Hydracare cleaning kits

You know it’s time to clean your hydration bladder when: A) Live algae has sprouted in a crease; B) Water that goes in pure comes out tasting literally fishy; or, C) That strange and swampy odor seeping from your CamelBak is eliciting vocal complaints from your hiking buddies.

The correct answer is all of the above, and I unfortunately know from experience. Used to be, I’d finish a long day outside drinking from a bladder-hydration system and simply crack open the reservoir screw-cap, hoping evaporation would take care of the rest. But the floppy plastic sidewalls would rarely stand on their own enough to truly dry out.

Dry out your CamelBak with Hydracare...

Hydracare, a family owed and operated company based in Lindstrom, Minn., has an $8 product created for the simple purpose of drying out a hydration bladder. It’s so easy to use that I now hang up and dry my hydration bladder after every single use, just like you should, and I haven’t seen a single sprig of algae in months.

The Hydrahang Reservoir Drying Hanger consists of a small expander piece that fits inside the reservoir’s screw-cap to keep the plastic pushed apart and open to the air. For roll-top-closure bladders, the expander piece is wedged in from the top partway inside the reservoir. The other component, a small plastic hook, clips to the bladder’s hose to let you hang it up to dry. It’s simple, but it works.

"Compatible with all common hydration bladders..."

Hydracare (www.hydracare.com) guarantees its dryer products to be compatible with all common hydration bladders from CamelBak, Ultimate Direction, Nalgene, Outdoor Products and other companies. The dryer and hanger pieces are so small and light weight that the company recommends storing them permanently in a small pocket on your hydration pack for quick access.

In the right conditions, when rinsed out and hung up, the Hydrahang system will allow the bladder to dry in a couple hours.

Beyond just drying the reservoir out, a good scrubbing is sometimes necessary, especially if you prefer to stock your hydration pack with Gatorade, Cytomax, or anything other than water. Hydracare’s Personal Hydration Cleaning Kit includes the basic tools you’ll need for a thorough rinse/scrub/dry cleaning session.

The $15 kit comes with the company’s expander piece and drying hook plus a 42-inch-long tube-cleaning brush and a thick, bristly brush for scrubbing the reservoir's inner walls. To clean the hose, you remove the bite valve and snake the thin tube brush all the way through. The large brush is on a rigid handle, allowing you to reach inside to every corner, nook and cranny and scrub the reservoir clean.

The CrossBreed Dry Pack 1500

The rubbery roll-top dry bags popularized by river rafters and whitewater kayakers several years ago are gaining favor with hikers, hunters, backpackers and adventure racers. If 100 percent dry gear is an absolute necessity -- as it's increasingly becoming with cell phones, digital cameras, walkie talkies and GPS systems -- these PVC, urethane or treated-nylon bags are pretty much the only thing going.

Seattle Sports Company (www.seattlesportsco.com) has one of the largest selections of dry bags on the market, with 30 bag-type varieties, including duffels, compression-style bags, boating-specific models, small accessory bags and backpacks. The company's products are manufactured with traditional vinyl/PVC fabrics or a new urethane-coated fabric, which the company claims is more eco-friendly.

The CrossBreed Dry Pack

To test out a new product from the company, I recently reviewed the CrossBreed Dry Pack 1500 ($70), a mid-size waterproof backpack. The pack is essentially a dry bag with shoulder straps, a waist belt and a sternum strap, along with a few unique extra touches.

It is a simple design, with one large main pocket that opens wide and closes by rolling the top down and snapping each side into a plastic buckle. It has a bungee cinch on the front, but no small zippered pockets or other storage.

The pack weighs about 2 pounds when empty and, as the name references, can carry about 1,500-cubic-inches of equipment. Closed up, the pack is watertight, even when submerged for several minutes.

The CrossBreed's Back Panel is Designed to Maximize Ventilation...

The CrossBreed 1500's back panel was made to maximize ventilation, and its design incorporates hundreds of small plastic nodules that each stick out about 1/4 of an inch. This strange pokey panel allows air to flow subtly between your back and the pack's rubbery fabric façade.

In my tests, hiking with about 15 pounds of gear in the pack, the CrossBreed carried comfortably, and the back panel provided adequate ventilation. The myriad little back-panel nubbins press in on the back with surprising, direct pressure, which on mellow hikes felt sort of nice in an acupressure-massage sort of a way.

But for anything more than a couple miles, the panel might start to feel too aggressive. Indeed, I would not recommend this pack for trail running, adventure racing or other activities where you'll be moving fast or running with a bouncing pack for hours on end, especially if you're wearing only a thin top or a T-shirt.

Seattle Sports Company markets the CrossBreed Dry Pack 1500 for recreational hiking, biking, boating or camping. Workaday bike commuters might also consider the CrossBreed, as the pack will protect folders, files and notebook computers from road spray and those unfortunate, unexpected rain storms that can pop up miles from your office door.

