Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.
Went on a little geocaching the other day. Gave me a chance to try out the Blackhawk Hydrastorm Predator that I picked up a few weeks ago. I've lately come to eschew Blackhawk gear for its Made-In-Vietnam angle, but I'd already plunked the money down on this thing so I'll go ahead and use it. The bladder features a seam running down the middle which effectively forms two channels for liquid to fill…what this does is keep the bladder from blowing up like a balloon. nice touch. The new Bite Me valve did seem nicer than the Camelbak's and it definitely delivered more water. Shoulder straps were comfortable and generally the product performed well. Some sort of retainer for the tube would have been nice to keep it from flopping around but thats a quick fix with a rubber band or spring clip.
My GPS uses 4 AA batts, like many other GPS. I stuffed mine with lithium batts since the GPS sits idle for long periods of time and that can sometimes be a drag on regular batts. I think I put those lithiums in three years ago and I now finally need to swap them out. So, with infrequent use, three years out of the lithium batteries. More expensive up front, but worth it.
Cant say enough about UTM. Some people still want to use the long/lat hour-minute units. This is fine until you get a question like how far is a minute? A degree? An hour? With UTM you subtract one number from the other number and thats your distance in meters. Piece of cake. Where its really, really handy is for using pythagoreum (sp?) theory to figure your distance. Take your location on a map and draw a dot, draw a dot at your target location. Draw a line between the two. Draw a triangle so that the line you drew is the long leg of a right triangle. (a^2) + (b^2) = (c^2), right? So measure leg a, leg b and do some math and you know exactly how long leg c, the line you drew, is. Try that with degrees sometime.
Other gear this trip:
UM84 holster for the Glock 17 – Good protection, easy attachment to belt, protects gun nicely. Good holster.
Boonie hat – run that baby though a stream, shake excess water off, put hat on head and brace for the glacial cold that will wash over you. And it keeps the sun out of your eyes to boot.
Motorola radios – Litte Talkabouts came in handy. I crossed the stream and hunted for a trail on the one side while the girlfriend waited on the other and I could let her know what was going on. Handy that.
There was also sundry gear that was taken that simply wasnt used so I wont go into any detail on that.
The trails immediately split right at the trailhead and I think we took the wrong one which is why we didnt find the cache we were looking for. Next time we'll take the fork on the right and see what happens.
