... Oh, yeah, and I did do a few winter backpacks with Sinar gear, even the 8x10 once, and everything fit, though I'm more comfortable moving around on snowshoes than skis, esp when it comes to trying to compose on rocks or whatever up close. Skis are kinda hard to maneuver with using a big camera. I'm not
much of a skier anyway, and did these trips with my nephew, who is expert. At that time he was working for North Face, who was also sponsoring some of his
climbing expeditions, and he bought one of those first internal-frame teardrop packs. North Face still makes one of the best and most expensive of these. Of course, with these you kinda gotta dig things out, top to bottom, while my traditional Kelty pack allows go to access things easier. So we decided to do a full south to north off-trail "high route" up the Kern, scrambling ridges over 13000 ft etc. Pretty strenuous, but lots of solitude, then we could gun out way back out on the Muir Trail on the return trip. I carried my Sinar F system back then. But he arranged his stuff so that, other than jacket etc, he'd dig down into the pack
sequentially, during the first week. So maybe six days out we finally we camping in the upper reaches of the Kern, slightly below Mt Tyndale, and he encounters
a Duraflame log in the bottom of the pack - a nice extra ten pounds of load! Obviously he was having a fit and knew who did it. I simply replied that we might
need to campfire somewhere. He didn't say anything more. So the next day I hauled that Sinar clear up some peak, arrived back in camp exhausted and started
to crawl in my sleeping bag.... which was full of sticky, pitchy whitebark pine cones.
Bookmarks