Four-eyes in the outdoors

Despite a dependency on corrective lenses, I'd never considered sports-oriented prescription glasses to be germane for the active genre of outdoor sports I favor. When people mentioned "performance" eyewear, the one thing that came to mind were the thick-framed plastic goggles seemingly favored by high-school wrestling teams.


Oakley frames...

In reality, eyewear companies have been developing high-quality, durable and sleek prescription glasses for quite a long time. Oakley's Half Jacket, for example, is the company's best-selling sunglasses model, and it's available with just about any kind of lens prescription.

Oakley offers two lens shapes and 18 lens hues for its prescription Half Jacket glasses. You pick the clear, amber or dark lens that will best suit the anticipated conditions.

The lenses are removable and interchangeable, meaning you can buy multiple lenses for varying environments or swap them out for non-prescription lenses when you want to wear contacts.

I put a Half Jacket to the test mountain biking and orienteering over the course of a month. Initially, the glasses were overwhelming to my eyes and were uncomfortable to wear for more than 20 minutes. Oakley actually warns about this in the Half Jacket's literature, saying that its optics provide an unusually wide field of vision and enhanced peripheral clarity that may require a period of adaptation.

It took me four or five days to get used to the glasses, but now they are sharp, clear and comfortable for long periods.

The Half Jacket is a solid model that seems to glue to your head. Even after a couple of hours of running through the woods on a tough orienteering course, the glasses remained comfortable. I climbed over logs, thrashed through thorns and trudged in swamp muck up to my knees, but the glasses never fell off and barely even slipped on my sweaty face.

Prescription glasses are never remarkably affordable, and the Half Jacket follows suit with prices that start around $300. To purchase the glasses, you must work with an Oakley-affiliated eye doctor who can take your prescription and order the frame and lenses from Oakley. The company provides a dealer locator section on its Web site to guide you to affiliated doctors near your home.

Price: frame only, $130; prescription lenses range from $165-$245 a pair.
Contact: Oakley Inc., 800-431-1439, www.oakley.com.

Bike Lights, or L.E.D., Xenon and other fun photon-emitting technologies

On the very periphery of the outdoors genus, there exists a group of bike heads and gear junkies who will not think twice about putting down $500 on a high-power bike light system. Granted, the light cannons manufactured by companies like NiteRider and Light & Motion -- which create virtual windows of daylight blasted off a bike handlebar -- do allow the serious cyclist to ride technical singletrack at three in the morning. Still, though, $500 for a bike light?

Now, to be honest, I do keep a second-tier, $215 Light & Motion model at the ready for night use on my mountain bike. Its long-burning, 13-watt beam has pushed me through the wee hours on more than one long and painful adventure race.

For most bikers, however, the big guns will be complete overkill. The new Bike Series lights from Princeton Tec, which start at $39, have brightness modes for city riding and moderate off-trail venues.

The Yukon Bike ($39) and Yukon HL Bike ($60) are incarnations of high-end Princeton Tec headlamp models, tweaked and redesigned to accommodate the pedal-turning crowd. Except for a different bulb configuration, these models are identical, each weighing about 8 ounces and consisting of a dual-mode lamp on a five-foot cord. The battery pack, which takes three AAs, comes in a zippered nylon case that connects to the bike frame with Velcro straps.

Both models come with a handlebar mount as well as a mount that can be attached to a bike helmet. Riders that prefer the light on their helmet can stash the battery pouch in a pocket or inside a hydration pack. The lamp is released from the mount with a simple slide out of the bracket, letting riders easily switch from handlebar to helmet while out and about.

The Yukon Bike model has a focusable high-output Xenon bulb and three small LEDs. Switched to the Xenon mode, I was able to bike on dirt trails with little worry. Even moderate singletrack was not a problem, as the Xenon bulb shot a solid beam onto the ground 15-25 feet ahead of my front tire. The Yukon Bike's LED mode provides a hazy blue cloud of light that is adequate for city biking.

Battery burn times vary widely with this model, as the company specs the Xenon mode to last only three to five hours and the LED mode to keep on illuminating for up to 120 hours.

The more-expensive Yukon HL Bike model has a longer-lasting high-output mode, in the form of a large 1-watt LED. This high-brightness mode will burn for about 25 hours on three AA batteries, according to the company.

On the trail, the Yukon HL Bike performed at about the same level as the regular Yukon Bike model, letting me comfortably ride through the woods at night. However, I actually came to prefer the sharper, yellow beam of the lower-cost Yukon Bike over the Yukon HL Bike's ultra-white/hazy blue 1-watt LED.

Like its sister model, the Yukon HL Bike has a long-lasting, dimmer LED mode. The three small ancillary LEDs on this model have the luminosity to light up a sidewalk and make you visible during a commute or city ride. With fresh batteries, these small LEDs, according to Princeton, will also burn for up to 120 hours or literally five days straight.

