Firstly I want to thank Phantom Grappler for meeting up and helping me with the inevitable initial hang debug. Hopefully I provided some amusement as a novice! TL;DR A huge success, the second night was my best sleep ever in the woods and I expect it’ll only get better.
We hiked a little down the Dutchman’s Creek Trail from Yates Place campground to the area just before Lick Mountain, and camped out Sunday and Monday nights before hiking out (Monday was a holiday at my work). I had a lot of new gear to test out from last fall’s Black Friday sales, including a Dutchware Gear half zipped hammock, a Dutch Falcon tarp, a couple of JRB quilts, and a new backpack. I’m trialing hammock gear because a nice guy with a WBBB let me try out his hammock at the north rim of the Grand Canyon two years ago, and those five minutes convinced me to give it a try. And I wanted to practice setting up and taking down the gear each day as well as hiking a little, so on Monday I packed up and hiked the north loop off the Dutchman’s Creek Trail and the Uhwarrie Trail with the full backpack. Temperatures a little below freezing each day help test out the quilts. Other than being cool at night, the skies were clear and the tarp didn’t do much work. Testing my ability to set up the tarp in rain will wait for warmer weather.
Many thanks to everyone here, I’ve learned a lot by lurking, so setting up the tarp and hammock were easy other than my hanging them too low (thanks PG for helping me there). The second night I slept 10.5 hours, the hammock and quilts did great after a little debugging of the UQ gaping in the first night.
The few pictures that I tried to upload are rotated upside down, so here’s one of my nighttime view of the moon that doesn’t matter!
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