GearFlogger

Best Easy Day Hikes Lake Tahoe

Falcon Guide are reliable companions to a lot of backcountry activities from hiking to climbing to birdwatching. Best Easy Day Hikes Lake Tahoe by Tracy Salcedo is small in size but large in utility, providing overviews of 29 hikes in the Lake Tahoe area.

This is not Ms. Salcedo's first rodeo, as she's written over twenty guides for Falcon covering California and Colorado. The book itself is easily pocketable at 4x7 inches and 3/8" thick. The maps are simple and clear, starting with an overview map that locates all 29 hikes reviewed around the Lake Tahoe basin. The hikes are chosen based on short length (under 6 miles round trip), beautiful and varied scenery and good trails. Pages 8-10 group the hikes by various criteria (best for children, history, lakes, workout, etc.) and there is a list of all 29 hikes ordered by difficulty.

Individual trail descriptions contain information on best season to hike, time to complete, fees, dogs, amenities, maps and more. Very useful is the first item of narrative in each description: Finding the Trailhead. You just can't go wrong with this guide.

A useful addition is the National Geographic US Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Trails Illustrated topographic map, $11.95 at Amazon. It's a gorgeous and useful fold-out map printed on waterproof and tear-resistant paper. One side has the north basin and the other side the south, and unfolded to it's full 37.75" x 25.5" size it really communicates the scale and beauty of America's largest alpine lake, what Ms. Salcedo eloquently calls the Blue Heart of the Sierra. 

$10.49 on Amazon

32 Degrees Face Cover

Face masks had a rocky start at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, but current guidance is that they should be mandatory when social distancing is not an option. Pro-mask people frequently treat mask-wearing as settled science, which it most definitely is not, while anti-mask people go so far as to shoot at people. The issue is more complicated than either extreme gives it credit for; read FiveThirtyEight's overview if you really want to be informed.

Controversy aside, there is enough evidence that masks can limit transmission of the virus, and possibly reception of it, enough to be useful, especially when they are really not that much of an inconvenience. CDC provides instructions on how to make your own sew and no-sew variations, or you buy them in most large retail locations these days. You probably won't get the surgical grade version, but that's OK because health care workers really need those first anyway.

Browsing Costco recently we came across a reasonably-priced face cover from 32 Degrees. We've liked their shirts and other products in the past, so we bought a four-pack of three black and one gray model and tried them out. If you look at the reviews on Costco.com you'll see people split on these, and here's why: the masks are on the small side, great for smaller faces and kids, but no so much for those with bigger mugs. The material is a 3-ply and is fairly dense, feeling like an very thin neoprene, and when you breathe in it kind of sucks in to your face which some people find disconcerting and uncomfortable.

We actually liked them for our smaller faces, especially when we discovered that you can wet them down and wear them on a hot day and they feel great for that. They're our go-to for quick in-and-out trips into stores, but that said if we had to go into a setting where we would be talking much we would grab something else, because these tend to slip down if you're jawboning for long. Overall, they're an inexpensive option for those with smaller faces who don't mind a close fit and won't be using them in meetings where they're expected to speak a lot.

$24.99 for an 8 pack at Costco 

Huel Complete Nutrition Bar

Huel is an interesting company, and one we admire in many respects. They make the extra effort to be transparent in how they source and make their products, which is refreshing in this age of hyper-marketing. We enjoyed early versions of their powder and ready-to-drink products, so we were looking forward to trying out the newest version, apparently dubbed 3.1, of their bars, designed to be a snack-sized portion of a full meal replacement schedule.

We've got some good and some bad to report here. First, the good: Huel Complete Nutrition Bars are made entirely from plant-based sources so they're vegan-friendly, if that's your thing. They're also lactose-free, soy-free, gluten-free, low-GI, and GMO-free, made with a similar oats, peas and brown rice base to their powder. All good so far! The price is fair too, about $2 per bar with a discount for subcription purchases, in line with other options out there. For all this you get 12g protein, 18g carbs, 8g fat and 5g fiber for a total of 200 calories. We're still good!

