Austin Sierra Club Camper's Guide...

section three...secrets of the woods

Author: Chuck Byrd, Austin Sierra Club Outings Leader, Webmaster and ExCom member. email: cbyrd4@austin.rr.com

This part of the website was written especially for those campers who are new to the game and would like a few helpful hints about how to make sure their early camping experiences are not disasters.

Consequently, the site is divided into three sections:
1. The BASICS - what everyone needs to know about basecamp camping (also known as car-camping)
2. CAMPING COMFORTS
This section of the website assumes that you know the very basics of camping and extends the discussion to making your camping trip more fun and comfortable.

3. SECRETS OF THE WOODS - Stuff that even an experienced camper might not know

This section of the website provides some of the helpful hints that I - and lots of other campers - have discovered through trial and error, campfire discussions and reading in arcane and hard-to-find literature. Got a secret you want to share? Send it to me - Chuck Byrd, Webmaster at: cbyrd4@austin.rr.com

DUCT TAPE
FIRE STARTER
DENTAL FLOSS
SUPER GLUE
MULTI-TOOLS
SANITARY WIPES
HAND SANITIZER
BAG BALM

DUCT TAPE - Duct tape? - Some secret. Everybody knows about duct tape, right? Maybe, but even experienced hikers sometimes forget to pack it. Duct tape, like Spam (the meat product, not the email), has a huge cult following, some of whom clearly have too much time on their hands. Enter "Duct Tape" into any search engine on the web and you will find an astounding number of sites devoted to the gray miracle-stuff (it now comes in black, red and other colors). You can find instructions on how to make duct tape hats, how to use it in cooking and lots of other weird information. In the woods, however, duct tape can be a life-saver, so bring some along.

The first obstacle is how to pack it. Since pack space is at a premium, most folks are reluctant to pack a big honking cardboard and tape package. It just takes up too much valuable space. There are several options: 1. Wrap it around your water bottle. Eight or ten turns around your bottle will not only keep the tape handy, it will help insulate your water bottle and make it easier to grip;
2. Wrap it around a pen or pencil and put it in your first aid kit. I like this option because most of my uses for duct tape are first-aid related (see below) and it makes the pencil easier to find in the kit;
3. Wrap it around virtually any cylindrical object in your pack (mini-flashlight, toothbrush holder, etc.)
Duct tape is excellent for repairing tears and rips in your thermal pad, sleeping bag or tent. It will not last long, but it will get you back home, in most cases, where you can begin more permanent repairs. Wrap it around your boot when the sole separates from the uppers after a long day of slogging through mud and water. Again, it won't hold long, but it will keep body and sole together until you get back to camp. (Sorry). Duct tape belongs in your first aid kit. Use it as a blister preventative as 'hot spots' begin to develop on a hike. It can also hold bandages in place if you ignore a hot spot until it becomes a blister and breaks. Use it to cover any bandaged area to prevent soaking and to help prevent infections of wounds. Sucking chest wounds are rare in the wilderness, but if you encounter them, duct tape is one of the best materials to hold a plastic wound cover in place or to cover a smaller sucking wound directly. It makes a good sling for an injured arm and can be used to hold a wooden-stick splint together in the event of a broken arm or leg and can be used to bind broken fingers or toes together to immobilize them (this is called a 'buddy splint') until they can be set properly. Use it to cover the injured eye of someone with an eye injury or use it to secure a foreign object which has wound up in an eye and should not be extracted until you get back to a hospital. Duct tape (frequently mis-called Duck tape, which is actually a brand name for a kind of duct tape) is really useful stuff. Bring it along. Want more duct tape data? Visit this site on the web: http://www.octanecreative.com/ducttape/index.html

