Posts Tagged ‘hikes’

The Casio Pathfinder PAW1500T-7V is the latest addition to my hiking and backpacking arsenal.  There are a few reasons to purchase this watch, the main one being it makes you feel eerily like James Bond with a new gadget.

Getting back to all seriousness, this watch is fantastic to take out on the trails. The range of functions that this watch can perform will stagger the senses.  I will list just a few for you;

Multi-Band Atomic Timekeeping

It automatically calls out to the national atomic time broadcast towers and updates itself up to 6 times a night, so your time is always accurate.

Solar Power

How do you make a watch better?  Make it run off the sun!  With as little as 5 minutes a day exposure to direct sunlight, this watch will keep it’s main charge for up to 5 months.  Just with 5 minutes a day!  Any more than that, it will always keep the battery fresh and charged.

600ft Water Resistant

For those tough days hiking in a horrible, driving rain.

Tide Graph

I haven’t really figured out how this will benefit me, but I’ll admit I find myself checking EXACTLY what the current tide is every hour!  I suppose it would be useful for beach hiking, but around Michigan that’s not exactly our main trail system…

Moon Data

Notably, one of the best functions ever put into a watch.  You may be asking yourself “Why the hell would I want to know the phase of the moon when I’m backpacking?”  Well I’ll tell you!  There are several good reasons, such as you can more accurately predict the movement of nocturnal animals (i.e. deer, bear) as corresponds to the moon and moonlight rating.  Also, you can tell when there is going to be a full moon, so you can plan a romantic moon-watching session on the beach!… or turn into a werewolf.  Both are interesting, and this watch will help!

Digital Compass

This wonderful bond-esqe watch comes with a live compass that will change the main directions, as well as the compass degrees as you walk.  Given a proper map, you can actually use this watch to find your compass bearings and location, therefore combining NEW technology, with TRUSTED paper.

Altimeter

Climb a lot of mountains?  Yeah, me neither.  I try to keep it to at least one a year though!  So when you do, this watch will tell you exactly how high you are, and how much further you have to go.  As an added bonus, it will store the max altitude reached, so when your friends don’t believe you just came back from that easy stroll up K2, bust out the watch and show them EXACTLY how high you were!

Barometer

My favorite function.  Not only will the Pathfinder tell you the current barometric pressure, but it graphs the changes in pressure too!  With simply a push of one button, you can see the barometric change over the last 18 hours.  I can not begin to tell you how handy this is when you’re stuck on a trail and the clouds turn iffy.  It’s like having a weatherman strapped to your wrist!  …only lighter, and less hair gel.

Thermometer

Ok, I’m not terribly thrilled with this function, but it still doesn’t turn me off of the watch as a whole.  The temperature is very inaccurate, mostly because it’s strapped to a big sweaty Polish wrist when I keep hitting the button.  Even in the user’s guide, it says to take off the watch and let it set for at least 5 minutes in order to get an accurate temp.  I guess it’s a small price to pay, and when taken off and let stand, the watch does read very accurately.  It’s just a bit of a hassle.

Low Temperature Resistant (For those really, REALLY cold mornings.  You know which ones I’m talking about.)

World Time (29 times zones for when you’re hiking abroad)

So basically as I’m wrapping this up, this watch is a wonderful toy to have.  Not necessary on the trail, but given the opportunity, it would be a nice addition to anyone’s repertoire of hiking goodies.  At a retail price of $400, it’s… well… very expensive.  You can find it on sale quite a bit, and with as many vendors that carry it, you shouldn’t pay more than $230 for it.

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The Mad Backpacker team has taken a trip out of Michigan and visited one of the most beautiful parks ever to be declared such: The Great Smokey Mountains.

While staying in this beautiful  park, we decided to take a short day hike to a beautiful mountain named Mount Le Conte.  While ranked 3^rd highest in the Great Smokey Mountains, Mt. Le Conte is actually the tallest mountain in the eastern United States, when measured from the mountain’s base to it’s summit.

As we only had a short time to climb, we decided to take a trail called the Alum Cave Bluff trail.  The Alum Cave Bluff trail runs from it’s trailhead at 441 and runs roughly 5 miles to the Le Conte Lodge, located at the top of Mt. Le Conte.  During those 5 miles it passes through Alum Cave, which is a man-made cave / bluff made while mining salt for the Epsom Salt Co. as well as the Confederate Army during the civil war.

We started out in 64 degree rain at the base of Mt. Le Conte.  The weather was not very pleasing to most, but we found it acceptable given our task ahead.  We gathered our day pack and hiking poles and set out.  We were instantly greeted with the roaring of water rushing down the mountain.  It had rained hard the night previous and the streams had turned quite quickly into rapids.  Noise aside, it still had a musical beauty behind it.

We crossed several bridges, made simply of a log split in half, and then covered with what appeared to be a form of cement.  They all were structurally sound and I found the concept wonderful.

After a short stint of climbing slippery rocks, we arrived at Arch rock.  It was a beautiful cave-like rock with stairs leading through it, hewn into the rock itself.

Miles passed on, and after a mildly easy stretch we arrived at Alum Cave.  Standing tall and ominous, Alum Cave laid before us as we stared agape at it’s beauty.  This clearly was a  turnaround point for most day hikers, as well as a rest stop for those pressing through.  We sat beneath it’s dark wonderment and regained our senses, refueling our thirst and having a quick snack.  There were several other groups doing the same.

We gathered up our things and set out again, this time newly recharged.  The trail went up for a short time, then dropped back down again, leaving us wondering if we had perhaps taken a wrong turn somewhere.  The views along the side of the mountain are beyond describing with words.  Although at this point we were into the deep mist of the Smokey Mountains, we could look down and see the shadowed silhouettes of other tree lines, far below us.  The temperature had also began to drop.

We continued on, with the trail raising steeper and steeper.  The air was also beginning to thin, and the visibility was low with the fog, clouds, and mist.  We slowed our climb, and took each leg of the trail with careful accuracy and deliberation.  We took several breaks, needless to say.

Eventually the trail leveled out and we found ourselves at the Mt. Le Conte Lodge.  We were greeted by a very friendly and informative park ranger, as well as dozens of other hikers and backpackers.  The lodge has a very long history that I will not get into in this review, but I suggest you take a moment to look it up as it is very interested.  The lodge even today is resupplied via Llamas, even the mail!

We looked through the history of the lodge, as well as purchased a few shirts and patches before wandering over to the dining lodge.  The beautiful wooden lodge was surrounded by oil lamps, as there is no electricity at the mountain’s summit, and the entire place has an air of nostalgia.  We purchased a sack lunch for $9.00, and I am here to tell you, that is the BEST nine bucks I’ve ever spent.  Inside the wondrous sack-lunch-of-holding was a bagel with cream cheese, a small summer sausage, applesauce, cookies, trail mix, and some Gatorade electrolyte mix.  Sweet nectar of the gods.  It also came with bottomless coffee or hot chocolate, which has got to be the BEST coffee I’ve ever had above 6500 ft.  This could also be because the temperature had dropped nearly 20 degrees and we could now see our breath.

With our biblical ambrosia in our stomachs, we set out on our decent back down the mountain with a newfound spring in our step.  The climb down was easy, although slippery with the water still running down the mountainside.  We passed and followed several dozen friendly fellow hikers and eventually made it back to the trailhead without much incident.  We were left with a Greek-like feeling of accomplishment, as if we ourselves were Zeus climbing down from Olympus.  I would suggest this hike to anyone with a few hard hikes under their belt, but the stress is but a minor bump in the mountain of beauty and majesty.

Pictures can be found HERE

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