My Alcohol Stove & Trail Cooking System

Several people have sent me e-mails asking about my backpacking cooking system and what I use or take with me.  There also seems to be general level of interest among us to know more about what others carry and why.  Fair enough.

Like all of you, my cooking system has evolved over time and through trial and error to the system and set-up that I currently have. I like what I have now and it seems to suit my needs perfectly which for the most part is boiling water to rehydrate food (freezer bag cooking) or making hot drinks of coffee, tea, cocoa.  Below is a picture of my current cooking "system".



The whole cooking system above weighs 12.375oz  - let's break it down piece by piece:

1. This is a pot cozy that I made using Reflectix insulation wrap and foil tape. It weighs a mere 0.75oz but helps the pot maintain heat for a really long time after a boil without the need to keep my alcohol stove running. Great for those cold mornings when I make hot granola and coffee
2. My trusty GSI Soloist pot and Lexan lid. This isn't the lightest of cook pots but it certainly is a great  one for the price. The Soloist kit comes with the cup/bowl (item #7) and a carry bag that I rarely use. The combined weight for pot and lid only is 7.625oz (pot = 6.75oz, lid = 0.875oz). I love the solid snapping handle on this pot that has never come loose on me and serves as a great lid holder when the whole kit is stacked back together
3. Home-made aluminum wind shield. I sacrifice a little weight here in order to have a heavier gauge aluminum material and some additional length to make sure I can wrap it around my pot and stove when cooking. Weight is 0.125oz
4. My home-made single piece aluminum beer bottle alcohol stove that weighs 0.875oz. This is one that I made using the manual method shown by Tinny at MiniBullDesigns as part of his two-part BIOS video demo. Nothing new here, just my version of his design, made at home with some basic machining tools and a one-tonne press that I have. There is a more detailed picture of this stove below. This thing is rock solid, I can stand on it and it won't deform. It's also ultra reliable needing just 2oz of fuel and a flame to work every time. I can boil two cups of cold water on this stove in under 5 minutes, and the stove is consistently primed and plumed in 15-20 seconds
5. A small plastic measuring cup (0.0625oz) that I use to ration out my denatured alcohol. Not a necessity but very handy to keep burn times consistent. Alternatively I could make marks on the inside of my stove to correspond to the levels of fuel I need - just have never got round to doing that
   
6. A quarter of a Scotchbrite scrubbing sponge 0.125oz. This is used with a little CampSuds to clean my cooking utensils when necessary - very handy!
7. The GSI Soloist cup/bowl that comes with #2. Separately it weighs 1.5oz including the heat protective cozy that is wrapped around it. The Lexan pot lid will snap into this upside down and make a spill-proof container or strainer
8. Trail Designs Prime-Lite aluminum alcohol stove primer pan, 0.25oz. I used to carry a leftover piece of one of the aluminum beer bottles flattened out as a primer pan. That worked perfectly, but this cool little primer pan from Trail Designs is really nicely made. It has a ridged ring in the center that keeps most alcohol stoves (the one I show here and most soda can stoves) neatly in place. It also has an outer ridge to contain a small amount of fuel to prime the stove and three small dimpled feet that raise the pan off the ground slightly.  Simple but very effective
   

Here is a much larger picture of my single-piece aluminum beer bottle alcohol stove. It's made by taking one of the new style aluminum beer bottles, cutting off the bottom three and half inches and using a one-ton press and mold to invert the walls and make a double walled stove. It sounds complicated, but it's not. However it is especially difficult without a strong machine press.  Tinny at MiniBullDesigns who created this design (called a BIOS) has a great video on YouTube that shows exactly how it's done. That's how I did it. The flame ring holes are drilled using a 1/16th bit taking care that you don't go all the way through both walls. Two small inner pressure release holes are drilled to help equalize the pressure when the pot is placed on top. As you can see it sits perfectly in the Prime-Lite primer pan.



And below is the whole cooking system closed up inside the GSI Soloist pot with the handles snapped over to keep the lid on top and everything in place. The pot is then slotted down inside the Reflectix pot cozy to make a neat single cooking package.

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I love my StickPic!

I took my StickPic with me on the last backpacking trip I went on to deliberately take some photos and video using it on the end of my REI trekking poles. I've had it for quite some time and have forgotten to carry it with me, or on several occassions that I have taken it I've ended up not taking my poles - crazy I know.

Well the stars (and my memory) seem to have been in alignment for my last trip because I took the StickPic, my poles, and actually used both to take some very interesting looking videos.

For those of you that are not familiar with the StickPic I suggest you check it out. You'll wish you could have come up with such a simple yet ingenious idea as this. It's beautifully designed and just works! The idea is it screws to the tripod holes on your camera and then slides onto the end of your trekking pole with a snug friction fit. You then hold the pole out in front of you and use you timer setting or video option to take pictures from a perspective that puts you directly in the shot. It's a lot of fun. Here's a clip that was taken on my last trip using the StickPic.

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The Great Sleeping Pad Dilema

My last backpacking trip made up my mind that the self-inflating sleeping pad that I am using is an enormous pain in the butt to stay on top of at night. I figured out that the main reason I have been getting a restless night’s sleep is because I keep waking up to try and maneuver myself back onto the sleeping pad, which when I’m wrapped up snug inside my sleeping bag is an exercise in futility.

