Return to Main Gear Page.
Return to Beyond Spec Home.

The space blanket hooch in it's simplest incarnation: Snoozing out the
passage of thunder cells on a wildfire near Livengood, Alaska.

SHELTER BASICS: A tarp-weight space blanket can be used to construct a number of personal shelter options. The most useful addition for this is lengths of cord attached at multiple corners. Space blankets also come in square and rectangular shapes. The larger, symetrical shape of the square blankets makes them more versatile, but rectangular blankets are lighter-weight options when your only concern is a sleeping arrangement. Be forewarned: space blankets are not made for durability, and they will eventually fray, tear, or delaminate after repeated heavy use.

• Rainshelter. Using strings at the corner and/or side grommets, string the space blanket up so that water drains off it. There are many possible configurations. The key points: make sure you have enough space to lounge underneath it, and make sure the water drains to a place where it won't flow into the shelter. A single space blanket rainshelter often accomodates several people, and perhaps a small fire.
• Sunshelter. The principle is the same as with the rainshelter, but turning the silver side up ensures that sunlight is reflected away, making it cooler underneath.
• Heat Reflector. In a firecamping situation, comfort can be drastically improved by stringing the space blanket up behind you as a heat reflector, silver side face towards the fire, and sitting or lying on the remaining flap. For best results, another heat reflector of some sort (wall, cliff, tarp, hide) should be positioned on the other side of the fire. Beware: embers can burn holes in your space blanket.
  
• Raingear. Clasp the space blanket over your shoulders, keeping a corner extended over the top of your head, and letting the opposit corner trail down the back of your legs. This works well with a square space blanket.
  
• Bivouac Burrito. Don all your clothes and wrap the space blanket completely around you, silver side in. This made more effect by securing the edges together by tape or "sewing" with regular knife-cuts and a long piece of string. Expect your feet to stick out the bottom.
• Groundsheet. Use the space blanket as a tarp.
• Signaling Device. Both solid-color and silvered sides of space blankets are excellent aircraft signaling panels. For this reason, carrying a bright color blanket (such as red) may be advisable. You can lay the blanket out in a clearing. If you need to signal ground personnel, you can string the blanket up in trees or on a steep slope. An 8'x8' blanket is visible from a surprising distance. Aircraft may spot it from miles away.
  
• Personal Heat Chimney. Build a fire. Wrap the space blanket around you like a cone. Stand over the fire, funneling heat up through the cone. WARM!

Return to top.

Syrup Bottles. Plastic syrup bottles often have a slim profile, an integrated handle, and an unscrewable squeeze-nozzle. As a result, they're easy to stuff in pack, you can hook them on the exterior without modification, and you can either squirt water in your mouth or - where water is scarce - actually suction up shallow water sources. They're durable, too. We like'em!

Sports Drink Bottles (Gatorade etc.) Sports drink bottles often have a large volume, a wide mouth, and grippy, ridged sides. The wide mouth is nice for both filling and drinking, but these bottles have never really caught on with us. The squat shape just doesn't pack gracefully.

Bottled Water & Soda Plastic Bottles. These bottles lack tje large mouths and bizarre styling of sports drink bottles. For us, the big selling point is that you can get bottled water bottles in the 500ml size, which makes them very small and handy to stick just about anywhere in your stuff, or in a pocket. In a very wet climate, 2 500ml bottles is more than adequate for us.

The Big Jugs. 1-gallon Milk jugs, juice jugs, and large soda bottles all have their charms. For ease, we definitely prefer those with handles, and if you want to know exactly how much water you have, opt for a clear or semi-transparent jug. You can also use these big jugs to settle particulates out of your water, for which purpose you'll want some transparency, as well.

Franzia Winebags. Franzia, the Wine-in-a-Box, comes in various sizes (up to 7 liters?), all of which make excellent waterbags. I found them reasonably puncture-resistant. If you drink rotgut and want a large-volume collabsable waterbag for hiking, consider Franzia. If you don’t drink rotgut, convince your friends to do so. The resulting receptacle is larger than many off-the-shelf hydration bags and rolls up smaller, at a slight loss in durability. For on-the-Road Waterbag Protection, simply store your full waterbag inside a stuff sack. If you wish, you can cut a small hole in the bottom of a stuff sack, and then reinforce its edges, either by heat-sealing, sewing, or taping around the hole. The stuff sack will still function, and it will also have a spigot-hole. Franzia makes all its winesacks with silvered exterior, which reflects sunlight. This is nice if you want a cold drink in the desert, but not good for setting your water out sunbathing if its chilly out. Write to Franzia and demand they make black winebags, too.

Plastic Bags. We kid you not. In a pinch, you can put a plastic bag inside a stronger bag - a stuff sack, for instance - fill it up with water, and tie it off. The British SAS pioneered a striking version of this: fill an unlubricated condom with water, tie it off, put it in a sock, and hang the sock from your belt.

Return to top.

When we do purify, we use one of the following solutions to biological contamination:

• Boiling. Boiling water kills microbes. The pot is the key item. We'll generally bring the water to a rolling boil, then let it cool. Boiling is time consuming and requires a heat source.
• Iodine Tablets. Many people don't like the taste of iodine, but we don't mind it, and iodine is good at purifying water. We recommend Potable Aqua. You can add in flavor-neutralizing tablets after the water is purified, if you like.
• Liquid Iodine. You can also purify your water using a liquid iodine solution, although you'll need to research the dosage.
• Polar Pure. Polar Pure, to the best of our knowledge, is no longer made. It consists of a small bottle full of tiny iodine crystals held inside by a particle trap. You fill the bottle with water, and iodine dissolves into solution. A few capfuls per quart is enough to purify your water, and then you fill up the bottle again. You could make your own Polar Pure-type system with the right bottle, a supply of suitable iodine crystals, and a good grasp of the chemistry. Be sure you know what you're doing: you don't want to injest crystaline iodine or get your %-solution too far off the mark.
• Bleach. Bleach, a.k.a. Sodium Hypochloride, is another means of purifying water. We've met Brits with little commercial water-purification bleach bottles, but never seen them in the United States. At this time, we don't feel comfortable giving internet advice about how much bleach to put in your tea, but the information is out there.
• Water Filters. We don't know much about these, although there are some cool in-bottle water filters on the market. We're chemical people.

You can also settle the water in a large jug or plastic bag, or filter it with home-made contraption. The simplest home-filter is a bandana or other cloth item. To make a more elaborate filter, layer over your cloth filter with non-toxic grass, charcoal, and sand, then pour the water through this device. Stuffing the latter three in a cut-off 500ml bottled water bottle is a great way to make a quick-and-dirty funnel-filter.

CHEMICAL TOXINS
Charcoal possesses some chemical-filtering properties, but the best defense against chemical toxins is careful selection of your water source. Be alert to oily surface sheen, strange coloration, or unusual odor. If a water source gives a rash or other skin irritation, treat it as suspect. Consider what's upstream of you: mining country? Heavy industry? Agribusiness?

Return to top.

1. Electrial lights all break, eventually.
2. If they don't break, they run out batteries.
3. Or we drop them at inopportune times.
4. Lights ruin our nightvision. Lights ruin our ability to gather visual information from beyond their scope of illumination. Note that red & blue lights seem to do a much better job of preserving our nightvision, and we recommend them.
5. They diminish our awareness horizon. The effects of a light are psychological as well as optical. With a light on, it's easy to get tunnel vision. You stop scanning your environment with multiple senses, at multiple ranges.
6. Nocturnal travel is a skill. Navigating through darkness may sometime be a life-preserving skill for any of us, and it takes practice.

The Cop Light. A 4 or 6 D-Cell Mag Light is a great expedient spotlight. Although we don't recommend it for foot travel, it can be real handy on river or road trips. Incandescent Headlamps. We've mainly used petzl and black diamond incandescent headlamps, and we've never been stunned by their waterpoofing, but they seem to handle rain well enough. Although LED lights have a longer life, the spotlight powers of an incandescent are sometimes very valuable, especially if you need to assess hazards or judge distances at night.

The Petzl Tika (LED). We like it: 50+ hours of light on 3 AAA batteries. One of the most awkward parts of Tika is that AAA bats seem to always come in 4-packs, which means there's one odd battery we always lose, since nothing else we own runs on AAA. We've seen a Tika survive a full roll in a kayak, and stay functional. Ove 2 years, one of ours has, however, developed an ongoing flicker.

Pocket LED Lights. (Photon brand, etc.) These things are definitely nice, and they're very lightweight. It's good to have a couple: one white for serious illumination, and one red to preserve your nightvision. They can clip onto knife lanyards, zippers, key rings, and so forth, and their lifespan is long. They are not, however, all that waterproof, and we haven't found a way to solve this problem satisfactorily. You can coat one's seams with sealant, but the seal is broken when you depress the light-button the first time. Possbile solutions include coating the inner workings with grease, beeswax, or silicone, but we haven't gotten around to these hair-brained experiments yet.

Mini Mag Light. Smaller Mag Light flashlights have a charm that sometimes outshines headlamps for us. There are no wires or straps to run afoul of, and the whole package is sleek, high-impact, and easy to carry. You can attach a lanyard, or wrap the base in duct tape so you can hold the light in your teeth. You can also get - or make - a head strap so you can wear your flashlight on the side of your head, like a headlamp.

Mag Light Solitaire. We've also used the single AAA size Mag Light, which is fairly small and light.

Return to top.

Duct Tape Duct tape is the most versatile tape we've found. Its width, adhesion, flexibility, tearability, and waterproof surface all make it desirable. We've used it as waterproofing, repair, fabrication, and first aid. You can also used it as a firestarter, but it smells horrible and probably releases all sorts of hideous chemicals in the air. Not that we've looked, but there are probably whole websites dedicated to duct tape endevours.

Athletic/Medical Tape Cloth athletic-style tape has many of the perks of duct tape, but it's less adhesive, it's not waterproof and isn't a useful firestarter. It's narrower, making it less uesful for fabrication. This tape is, however, our favorite for first aid applications, which it's made for.

Electrical Tape Electrical tape is composed of an elastic, unfiorm synthetic that is slick on one side and coated with adhesive on the other. It is also very narrow, and generally requires a knife or scissors, since it doesn't rip. We haven't found electrical tape very useful in the field, but it works well for wrapping knife handles.

Fiberglass Tape Fiberglass tape is composed of long fiberglass strands in a plastic sheet of tape. Fiberglass tape's primary merit is that it is EXTREMELY strong. If your main application is heavy lashing, consider 1" fiberglass tape. You will need a sharp edge or heat source to cut it.

Return to top.

Inflatable Mattress
Over the years, we've used and abused numerous inflatable mattresses, all of the Therm-a-Rest brand. We've also found some great unintended uses for them. Air mattresses are lightweight and provide excellant insulation, but they're more vulnerable than foam pads. They are most useful on snow, rock, and bare earth. Thick dry tundra, long-grass prairie, and deciduous forests in autumn are some environments where nature provides plenty of ground insulation.

Most air mattress failures come in the form of punctures. Beware of getting your air mattress too close to fire or other heat source: the glue holding the mattress layers together can melt, leading to huge blisters that make for an uncomfortable night.

ALTERNATIVE USES OF THE AIR MATTRESS

• Torso Insulation. An air mattress can be wrapped aroudn the chest and hips, secured (such as by wearing a coat over it), and partially inflated.
• Life Preserver. Wrap an air mattress around your chest, partialy inflate it, and cover it with a zipped raincoat or other capturing garmet. The mattress provides adequate flotation for river running and/or water crossings. A belt or coat-bottom drawstring can help keep the mattress in place if you go upside down. We highly recommend using a 1/2 or 3/4 length mattress instead of a full-body size. Do not forget to partially inflate the mattress.
• Pack Frame. Inside a large, frameless pack, a slightly inflated air mattress gives a great dead of comfort and support. It can also be arranged an inflated to protect fragile items, like cameras.
• Splint. An air mattress is a passable means of supporting a broken limb, although we like closed-cell foam pads better for this. Air volume can be adjusted to the patient's support and comfort needs, and the mattress will comform to their limb(s).
• Sled We have not gone sledding on our mattresses, but don't think it's because we're afraid. Because we're not.

Return to top.

• Foam pads don't pop. You cannot accidentaly deflate your foam pad.
• Foam pads are cheap.
• Foam pads can be custom-shaped. You can shape your pad to your body.
• Foam pads can be cannibalized. You can cut pieces off your sleeping pad and make other things with, if necessary. An old foam pad is a great source of water bottle insulation, case padding, and magic hat material.

• Foam pads are mediocre torso insulators.
• Foam pads are less buoyant. They provide less life buoyancy as life preservers.
• Foam pads aren't as warm and comfortable.
• Foam pads don't pack as well. Brush grabs at them if you carry them exterior. Wind can also suck them out of the top flap of your pack.
• In a 60+ mph gust, it's amazing the ridge a foam pad can crest in under 5 seconds.

Return to top.

• Skin Protection. Nothing ruins our fun faster than pain and bleeding from our extremities. With leather or neoprene gloves, you can smear balm inside the gloves, so it constantly re-coats your hands. The chief author uses this technique on wildfires as a way to counter the drying, acrid effects of wood ash. Bag balm is also useful at preventing chafe.
• Ghetto Waterproofing. Bag balm and similar oil-based compounds are naturally water repellant. They can be used as expedient waterproofing for boots, seams, and so forth.
• Sealant. Bag balm's viscosity also makes it useful for sealing leaky valves.
• Leather Protectant. The balm makes a good quick-and-dirty leather protectant.
• Insulation. As open water swimmers can attest, any greasy substance liberally applied over the skin can take the bite off cold water.
• Hair Sculpting. Beyond Spec's Electrician, Jeff Anderson, likes to put lotion in his hair. Why, we don't know, but if he put bag balm in his hair, it would be ten times better! It's sculpting and reflective qualities are fabulous. We have yet to convince him to do this, but if you should see him, put in a good word. Send photos.

Alternatives to Bag Balm. Beyond Spec’s Staff Cosmetologist has been looking for a all-natural alternative to petroleum products. Currently, he’s experimenting with Obenauf’s Boot Grease. Manufactured for wildland firefighters, Obenauf’s is a blend of beeswax and propolis. Preliminary results look good. You can also try Sno-Seal.

Return to top.

Parachute Cord

Parachute cord is cheap, strong nylon cord. Constructed of an external sheath around a number of interior strands, P-cord was originaly designed to make the suspension lines of parachutes, for which it is still often used. P-cord has a breaking strength of approximately 400 lbs. In a pinch, you can pull out the interior strands, and use them as thread. Gutted, the sheath as serves well as replacement shoelaces. After cutting the ends of P-cord, consider melting explosed fibers on each end, as a way to prevent fraying.

P-cord can withstand great abrasion and stress, but is still easily cut with a knife. It's an excellant all-around cord, and it's cheap.

Return to top.

Return to top.