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FIRE STARTER - I found the tip for making these fire starters in an 'Hints From Heloise' column several years back. While the Sierra Club recommends that you not build a campfire merely for entertainment and rarely for cooking (propane stoves are much more reliable and better for the environment), a large number of people are convinced that a nice campfire is an integral part of the camping experience. Certainly the experience of sitting around a cheery campfire on a cold evening in the mountains is a great deal of fun and comfort and can be an important part of the bonding mechanism of a large group of campers. Fire starters can save a lot of time and frustration by allowing campers to start a nice fire (assuming there are no fire bans in effect and fire rings are provided at the campground) quickly and without a great deal of tinder. The fire starters pictured above are made out of the bottoms of egg cartons (the cardboard fiber ones, not the plastic foam ones). I keep them on top of my dryer and pack dryer lint into the egg cups every time I clean out the lint filter. Then whenever I use candles, I pour some of the hot candle wax into the cup, soaking the lint and forming a hard lump of lint and wax. When the cartons are full, I cut them up into double cups and store them in a ziplock baggie for the next camping trip that I take. The wax/lint starters are easy to light and they burn long enough and hot enough to start pieces of pine as thick as your thumb, eliminating the need for shavings, paper or other methods of starting a campfire. Make sure you store the starters in a baggie since the candle wax will bleed into a paper or cloth container if it gets warmer than room temperature. Fire starters have been a life-saver when the firewood is damp and other means of starting a fire have not worked. You can also use 'fat wood' as a fire starter if you can find it - 'fat wood' is highly resinous wood that lights quickly and burns a good while as well, but it is harder to find in most areas and more expensive than something you can make easily with recycled materials.

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DENTAL FLOSS - Dental floss - Scott Johnson, the Austin paramedic who taught the Austin Community College Wilderness First Aid class, turned us on to dental floss. Take a small roll of the unwaxed kind in your first aid kit. It can be used with a large needle or awl to repair equipment in the field (when your backpack strap pulls loose from the pack or a tent seam separates or a belt fails.) Dental floss is considerably stronger than thread and can take the stress of holding a pack strap together much better than anything else you can use. In a pinch, you can weave it together to make a short, strong, light cord which is almost unbreakable. It can be used as an emergency suture to close a really bad wound (follow with antibiotic, clean bandages and duct tape and head back for a hospital). If you run out of other uses for it, you can always use it to floss your teeth.

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SUPER GLUE - Yep, super glue. Actually, hospital emergency rooms all over the country have been using a medical variation of super glue for some time now to treat minor wounds, especially in areas like the face and hands of children where they want to keep scarring to a minimum. It is an effective way to bind a minor wound and is less painful and scary than sutures, especially for smaller children. Because there is less wound trauma than with sutures, the scar tissue is normally smaller and less noticeable. Wound-dressing is a possible field use of super glue for us (although you need to be trained in appropriate uses in a wound-dressing situation), but it is handy for the hiker in other ways as well. One of the problems that hikers from a reasonably humid environment like Austin experience when they travel to and camp in the West is desiccation. Our bodies are acclimated to a humid environment and when we camp in the west, where the humidity is considerably lower, we dry out like mummies. Many people experience this in their mucous membranes first - your eyes feel dry and grainy, your mouth is dry, you are thirsty a lot, your lips chap and your nose dries out. Morning nosebleeds are not unusual in the first few days of camping in a really dry climate. Many of these symptoms can be addressed with lotions and salves and by drinking a lot of fluids - a good thing anyway - but one of the side-effects of desiccation is often a drying out of the cuticles around your finger and toe-nails. Lotions and moisturizers help, but normal activities along with dish-washing and hand-washing frequently make it difficult to keep your hands from drying out. And, when your cuticles crack from dryness, they frequently get infected and before you know it you have annoying red cracks around your cuticles. These are seldom life-threatening, but they make your camping experience less fun and can sometimes be surprisingly painful. Enter super-glue. A small dot of super-glue in a cuticle crack will seal it and allow it to heal properly while providing a hard, shell-like protective coating. Voila, you are back on dishwashing detail. If the crack has already started to get infected, work some antibiotic/antibacterial ointment (Mycitracin or a similar Neomycin/Bacitracin/Polymyxin B ointment) into the wound, wipe it off and apply the super-glue on top of the wound. You may have to re-apply the super-glue in a few days, but you will be surprised at how quickly the healing begins. Buy the smallest tube you can find (I have seen blister packs of so-called single-application tubes, an ideal size for camping) since you want to reduce bulk and avoid having a large tube dry out between camping trips. The thicker gel is also better than the more viscous liquid and is less likely to leak and glue your first aid kit together into a brick.

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MULTI-TOOLS - These handy pocket tools are extremely useful on camping trips. They are very popular with campers, fishermen and hunters and every gadget nut that you know has at least one or two or three of them hanging around the house. There are dozens of cheap knock-offs, some of which are pretty ingenious, but the boss tool is one of the Leatherman variations. Despite the expense, the "juice pro" is the acknowledged gold standard of pocket workshop tools (see the photo - the juice is the lower tool in the photo). Aside from the obvious knife blades, saw blades, screwdrivers (both flathead and phillips), the juice pro boasts dozens of tools, including scissors, pliers, a corkscrew, a sturdy metal file and an awl (essential for use with the dental floss - see above - if you need to repair a backpack strap or sew a sole back on a boot in mid-trip). Despite their weight, multi-tools are popular with backpackers simply because they have a large number of uses and perform tasks in the wilderness that no other tool can perform as easily (like re-shaping the sprung bail on a lantern or opening a can when your regular can opener winds up at the bottom of a lake).

