1 mm from the top.

I never got a vigorous rolling boil, the heat output just wasn’t all that much. It took around 10 minutes to get to a gentle simmer with 300 mls of water in.

The handgel burnt pretty cleanly, no sooty residue left on the underside of my mug. Despite the handgel itself having a slight perfume aroma to it, it was more or less odourless when burnt.

In an emergency situation where you needed a quick fix, it gets the job done.

I picked up a Spork today. Simple, light and oh so useful. Well, I perceive it to be useful otherwise why would I have brought it? I guess I can now leave my metal camp cutlery behind. Incidently, it’s made in Sweden much like the Fold-a-Cup I picked up while I was in Abisko, Sweden earlier this year. I didn’t intend to go with a Swedish theme. I brought it in yellow just because it’d be easier to find should it wander around my cavernous backpack.