The Fabled Mora Knife

More than 100 years ago, in the rural Swedish village of Östnor, just outside of the well-known town of Mora, a knifesmith named Erik Frost founded Frosts Knivfabrik. The Mora region was renowned for its high-quality blades, and Frost built his company on knife making principles and practices that had been handed down for many generations.

Today, Frosts Knivfabrik (www.frosts.se) is still producing knives, and its tough blades have garnered a following with hikers, campers, hunters and survivalists in Sweden as well as the United States. The company’s signature knives are classic models with 3- or 4-inch blades, a wooden or plastic handle, and a price that is usually less than $10. These humble knife models are referred to simply and universally as Mora knives.

(Over the years, there have been other companies to market Mora knife models, but often they were knock-offs of Frosts Knivfabrik designs with inferior blades. However, KJ Eriksson, a company with ties to Frosts Knivfabrik and a factory right next door in Östnor, Sweden, is considered an original Mora knife manufacturer as well.)

The Historic Mora Knives

What makes a Mora knife so special? They’re cheap, lightweight and simple -- a no-nonsense knife that comes with a plastic sheath. Its straight blade is sharp out of the box, and it feels well-balanced and strong in the hand.

But what really has made Mora knives famous are their superior steel blades. The steel, which comes in four varieties from Frosts Knivfabrik -- carbon-steel, stainless, Triflex and laminated-steel -- is known to hold an edge well, and it is regarded as extremely tough and resilient. Indeed, a common survivalist endorsement of Mora knives says that in a time of dire need one of these knives can be used to fell a tree by pounding the blade in and hammering the knife back and forth to slowly cut through the trunk.

A grown man can also pound the blade of a Mora knife into a tree and stand on it without hesitation, or so portended the common wisdom and folklore that I’d heard.

To see what these Swedish knives could actually take, I recently found a tree on my family’s property that needed to be removed and went to work with a Mora knife I’d picked up in Sweden earlier this summer on a trip through the country. The tree was a box elder, and I managed to hack off a 6-inch-wide branch with the knife in about 10 minutes, repeatedly pounding the blade in a couple inches with a log and then forcing the handle back and forth to cut.

A Contemporary Mora Knife

I next pounded the knife into the base of the tree to stand on the blade with my foot pressed hard against the bark. It did support my 185-pound frame, though the blade bent slightly from this silly abuse.

Frosts Knivfabrik sells its Mora knives in several variations, but all are basic, straight-blade knives with a similar look and feel. The better Mora knives use a modified carbon steel or a laminated steel. Particular models I’ve used and would recommend include the 660 SB and the S-1 BK (these are the model names from the Frosts Knivfabrik catalog).

Though you cannot buy direct form the Frosts Knivfabrik Web site, Mora knives are sold in the United States at some specialty outdoors shops, as well as online at sites like www.buckshotscamp.com and www.sportsmansguide.com. Knife prices range from $8 to $12 with these retailers.

Outdoor Research Zealot shell

The Zealot jacket from Outdoor Research Inc. (www.orgear.com) is representative of an industry trend toward lightweight, multiuse shell jackets made for summer rains as well as wintertime sleet and snow. Weighing in at just 7.7 ounces, the Zealot is waterproof, wind-proof and highly breathable, making it appropriate for hiking, biking, trail running, moderate mountaineering and skiing in all kinds of weather.

Zealot Jacket

For warm summer rains, the Zealot will feel clammy. And for the coldest winter days, the thin shell may feel a bit paltry, no matter how much fleece and polypro you’ve layered underneath. But for most conditions, the jacket nails a nice middle ground of being light, breathable, wind-proof and capable of keeping all the elements at bay.

Made with pricey Gore-Tex PacLite fabric, you do pay a bundle for this simple jacket. But the $199 price tag gets you a minimalist shell that in my tests has performed with aplomb.

The Zealot is so small and light that it can be folded and packed down to the size of a grapefruit. I leave the jacket stashed in my backpack wherever I go in case inclement weather comes up unexpected.

To keep the weight down, Outdoor Research designed the Zealot with few bells and whistles. It has a basic hood, a single small zip pocket on the chest, svelte elasticized cuffs, and a draw cord to cinch the jacket tight to your waist. The main zipper is a small, water-resistant design. All seams are taped to keep it watertight.

Because the Zealot is made to be used as a raincoat, I paid close attention to the hood design. Testing it out during a September downpour, I found the single, rear-pull hood adjustment and small, stiff cap bill to work well. Rain dribbled off my hooded head with no hesitation, and the hood stayed in place at all times to offer decent visibility no matter which direction I turned my head.

My single bad experience with the jacket came one windy day when I tried to cinch the elasticized hood extra tight. Upon my tug for adjustment, the cord pulled right out of the seam, leaving me out of luck in the woods with a hood that would not fit right. Though a temporary annoyance, it was an easy fix at home to re-attach the cord with a needle and thread.

After three months of hard testing, the cord pull-out incident was the one and only fluke. Otherwise, the Zealot was an admirable performer, holding up to all the hard rains and cold winds I could possibly find to throw at it.