Over the holidays, my wife gave me an ultralight cuben fiber backpack cover from Zpacks.com. Weighing 1 oz, it replaces a silnylon Equinox pack cover I’ve been using the past few years that weighs 3.2 oz. A backpack cover is an important …

Marmot makes two styles of Precip Pants: Full Zip Precip Pants and Regular Precips. The Full Zips are designed for winter hiking, backpacking and climbing. They are sometimes called “New Style” Precips by online retailers because they were introduced after regular Precips (also called …

Hiking the Metacomet-Monadnock Trail I went for a very pleasant 5 mile ridge walk last Sunday at the Mt. Tom State Reservation in Western Massachusetts, overlooking the town of Northampton and the Connecticut River Valley. I used to live in this area …

A balaclava is an incredibly useful piece of gear to bring hiking or camping. It can be worn during the day in cool weather as a hat, face mask, or neck gaiter or at night as head covering to keep you extra …

Do you still long for the old days when Golite made a backpack that had mesh pockets? Those were the days of the Golite Trek, a multi-day backpack with an internal volume of just under 3950 cubic inches with a 700 cubic …

Step-in Crampons After much consideration, I decided to buy a pair of Black Diamond Sabertooth Pro step-in crampons last week that require front and toe boot welts, rather than strap-on ones that can be used with a wider variety of boots. The …

Hiking and Lyme Disease Last year, I switched to wearing long pants for all of my day hiking and backpacking trips to lower my risk of Lymes disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. I have an alarming number of friends who’ve contracted …

Scarpa Omega Mountaineering Boots are lightweight plastic mountaineering boots that weighs just 5.2 lbs per pair in a size 9.5 US. They retail for $360/pair. The level of ankle flex in the boot is fantastic: almost like a leather boot instead of …

Outdoor Research Alti Mountaineering gloves are designed for technical climbing in very cold weather or at high altitudes where you need to be able to grasp and manipulate tools and ropes. The shells are waterproof Gore-Tex with leather palms and are anatomically …

After a week of increasingly alarming weather forecasts, we ended up having excellent weather for our summit attempt on Mt. Washington today. Temperatures were only 10 below zero with winds of 38 miles an hour, gusting to 50 miles per hour. That’s …

I have never been a fan of sports recovery drinks or powders like Gatorade and don’t normally use them for 3 season backpacking because I feel that frequent all day snacking with unprocessed foods provides me with adequate calories and sodium. However, I …

If you’re not careful, it’s very easy to become dehydrated in the winter particularly if you’re engaged in sports like snowshoeing, backcountry skiing or mountaineering. Under these conditions, it’s not enough to be on the lookout for yellow pee; you need to …

Mt. Greylock (3,491 ft.) is the highest peak in Massachusetts. Located in the Berkshires near New York State, the Mount Greylock land form is composed of a north-south oriented central ridge: Saddle Ball Mountain (3,247 ft ); Mount Greylock, the high point (3,491 …

This weekend, I rented a pair of plastic mountaineering boots to try out in preparation for my upcoming Introduction to Mountaineering Course. This is a 3 day class that I’ll be taking with the International Mountain Climbing School in North Conway, NH …