I don’t think you’re supposed to fly with bear spray.
Well damn, obviously hadn’t thought of that. A quick google says you are right. Who wants to move to Montana and set up a bear spray rental store?
Tempting. I love Bozeman other than the rednecks.
That cougar video was posted all over my hiking and California back country FB groups. Immediately half the idiots chime in with “that’s why I never go hiking w/o my gun”. Yeah dude - just blow a cougar’s head off because you wouldn’t leave her and her cub alone. Or miss and get mauled.
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Went backpacking in the Black Hill National Forest in late August, highly recommended. Easy trails. I was going to go over to Colorado and when I researched it, all the interesting hikes were like 12,000 feet up. Which is to say, I would at the very least be miserable for three days with altitude sickness and I could die. Black hills is only about 6,000 feet which is very doable. I’m sure it’s not as pretty as the Rockies in Colorado but it was pretty good. Kept meaning to post these but kept putting it off. Only downside is you share the trails with horses so there’s plenty of horseflies and horseshit. Sad!
The third to last picture is my favorite, DUCY?
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lol camping
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Supposedly the charges occurred when he was crouching down trying to pick up rocks.
This last weekend went camping at a higher elevation spot over Lake Elsinore in SoCal. Day and night view pics. City lights at night is my favorite view, so I’m biased.
GF found the camping site on hipcamp.com which is like an airbnb for people with land that rent out to campers. We’ve used it a couple times and enjoyed it both times.
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If you are unfamiliar with the story, a Jeep with a passenger and two dogs plummeted down the mountainside earlier this month and the events were captured on another vehicle’s dash cam.
End over end the Jeep flipped right in front of the other vehicle on a road that few would dare to traverse.
And it was all captured on video.
Amazingly, the passenger — Suzie Rhodes — and her dogs survived. They were ejected from the vehicle.
The driver wasn’t injured, according to media reports, as he was outside the vehicle attempting to help another car on the very narrow pass when the Jeep began to roll down the mountain.
The Durango Herald reports that the driver “told authorities he shut off the Jeep’s engine, applied the emergency brake then stepped out of the vehicle to help a driver behind him around a tight turn.”
“The Jeep, however, started to roll with the 23-year-old woman and two dogs inside and went off Black Bear Pass, rolling several times. The woman and dogs were ejected from the vehicle.”
A GoFundMe page has been set-up to help with the woman’s medical bills.
The organizer of the page, Zoe Faller, said doctors estimate that Rhodes has “two years of extensive rehabilitation” in front of her.
One reason I like having an automatic on roads like this. Emergency brakes suck - including mine. They never seem to last. Putting the car in gear only helps so much. Parking brakes on automatics otoh seem to always be pretty solid.
On my last trip I went down into Canyonlands on a road like this. At one point I could see from above, a car was stuck on the swtichbacks while other cars were helping. So I waited. The big concern is having to back up a long way - not fun. There weren’t many place where it was wide enough to pass - and passing was scary as hell.
The stuck car was a freaking Mazda MX-5 or something that pulled over away from the cliff side to let another car pass - then bottomed out. Signs all over saying you need a high-clearance 4x4. People are morons. Looked like a rental that got pretty messed up. The trunk wouldn’t close afterwards.
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I’ve got a chunk of time coming up and am thinking about doing a night or two out in the national forest. Any backpackers here, what do you do for water purification on the trail? There are a couple of lakes along the trail but also cattle grazing.
I’ve used everything from filters to aquamira (both the tablets and liquids) to bleach. I usually use bleach in the northeast where I am obtaining water from high mountain streams. I would prefer a good filter if I needed to drink from lakes near cattle grazing areas.
Not a camper, but I’ve used a portable UV light water purifier for a couple months’ travel in India. My cousin then borrowed it for extended backpacking through SE Asia. Small, lightweight, works great. Kinda chews through batteries though.
I use a Steripen UV light to treat water while backpacking, but it has some drawbacks. It doesn’t do anything to improve the taste of the water and I’m not sure I’d trust it with cloudy water. I’ve also had one randomly break (they sent me a warranty replacement) . I would second Jbro’s recommendation to use a filter if you’re in areas with cattle.
I think I have a Katadyn filter I used on a backpacking trip, fairly easy to use, packed a little bit bigger than a Nalgene, water didn’t taste very good, should have got some Nuun tablets for the drinking water.
Sawyer Squeeze.
I’m fixing to sew mattress/cushions for my campervan. Borrowed a machine from the neighbor. YTing sewing videos. Sewing is very cool. This isn’t even that fancy of a machine and apparently you can load graphics and it’ll embroider them.
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It’s not bad at all.
So we have a lot of old clothes that we don’t wear. The main stuffing is old clothes. I also had a moving blanket that I got for something recently but didn’t need. Thinking that the clothes might get lumpy, I sewed sections of moving blanket onto the inside top and bottom of the cover, which is canvas. I also had some like 5cm memory foam. A rectangle of that is also there as the top layer. The whole thing is pretty thick. I was aiming for about 15cm (really I was aiming for 6 inches).
I watched a video on how to make a cushion. They cut one side to the cushion dimensions and the other side has that plus flaps in each direction the width that you want the cushion thickness to be. Then sew up the flaps, then sew up the top to bottom. The video I watched had a zipper in the middle, but I didn’t have a zipper and they also only used foam and I didn’t have more and foam is pretty expensive. The cushion is closed on one side with buttons that I sewed on - 'cause we had buttons.
This is cushion 1 out of 6. I think we’ll have enough clothes. I’m going to run short on foam and will probably leave it out of the cushions that will be for either heads (where you have pillows) or feet (where it doesn’t need to be as soft).
:)
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