I traveled to the northern part of Arizona again this weekend to enjoy some cool weather. The hike was a 15mi loop. But since it's a 4 hour drive, I decided to drive up on Saturday, do half the loop, spend the night, finish it on Sunday and then drive home.
There are 2 trails and a connector trail between them. I started at the east trailhead and followed the connector to the west trail. I knew I was there when I had to cross the west fork of the Little Colorado.
After about an hour of hiking, a monsoon rain hit. It was quite a downpour. I setup my Matcat Deluxe as quickly as I could. It kept me dry for the next 30 min.
For the next 3 hours I hiked through meadows and forest trails.
Then the rain started coming down again at about 3pm. I set up the tarp again, but this time I decided to also setup the hammock. I finally decided to just stay put and play around with the hammock suspension. (I also knew water was going to be sparse if I kept going and I didn't want to carry an extra 2L.) Initially I setup the tarp thinking it was going to be windy that night. So I used the 2 panel guyouts and kept the panels fairly low.
As it turned out, it wasn't windy at all ... so I switched to a porch arrangement.
I got to tryout the new Dutch clips. They worked great! ... and 1/2 the weight of the carabiners. I also used the marlin spike hitch for attaching the whoopie sling.
The one thing I learned was that the tri-rings that come along with the WB are a LOT easier to adust under load than the whoopie sling. I had already loaded a bunch of stuff in my hammock. I decided I wanted a little more sag. I had to detach the hammock from the marlin spike in order to adjust the sling. Not a big deal, but I'm still trying to decide which suspension I like best.
Well, in a few more months my trip reports will have pictures of cactus instead of spruce trees. The WB, GoLite Ultra and Yeti kept me VERY warm down to 45F.
Dan
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Originally Posted by te-wa
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