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SANITARY WIPES - Packages of sanitary wipes (soft cloths impregnated with Benzalkonium Chloride - 0.24% or some similar antibacterial agent) are, by most camping standards, a luxury item. On the other hand, anything that helps control bacterial contamination and infection and increases comfort without adding significant weight merits consideration. Outhouses, pit toilets, composting toilets and 'cat holes' that you dig for yourself are generally disgusting enough without adding concerns about infection and discomfort caused by sanitation conditions that are less than ideal. Sanitary wipes help clean up more effectively than toilet paper (which is frequently missing or ruined in primitive campsites) and are worth the trouble, weight and expense, even if you are not as fastidious as Adrian Monk, the obsessive-compulsive detective on TV. Please note, though, that sanitary wipes are not designed to bio-degrade like toilet paper, so do not discard them in a campsite toilet of any kind (flush, pit or composting). Pop the used wipe in a baggie and either burn it in a fire pit (discreetly) if local rules permit, or deposit it in the camp dumpster or pack it back out to civilization, depending on circumstances.

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HAND SANITIZER - Like sanitizing wipes (above), a small bottle of hand sanitizer is probably not going to make it on the list for a backpacker, but since most of our trips are campsite-based and we don't have to schlep everything into camp on our back, hand sanitizers come in handy. Health workers generally concede that hand sanitizers (alcohol-based gels often called 'waterless soap') are even more effective at killing the germs that cause infection, disease and gastric problems than the use of soap and water alone. It is difficult to wash your hands effectively when you are camping since you are seldom close to a basin with hot, soapy water. On our trips, we generally have a bottle of hand sanitizer available in the kitchen area for the folks who help with food preparation, cooking and cleanup. We also use commercial hotel disinfectant tablets as the final rinse in our dish-washing process, but lots of folks like to bring a personal bottle of hand sanitizer for use before eating lunch on the trail or at other times when hand washing seems like a good idea but is impractical or impossible.

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BAG BALM is the registered trade name of a mixture of 8-hydroxy Quinoline Sulfate 0.3% in a petrolatum, lanolin base. Developed by the Dairy Association Co., Inc. of Lyndonville, Vermont, it has been used for a long time (since 1899 according to the tin it comes in) by Vermont dairy farmers to soothe and heal minor cuts and abrasions on Bossy's udder (that would be the 'bag' in the name). Cows tend to get a little testy when you start yanking on a sore teat and Vermont farmers apparently swear by Bag Balm as a good way to avoid a hoof in the mouth on a cold morning. Over the years they noticed that their own hands also seemed to respond to the salve as well and a new, non-veterinarian, application for Bag Balm became popular. Rock climbers were among the first non-farming types to use the ointment, claiming that it was the best all-round moisturizer/antiseptic/antibacterial available - and the price was right. You used to have to go to a feed store to find it, but for several years now outdoors provisioners have carried it - I found my first tin of it at a Whole Earth Provision store about six or eight years back. Nowadays it has become so popular you can find it at Walgreens. The Vermont vendor has had the good sense to leave it unchanged in both content and container except for the fact that the new tins no longer say "For veterinary use only." The petrolatum/lanolin base provides the softening/moisturizing and keeps the antiseptic in contact with the cut or abrasion, so it not only helps with dry skin, it helps heal tiny cracks and abrasions which otherwise might become annoying infections. I use it as a lip and nose lubricant as well and the honest, straightforward petroleum product smell does not seem to be attractive to bugs. For some reason, I have only been able to find the giant 10 oz. size tin in local stores lately, but I still have my original 1-oz. tin that I keep refilling from the large size. You will probably not want to tote the big tin around either, so I suggest refilling an old lip gloss container or an old lip balm jar that you were about to throw out. Be advised, though, that it gets runny in the Texas heat, so keep it in a ziplock bag even in your pocket or pack. The antique-looking tin is nostalgic, but it does not seal in hot petroleum/lanolin and it can make a real mess.

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Last updated:  January 10, 2008   Content © 1999-2002 by the Sierra Club.