Over the past several years through various channels I’ve been fortunate enough to become a part of a great cross-section of people in the Fredericton area dedicated to healthy lifestyles and the pursuit of adventure. This is in no small part due to The Radical Edge and the community they foster in an effort to get people outside, living actively through their mission, events and attitudes. Their staff and customers are some of the best folks around and I’m proud to now call many of them good friends.
Which is why I’m super stoked to announce that I’m now their Giant Bikes Brand Ambassador. I’ve always hoped that by sharing my runs, rides and adventures that it might in some small way inspire others to get out and enrich their lives. Now, along with The Radical Edge and Giant, I hope to inspire even more of you to get out there. If you see me out riding my killer Defy Advanced around, don’t hesitate to say hi and maybe let me bend your ear a bit about how well it rides. Better yet, get yourself into the Rad Edge Westmorland shop and take a Giant, or any other bike they sell, for a spin – they’d love to help you out, make sure and tell ‘em I sent you.
I’ll also be leading a beginner road ride this spring/summer out of the shop, called the Donut Roll, which I’m pretty excited about. Our goal is to give beginning and less-seasoned road riders a ride where they can gain more experience and confidence. We may even get some donuts as well! Further details will be coming on the ride in the near future.
It’s easy these days to get caught up in the push-button ease with which you can get pretty much everything you need online, but there’s always going to be something missing. By supporting local businesses, you not only have an opportunity to get first rate service, but you can build quality relationships with like-minded folks while at the same time helping build and support a community you are actively part of.
Thanks again to Mike, Brian, Cam, Keenan, the other Brian, and all the other great staff at Radical Edge who’ve patiently helped me and also inspired me over the years. Now, LET’S GET OUTSIDE – I hope to see you out there!
So we did a FamJam car-camping trip this weekend and wanted to try out some cooking vs relying on pre-cooked stuff or buying take out.
Initially was going to use the vintage Coleman 2-burner stove gifted to me by my father-in-law, but last week at home I couldn’t get it to fire up, and ran out of time to mess with it.
I’d been into The Radical Edge checking out backpacking stoves and was thinking about buying a MSR Dragonfly to use for family car-camping trips as well as maybe bike camping trips with 3-4 of the kids and was attracted to it’s versatility – small packing size, but still big enough to cook for a larger group – and it simmers. Was hesitant to plunk down the cash on a liquid-fuel stove as I’ve never used one, and luckily enough, Brian mentioned that they rent them – why don’t I just try one out? Bing. Done.
So then I went online searching for recipes – of which there’s bazillions. After pondering the tastes and logistics of various ones, then factoring in ‘will my kids eat it’, I decided to actually just use a recipe that we make often at home on our gas kitchen stove. As we’d be car camping with a cooler for a short period of time, having to cart fresh ingredients and keep them cool wasn’t an issue like it might be on a longer, more minimalistic trip. Sausage and pepper pasta wins the day.
Brian had sent me off with a quick primer on stove use and about 3/4 a container of liquid fuel and assured me that would be plenty. On Friday afternoon before leaving the house I fired up the stove real quick just to make sure I understood it’s operation and called him with a few questions, then packed it up to head out.
Saturday evening was the target cooking evening, which worked out well since there was an open-fire ban on due to weather conditions, so we wouldn’t have been able to cook in the fire pit.
I prepped all my ingredients and fired up the stove. I had a little bit of trouble lighting it at first, I think due to the fact that I hadn’t primed it enough, but eventually got it going. One thing about the stove that set me off at first (and that I actually called about from home) was how loud it is. I was a little bit used to this from using my MSR Micro Rocket stove, but this one is actually considerably louder than that. Once I was assured that, yes, it’s ok if it sounds like jet engine, that’s normal, I got used to it and was actually sure that, no, it’s not going to blow up.
After starting up and getting over the jet engine noise, one thing Lyn commented on was how close the fuel bottle was to the burner. It seemed unnerving that it should be that close to the heat source. I pointed out that the fuel hose was that long so it must be ok, but it did make me wonder though. I would check the side of the bottle with my hand periodically and it wasn’t getting that hot, so I surmised that it must be ok, because it seemed that the majority of the heat from the flame was focused upward, not outward and if the canister needed to be further away, they would have made the fuel line longer. It also occurred to me that in the future I might use the windscreen provided with the stove to keep heat from the canister as well – it wasn’t windy at all that day so I hadn’t thought to use it.
Then I got cooking.
Since I was cooking for 6, I brought pots/pans from home as nothing ‘backpacky’ would hold that much. First up I cooked up my sliced sausage. I found the volume/simmer control on the burner worked really well, allowing me to control the temperature quite precisely. Once my sausage was done, I removed from the pan into another pot, left the burner running, and then dumped my onions and peppers and sautéed those a bit in the same pan. Once they were good to go, I set the whole pan aside and threw on a pot of water.
