News / Gear

It’s that time of year again when we are running around grabbing gifts and stocking stuffers for our co-workers, friends, and family. It can be a stressful time so we put together a list of five awesome presents under twenty dollars that your outdoor people will love and use! After all what a better gift than making their experience outdoors a little more comfortable and safe.

“This patch is used an emergency call book. Reference it to hail assistance on emergency  radio frequencies and channels. 4 helpful contact telephone numbers are included in the event of an emergency. The lower half of the patch contains a fill-in-the-blank ICE (In-Case-of-Emergency) Card. This information is referred to by first responders in the event of an accident so that family can be contacted. It will also provide medical services with your blood type and known allergies”. – Super ESSE

I woke up early-ish, after a few cold spots during the night I really didn’t want to get out of my bag, I was comfortable. Eventually though the sun crested, and I started to get a little too warm, nature’s way of saying time to get on the trail. I had a power bar and got my gear together and topped off all my water bottles.

The spirit of adventure and exploration doesn’t have to be super dangerous and difficult sometimes it’s just going a different route or somewhere you have not been before. That’s not to say planning and preparation are not important either. One of the great things about San Diego’s backcountry is an area you have been to many times can still have a few surprises up its sleeve.

Survival Starts at Home: Tools, well there are a million and one ways to address this and I will start off with this one, make sure your tools are in good repair and ready to go. So much of what we do in the outdoors is seasonal and because of that a third of our gear can be shelved for the season at any given time. So, we should be aware that what we need to make sure we might need to keep our backcountry adventures safe and fun might need some periodic maintenance and a check out before we grab it and go.

Survival Starts at Home: Water, we spent an amazing week in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and you can read about it HERE, but it was definitely a stark contrast from the water situation down here in SoCal.

Survival Starts at Home, Shelter; when we are talking “survival” we love to jump right into the worst case and learn the cool skills (which are important) but the true mark of a backcountry pro is not having to use those skills because of things that they can control.

The “fanny pack” is back, and it’s cool again to be able to store extra stuff securely, outdoors people rejoice! I have been using my Vanquest Dendrite Large for a couple months now and am pretty stoked to have something new.

Portable power becomes more and more important in the outdoors as we love to bring our gadgets with us. Some times we might need purpose built but sometimes we can improvise or find solutions that where not designed for the outdoors. This week we have a special guest post from our friend Gregory Parker about the Milwaukee M18 Power Bank: