Dynafit Traverse Gore-Tex® Jacket Review
Dynafit, a company with a long history serving serious athletes with performance gear and apparel, calls its brand new Traverse GTX Jacket “one of the[Read More…]
Articles by: Cheryl Talbert
NZ Part 6 – Circling Mount Doom on the Tongariro Northern Circuit, New Zealand
Only the fourth national park established in the world, Tongariro sits at the south-west terminus of a 1600-mile-long string of volcanoes on the boundary of the Indo-Australian and Pacific plates, on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”. The boundary of the park encircles the active Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro volcanoes, with two smaller dormant cones outside the park just to the north and huge Mt Taranaki in view 130 miles to the southwest.
NZ Part 5- In the Center of Nature’s Flow in Aoraki – Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand
Never in my life have I felt more in the center of Muir’s flow of nature than from a high windy knob on Ball Ridge under the vertical Caroline Face of New Zealand’s highest peak, Aoraki/Mount Cook.
NZ Part 4 – Tramping Above the Clouds on the Routeburn Track
We were on day two of the Routeburn Track, our group’s consensus favorite of the eight different extended trails, from the southern to northern ends of the country, that we would sample during our month-long trekking trip in February of 2013.
Safe Preparation and Storage of Home-Dehydrated Meals
In my last article, “Tasty Alternatives to Freeze-Dried Trail Meals,” I advocated getting busy over the winter season to prepare your next season’s backpacking dinners using your favorite home comfort-food recipes and some simple methods with a home dehydrator. When we talk about this in my backpacking food prep classes, many of my students ask about how to store their dehydrated food safely over the intervening months.
NZ Part 3 – Milford Track
In places the green “skin” has sloughed off, leaving stark scars on the cliff face. This is the visual extravaganza offered up all along the Milford Track, the most iconic extended walking trail in New Zealand.
Tasty Alternatives to Freeze Dried Meals
With a little practice, I’ve found that you can take leftovers from many of your favorite recipes – meals that you’ve already made for your dinner – and adapt them so that you just pop them in the dehydrator overnight and bingo! By morning they’re ready to bag up in a Ziploc to store for next summer’s expeditions.
NZ Part 2 – A Multi-Course Feast on the Hump Ridge Track, Southern Fiordland, New Zealand
Limestone tors, black and lichen-speckled earth-bones, loomed over the choppy water of the several tarns scattered around us on the ridge. We were enraptured. This was the crux of the Hump Ridge, a southernmost promontory of the 450-mile-long Southern Alps of New Zealand in Fiordland National Park, and the goal of the first trekking day of a month-long, multi-trek itinerary that would stretch from the upper end of the North Island to the far south of the South Island.
NZ Part 1 – Why New Zealand?
New Zealand delivers this with great amenities for backpackers. Their extensive backcountry hut system affords inexpensive comforts and international camaraderie throughout the countryside (you could sleep in a hut bed every night even on the remotest of tracks).
Devils Dome Loop
We climbed up and up, the vistas unfolding, the massive glaciered crag of Jack Mountain – the “King of the Skagit” – revealing itself close enough to touch, the Picket Range and Mount Baker gathering up the thunder clouds on their crests to the far west. This is what calls me to the wilderness, the power to amaze and dwarf my mind and re-awaken my sense of wonder. Our little group spread out across the top of Devil’s Dome to turn around and around and around – no way to capture the breadth and depth of it.
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