And then, the bad... The taste and texture of the Huel Complete Nutrition Bar are not great. Our tasters found them to be on the dry and crumbly side, and the differences in taste between the three bars we tried - coffee caramel, chocolate and peanute butter - are not particularly dramatic. They're easy enough to eat with some water to wash them down, and we did appreciate how light they are on the glycemic index, but it would be going too far to say we were looking forward to getting through the entire box of bars.

Overall if you want or need the benefits of Huel's high-quality ingredients and process, give them a try. If it's taste you're looking for, you may want to wait for version 4.0.

$62.22 for 30 bars at Huel

Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance

There are a few foundational texts in each sport, like Freedom of the Hills for mountaineers, and mountain bikers have long looked to Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance for the first and last word on their rides. We finally got around to updating to the 2018 sixth edition, and it's better than ever.

Repair and maintenance for every component on a modern mountain bike is fully covered, with great illustrations that reminded us of classics by Andy Tyson and Mike Clelland. Our newest bike has introduced us to a 1x drivetrain, hydraulic disc brakes and tubeless tires and Zinn covers all of that and a lot more, even electronic shifting systems.

Explanations are detailed, clear and engaging, and the illustrations are just fantastic and often include every variation of a particular component as well as exploded diagrams of the leading models from major manufacturers.

Zinn starts with three helpful chapters that cover tools (basic, intermediate, advanced and shop setups), repair kits for different scenarios, pre-ride and intermittent inspections, cleaning and common emergency repairs. Those three chapters alone are worth the price of admission, and then he gets to all the components including major tasks like building wheels and rebuilding shocks. There's even a chapter on fitting a bike to your body at the end, which we'd like to see at the very beginning. There's very little to nitpick here: maybe a detailed table of contents and ditch the white text on orange background for the sidebars, but the bottom line is ZATAOMBM is required reading, so just buy it.

$19.76 at Amazon

Carry a Minimalist Trauma Kit

We've always had a problem with the order of things in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. From our perspective, stopping the bleeding is always job one, well before food, water, shelter and even sex. Let's follow the critical path: trauma is the leading cause of death for people up to age 45, and uncontrolled bleeding is the leading cause of death from trauma. Ipso facto, if you're going to be prepared for one thing, it should be the training and gear to control bleeding.

Training is available from many sources, just be sure you're not getting the ubiquitous "first aid" class that doesn't teach tourniquets, chest seals and airway management - the big three when it comes to casualty care. NOLS has a series of wilderness medicine courses from a 16 hour Wilderness First Aid to the 200 hour Wilderness EMT. Private companies like Dark Angel Medical offer courses all over the country. If it's at all related to your job, your state probably has a list of trauma courses for credit, as likely will the university or community college near you. If you're really tight on cash, find some reliable video training online. The point is, there's not excuse not to get some training.

So what's in a minimalist trauma kit?

Going tubeless with Stan's NoTubes

Browsing an article about mountain biking technique recently, we were surprised to read the phrase, "...for those of you who still haven't gone tubeless..." Well, that's us, and we'll admit it stung a little, being the gear-forward geeks that we like to think we are around here. So a project was born, and if you're a noob like us wondering (1) why tubeless, and (2) how tubeless, read on.

First, why tubeless? Queue the reasons: less chance of a flat (especially pinch flats), ability of sealant that remains in the tire to plug small punctures, lower pressure equals less bounce and larger contact patch for better traction on climbs and corners, less weight (bc no tube, duh), and the aforementioned softer ride. Done x6.

On to the how, but first the deets: last summer we retired our ancient but still rockin' Gary Fisher Sugar 3+ full suspension, and upgraded (sidegraded?) to a Co-op Cycles DRT 2.1 hardtail. We liked the single chain ring, disc brakes and 27.5+ tire size but missed the butt-saving grace of a rear shock, and read somewhere that the low pressure of a tubeless setup makes for a more comfortable ride. The DRT 2.1 was already equipped with tubeless ready Scraper i45 27.5 rims and Ranger 2.8 tires, both from WTB, but for some reason it had a tube. Game on.