We were using a big pot from home and making two packages of pasta, so it was a considerable amount of water I needed to get to a boil. The stove took longer than I thought it would to get the water to a boil, and it never got really rolling but it got there. This could have been due to 2 things:
First, I was kinda hesitant to open up the stove full blast, as I wasn’t sure if it should run that long at full tilt or whether that would cause problems.* At this point I’d been running the thing almost half an hour straight. I didn’t know if the burner would take it or not. Also, I was a little leery of how much fuel I was using/if I would run out, but I didn’t really think it was a good idea to pick up the bottle and check it with the stove running, so left it alone, and ran just a little below full blast, thinking it might conserve fuel. (Note, in the end, I probably ran the stove for a little over an hour straight and I think I used about 1/3 of the fuel I had in the bottle.)
Second, if I’d used the windscreen mentioned earlier, even though there was no wind, it probably would have minimized some heat loss and been more efficient at focusing the heat on the pot.
Eventually though, I got my water boiling, dumped in and cooked my pasta. Drained that, dumped in some olive oil, the sausage, peppers, onions and 2 cans of diced tomatoes and then simmered/mixed it all again for a few minutes to make sure it was all hot to serve.
Dumped into some ‘bowls’, topped with parmesan and was good to go. Everyone said it was as good as home. Even if they hadn’t, 2-3 servings each said so anyway. We had brought some bread that we were gonna do up with garlic and cheese to make garlic bread in a foil packet on the fire pit while we cooked, but due to the fire ban, we just ate the bread with butter instead.
Overall, I was really happy with the stove and will probably pick one up at some point in the future. Though the drawback compared to something like the Coleman is that you only have one burner to cook with, there’s really no comparison, since they’re two different kinds of stoves. The Dragonfly is way more packable, yet still delivers a huge punch and excellent heat control and could easily be supplemented with either another Dragonfly, another burner stove, or the Coleman itself. As far as what I’m looking for, it would be a great addition to our family gear as something that could be used in tandem with the Coleman or as a stand-alone stove for more minimal outings.
*When returning the stove, my buddy at the shop confirmed that the Dragonfly is an 'expedition level' stove commonly used at places like basecamps and such, often for extended periods to boil copious amounts of water for camp. He said running it full bore, even through a whole canister of fuel shouldn't be an issue.
Yesterday, quite on a lark, I was able to have a great conversation with adventure cyclist Ryan Correy about bikepacking and the Tour Divide.
My LBS, The Radical Edge, posted on Facebook a couple of days back that they were having a rep from Hammer Nutrition come out to talk about their stuff and I mostly glossed over it as I pretty much chalk that stuff up to the uber tri-geeks and the Hammerheads out there. Yesterday though, they posted again saying that Ryan would be the one coming and would be giving the talk. As fate would have it, I was able to drop Julia off at soccer practice just in time to swing by the shop and check things out.
You can learn more about Ryan’s exploits at his website, but suffice to say dude has ridden some bike. Started at 13 with a cross-Canada tour with his dad and went from there. A tour from Alaska to Argentina. The Race Across America, and two finishes in the Tour Divide, the most recent just wrapping up last week on Canada Day.
He was there to do his ‘day job’ and speak to the tri and endurance racers about Hammer’s products – which I did find interesting and enlightening – but even cooler than that, I was able to talk to him – and his fiancee Sarah – for about a 1/2 hour prior, one-on-one, and barrage him with questions about the Tour Divide.
It was so cool to be able to actually talk to someone that’s done this event vs. read articles and interviews on the internet.
He had his rig there that he’d ridden on the Tour Divide and I snapped a photo of it, but I was so busy fanboy-ing out that it didn’t occur to me to actually move it to a not so cluttered background, so it kinda sucks. I was very much in a 14-year-old oh-my-god-this-bike(and this GUY)-did-the-Divide-TWICE kind of mode.
Ryan has written a book that’s just come out about his adventures on the bike. A Purpose Ridden details not only his 2012 Divide ride, but his other rides and his beginnings with his dad. I picked up a copy and I look forward to checking it out. One of the things I’ve always been curious about with riders who do these events and maintain blogs or write about them afterwards was how they retained the thoughts and details of such a long ride when so much else is going on physically and mentally.
One of the things that really resonated with me was when I asked him if he kept/took a journal with him on the ride to take notes, he replied that no, he didn’t need one. Other than taking lots of pictures – which also helped to revisit afterwords – he explained it by saying that there’s no way he could forget it. He said quite emphatically that he could ride the whole route again – save a few sections – without a map or GPS, pretty much on memory alone.
“Each day on the Divide is a thousand adventures in one. Each day is it’s own amazing adventure, constantly coming on new, breathtaking scenery. So many moments. I remember all the details.”
While riding 4,300km across the continent, unsupported for 19 days, many times alone in the wilderness, he said several times that really, things like whether or not you made the right gear choices were really not the biggest hurdle – that it was mostly a mental battle – were you prepared to endure the sleep deprivation, aches and pain and the subsequent doubts and challenges all those brought on. That was the key. Yet he was still able to – in the simplest terms – stop and smell the evergreens – and be fully present in those moments out on the trail and take those with him past the finish line.
Would that we all could make each of our ‘ordinary’ days ‘it’s own adventure’ and be fully present in them. I’m inspired to try.