Contact: Princeton Tec, (800) 257-9080, www.princetontec.com.

Canned Heat

Brunton has taken the decades-old concept of canned heat and added a couple crucial modern twists. The company's new line of GreenHeat fuel canisters, which are being marketed to backpackers, climbers and anyone else who needs to pack as light as possible, are filled with a special concoction of gelled and highly-flammable vegetable oil.

The concept is bone simple: Pop off the can top, throw in a match and cook. (Or boil water or melt snow.) Healthy, hot-burning flames will stir and whirl from the magical green goo inside the can for up to 80 minutes, and Brunton says in optimal conditions you'll be able to boil a liter of water in as little as seven minutes.

Despite the fact that my test liter of water took about 22 minutes to boil in a slightly breezy, 65-degree setting -- a common backcountry venue -- I was impressed overall with the product. The small, inexpensive GreenHeat cans are a no-nonsense and much-needed upgrade to the Sterno-brand canisters I've intermittently used over the years.

A hotter flame is their No. 1 asset. Brunton also pushes the environmental angle with GreenHeat, as the flammable gel is vegetable-oil based and does not give off noxious fumes. Another advantage: GreenHeat canisters come with lightweight sheet metal pot holders that quickly and conveniently let you set a cooking pot over the flame.

Brunton sells the GreenHeat products in two configurations: The Standard version is a 6.4-ounce canister that will burn for up to 80 minutes at 4,700 BTUs, according to Brunton. Packs of two Standard GreenHeat canisters with the pot support cost $19.


Standard GreenHeat canisters...

For the fast-and-light backpacking crowd, the company's smaller Fastpack GreenHeat canisters weigh about 3.2 ounces and provide a flame for up to 45 minutes, which also burns at 4,700 BTUs, according to the company. They come in packs of three with a single pot holder for $10.


Fastpack GreenHeat...

After use, the flame in a GreenHeat canister can easily be blown out and re-capped. They can be used over and over until the fuel runs out. The thickly concealed gel will not freeze and has an indefinite shelf life, according to Brunton. It's also a non-pressurized, non-explosive fuel, so some airlines may allow it to accompany travelers on their way off to an adventure.

Beyond cooking, Brunton is promoting GreenHeat as an emergency firestarter. Stowed away in the bottom of your backpack, a Fastpack canister weighs less than a jackknife but will burn steady for more than 40 minutes. In an emergency, light the can, throw on some dead pine bows, leaves and a few dry sticks and a roaring warmth will soon ensue.

Contact: Brunton, 1-307-856-6559, www.brunton.com.

The Outside Pen

In a former life, Greg Adelman designed optical instrumentation for Scripps Institution of Oceanography and worked on engineering projects for the U.S. military and NATO.

Now, he's dabbling in writing utensils.

"I want to do to pens what Leatherman did to pliers," says Adelman, who is president and founder of the Boulder, Colo.-based Inka Corp.

The company's namesake product -- the Inka pen -- is one of the few available writing utensils specifically designed for use in the outdoors. It weighs a miniscule 0.6 ounces and has a pressurized ink cartridge that will put up with almost any condition and environment an outdoors person may throw at it.


The Inka pen...

The pen writes in wet conditions, below-zero weather and scorching desert sun. It writes at any altitude and works when held upside down for extended periods. For scuba divers, it even writes underwater.

Inka Corp. plans to market the pen to mountaineers, hikers, orienteers, scuba divers, fishermen and pilots. I'd add adventure racers to that list, as they have to work with maps and chart courses in all types of conditions.

I tested the Inka pen in a handful of harsh conditions over the past two months, subjecting it to frozen air in a Minnesota forest during a day-long winter excursion and using it to mark up maps at two orienteering meets in northern Missouri's bluff country. I even held it underwater and scrawled some hazy doodles on a slip of coated paper.

On all fronts, the pen did its job and the ink flowed freely whenever I needed it. The pen's convenient design, which includes a stainless steel case fixed with a key ring, allowed me to wear the pen on a cord around my neck or clip it to a carabineer for quick access.

The compact pen measures 2.75 inches long. This stubby form is fine for jotting quick notes, but it quickly becomes uncomfortable writing anything longer than a sentence or two.

But Inka was on top of this. The pen can be converted to a full-size writing utensil: Just unscrew the end cap and thread the stainless steel case onto the pen body. This setup creates a comfortable, 5-inch-long pen that will make short work of that requisite fireside journal entry at the end of a long day on the trail.

Price: $25 (comes with one ink cartridge); replacement ink cartridge, $4.
Contact: Inka Corp., 1-877-446-5226, www.inkacorp.com