My favorite hiking notebook is the Rite in the Rain 371FX-M. It weighs 20 grams, fits in my shirt pocket, and works fine when soaked with rain (or sweat).
Here are a couple of them that have been on a few treks.
Rite in the Rain Notebooks
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Monthly Archives: December 2014
The Scoutmaster Load
Pop over to the Gossamer Gear blog to read my article about the load that Scoutmasters carry. The real load is responsibility, but you can respond to it with gear or with training. One of them weighs less on the scale.
Ten Essential Skills
Gear without skills is dead weight. In 2010, The Mountaineers revised the Ten Essentials for a list of items to a list of functional systems. What skills are needed to actually use these essentials?
The New Ten Essentials—A Systems Approach was published in Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills, 8th Edition. The list was first formulated in the 1930’s as a tool to increase safety for climbers on Mount Rainier.
Italic
Every December, I break out the Speedball italic nib and the Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bombay Red india ink. I tried a few too many inks until I found one that was Christmas red and sufficiently opaque.
My lettering isn’t great, but people give a fair amount of slack for hand-lettered gift tags.
Flickery Flame Kit for Electronics Merit Badge
This looks like a great kit for Electronics merit badge. If I count correctly, it has 26 through-hole solder joints. Half the components are resistors, which work even if you put them in backwards.
The result is an LED-powered flame-like flickering light. I am pretty sure this is a “control device circuit”, as described in requirement 4a.
The kit is around $6, depending on how many you order. Check out the Evil Mad Scientist Flickery Flame Soldering Kit.
There is also a Solderless Flickery Flame Kit for around $9. But where is the fun in that?
Gossamer Gear Riksak at Philmont
A daypack is pretty useful on a Philmont trek, but only if it is really light. The Gossamer Gear Riksak is 2.9 ounces and doubles as a stuff sack. It is made of silnylon and costs $30.
Most Casual Observer 