Gear Repair and Maintenance

I wear a pair of Outdoor Research Crocodile Gaiters in winter to keep snow out of my mountaineering boots and to provide some protection for my legs against self-inflected crampon strikes. I’ve owned a pair for going on 4 years and they are in rough shape, but rather than replace …

Gear Aid’s Outdoor Sewing Kit is a great hiking and backpacking sewing kit if you already know how to sew. While it includes an “Expert Repair Guide”, McNett’s claim that “anybody is going to be able to make a sewing repair even if you’ve never picked up a needle” is …

Backpacking and hiking gear has a nasty habit of failing when you least expect it or you need it the most – in the dark, when it’s pouring rain, or in the middle of nowhere. Knock on wood, I’ve never been stranded by gear failure, but it can be damn …

Describe a piece of hiking gear or hiking clothing that you damaged, destroyed or wore out this year, including what it was, the circumstances leading to its demise, whether you plan to repair or replace it, and if the latter with what. Here are a few examples: Damaged: I tore …

Do you remember the orange tag that was attached to your eVent jacket when you bought it? The one that said, Please Wash Me Often. It sounded like a good idea then, but I never seemed to get around to it.  That finally changed this week. My jacket was noticeably …

I’ve owned my Western Mountaineering Ultralight 20 down sleeping bag for about 4 years now and I estimate that I’ve slept in it over 100 nights. As you can imagine, it doesn’t have that new smell anymore and could use some freshening up. One option is for me to take …

 Backpacking gear is expensive and you need to take care of it to extend its lifetime. Here’s a checklist of gear maintenance tasks I try to do the morning after I get home from a backpacking trip: Air out my sleeping bag or quilt to make sure they’re dry before storing un-stuffed. Hang up …

This year, I’ve had a hard time preventing red mold from growing in my Platypus hydration reservoirs. I don’t know why mold started to be a problem this year, but I think I’ve finally found a way to clean it out of my bladders and prevent it from returning. The …

Do you see that red stain on the inside of my platypus hydration bladder  in the picture below? That’s mold, like the stuff that grows on our bathroom shower curtain. I only noticed it on my last backpacking trip, and since getting home I’ve tried a few things to get …

When I started using the Platypus hydration system (collapsible bladder and hose), I periodically had leaks where water would seep out of the system and get the contents of my pack wet. The source of these leaks was the connection between the hose adapter and the threads of the bladder …