Trail Monsters

As of today we are presently 8 days away from our planned Ocala Thru-hike which will be about 60 miles total. It will be three of us(myself, Mike, and Jesse) and I think this is the biggest hike any of us have ever done. We are all very excited about the prospect of such a massive undertaking as mere novices. Most of the equipment we are taking is on its maiden voyage so I am sure it will be interesting.

Although, we are by no means going ultralight we aren’t taking sleeping bags so that will significantly reduce the weight of our packs. The main two items I purchased are an MSR MiniWorks EX($60) and a Therma-Lite Pro Lite 4($55); both of which were on sale at REI. I also bought the maintenance kit and a spare ceramic filter but I wont be bringing the filter with me. I didn’t know until after I bought it but the MiniWorks does not filter out viruses so based upon some research we will be using iodine before filtering it just to be sure. Fortunately, from what I have read, the filter should eliminate the taste of iodine so it shouldn’t be so bad. We plan on packing the simple foods: rice, pasta, mashed potatoes, nuts, grains, energy bars, dried veggies(mushrooms, pepper, olives, onions, etc), ramen noodles, and a few of those packaged meals. And then flavor-makers like salt, pepper, cajun, soy sauce(courtesy of your local asian takout place), and teriyaki. So our goal is to have enough calories until the next meal for the least amount of money,the most amount of flavor, and the least amount of weight.

Right now my pack weighs about 35lbs with 4 liters of water and after wearing it around for an hour I adjusted the pack for optimum comfort and actually forgot I was wearing it a couple of times. Before the trip we plan on a hike in Bull Creek WMA with all of our gear packed. We don’t plan on staying the night but will be doing as much testing as possible. For example, we want to test the water filter using iodine tablets and also field test the new stove and pot. Another skill we are obligated to master is the hanging of food to keep away the bears. Right now the plan is parachute cord and plastic bags. So hopefully that will be all it takes but things never seem to go the way the should. We already tested the Pro Lite 4 sleeping pad and found it to be a thing of beauty. This little self-inflating pad might as well be a cloud because I nearly passed out just laying it on my wood floor. It has just the right amount of cushion so that you are off the ground and dont wake up with a sour hip.

I did a basic test of the water filter just by filtering some tap water so not much to be expected from that. I will be bringing coffee filters at the recommendation of some posts I read in order to minimize the frequency of cleaning the filter due to sediment. I also pretty much took the whole filter apart and put it back together using the exploded diagram provided with relative ease. My biggest concern with the filter is how fragile the ceramic element is. From what I have read in some reviews a drop of about 2 feet and its all over for this little beauty. So suffice to say I am going to be very careful with the precious filter.

As for mapping/navigation I wasn’t able to find any good gps data for ALL of the Ocala National Forest trails so I downloaded the shapefile for all of the trails in Florida from the Florida Trails Network Database site and extracting the Ocala trail using GIS software and converted it into a format compatible with my GPS. I then downloaded the topo data using Garmin US Topo East which just happened to have Ocala National Forest as the only location it provided topo maps for in the state of FL. And since I cant just have a single point of failure I retrieved downloadable versions of the topo maps for the areas in Ocala from Topoquest and had them laminated. Another good site is OutInTheBoonies.com who have sat maps and gps data for a lot of trails around FL including Juniper Prairie. The most important lesson to take from this is that you should not ever have to pay for topo maps, or any other map for that matter, as they are freely available online. Until the next post…

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