The pad I have been using is the REI Lite-Core self-inflating pad (regular size) which weighs less than 2 pounds and rolls up into an ultra compact size. For the most part I love this pad, it’s just impossible to sleep on top of without coming off – which is a significant problem as that’s the sole purpose of the pad! I’ve even tried putting the pad inside my sleeping bag which wasn’t very pleasant and didn’t help with ground insulation, but did stay under me all night. Needless to say I’m not willing to do that again. I’ve also used my friend’s BigAgnes inflatable pad, which is better and bigger than my REI Lite Core but still very hard to stay on.

So what are my options? No pads, foam pads?



I’m thinking of purchasing a Therm-a-Rest Z-Lite closed-cell foam pad and using that on my next few trips. It’s about half the price of the REI Lite Core, easily half the weight, and I don’t have to worry about getting a puncture. In fact the only downside I can think of is the size when it’s folded up, it’s definitely going to have to go on the outside of my pack – but I can think of some good points to that, such as being able to use it seat or sitting pad to keep my butt dry can clean at stops and the bright color will work in my favor to serve as a perfect warning to nearby hunters.

A lot of backpackers have different types and thickness pads for different seasons. So a foam pad would be a good thing to have handy with minimal investment. I also think it would work quite well inside my Hennessy Hammock Expedition Asym, but I’ll let you know how that goes. It may sound good in theory but work poorly in practice, hence the importance of continual practice hikes to familiarize yourself with you gear and find out what works and what doesn’t work before you head off on a multi-night.

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Gravity Water Filter

Usually when I go hiking I take along my portable Katadyn Guide water pump and use it to fill up one or two 2-liter Platypus bags for later drinking. While the Katadyn works extremely well and I’ve never experienced any problems resulting from the water I’ve pumped and later consumed, I’ve noticed that it is by far one of the heaviest pieces of gear that I carry when backpacking. My friend Andy has the Katadyn Hiker version which is more compact and equally as reliable, but still on the heavy side. I wanted a better, lighter solution.

Recently I’ve been taking along my home-made portable gravity water filtration system based on the one designed by Jason Klass. It uses an inexpensive Aquamira Frontier Pro water filter, Micropur water purification tablets, some tubing, and two Platypus 2-liter bags. Even combined it’s very light weight and has the advantage of being flexible enough to be used in different ways other than just for a gravity filter – for example I can use the clean bag and the tube as my hydration pack, or I can use the Aquamira and the bite valve to drink directly from a stream or water bottle of dirty water – the gravity filter is just an easy way to go UL and let the water’s own weight do the work for me while I go off and do other things. Below is a picture of the basic setup that I used during a backpacking trip this past weekend.

There are two Platypus bags used for this, one for dirty water (from the lake, creek, stream, wherever) and one for clean water. It’s very important that you clearly mark which bag (and cap) is for the dirty water so that you never use them the wrong way round. You should be able to see some large XXXs marked on the top (dirty) bag in the picture, the lid also has a large X on it. Once the dirty bag has been filled with water from the creek or stream, drop in two (one for every liter) Micropur water purification tablets and wait 20 – 30 mins. The Aquamira filter will filter out all of the nasty stuff down to 2 microns [edit: 3 microns], but just to be safe the Micropur tablets will kill all of the smaller stuff that’s lurking around in the water.

The Aquamira is designed to screw directly onto a standard bottle sized opening and fits snuggly onto the Platypus (dirty) bag. I remove the bite valve that comes as standard on the Aquamira filter and use the plastic tubing from my hydration pack (minus the bite valve is uses) to connect from the Aquamira to the second (clean) Platypus bag. The dirty bag has a little Kelty Triptease cord ties to it so that is can be hanged from a branch or notch. Now all that is left is to hand the dirty bag and wait for gravity to do the work. It took just under 14 minutes for all two liters of water to pass through the filter, which as it turned out was barely enough time to go throw the ball for Coco a few times :)

The result was two liters of crystal clear ice-cold refreshing water that had no taste of the purification tablets. There are many commercial gravity water filtration systems out there, including the Platypus one I blogged about recently, but most are expensive and use filters that cost almost as much as the whole device to replace. The system that Jason has devised and that I now use is cheap (~$40) and uses the Aquamira Frontier Pro as the workhorse which is good for 50 gallons of filtering and costs $20 to replace, other than the Micropur tablets, the other components should last a very long time if taken care of.

It’s very satisfying to come up with a better solution to an old problem. Even though this was dreamed up by Jason, I’m very pleased with how I’ve put mine together and how it has turned out to be a first class gravity filtration system. I hope you find this useful and be sure to check out Jason’s video.

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Hiking with Coco

I just got back from a weekend backpacking trip to South Mountain (NC) with my chocolate lab, Coco, best friend Andy, and his son Logan. We had fantastic weather and a lot of fun (video clips to follow soon). Here's a great picture of me and Coco stopping to pose in front of the mountains - what a beautiful background (see my updated blog banner?). Notice too how Coco is wearing her Kelty K-9 Chuckwagon pack. She carried in all her gear and food and carried out all her trash.

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