I’ll pass on a phone charging stove, but can I have a portable espresso machine please?
Many moons ago, back when the Scotsman Magazine was printed on heavy duty parchment and delivered by horse-drawn cart, I used to write a weekly guide to the latest outdoors kit. As these were the days when journalists were still encouraged to leave their desks for reasons other than toilet breaks, I got to test it all out, too. I went to the Nevis Range ski centre and frolicked around in knee-deep snow in an attempt to decide which of the latest models of snowshoes worked best. I went snowholing on the Cairngorm plateau in February as part of my “research” into the warmest down jackets. And I deliberately picked the soggiest, boggiest possible route up Ben More on Mull in order to determine which “waterproof and breathable” walking boots were the most waterproof and breathable.
Since the gear guide came to an end, however, I’ve not really taken much of an interest in outdoors kit. My usual approach to new stuff is: if it ain’t broke, you probably don’t need to buy another one, and in recent years I have paid next-to no attention to the latest developments in camping clobber and the like.
All this changed the other week, however, when I had cause to visit the interweb for some new tent pegs and discovered en passant that there was now such a thing as a stretchy sleeping bag. A stretchy sleeping bag! What mad genuis came up with that one? Who hasn’t woken up in a tent first thing in the morning and wished they could stretch their limbs properly without having to expose themselves to the cold? And who hasn’t been forced to get up and get dressed, not because they want to stop snoozing, but because they have run out of comfortable positions in which to snooze?
Apparently, the stretchy Deuter
Exosphere 0 Reg Sleeping Bag has “internal and external elastic chamber seams” which provide “25 per cent expansion in width.” This sounded pretty sci-fi to an old-timer like me, so, like a modern-day Rip van Winkle, I ventured off into cyberspace to see what else the eggheads of the outdoors industry had been up to in the years since I’d last thumbed through a glossy Berghaus brochure. And whaddyaknow? Turns out they’ve been pretty busy.
One of the more mind-blowing things I discovered is the Biolite Campstove2. The fact that they’re up to the second edition just shows you how far behind the times I am with this one, but anyway – this isn’t just a neat little cooking stove that runs on whatever sticks and pine cones you can find lying about, it also converts all the heat it kicks out into electricity, allowing you to charge your smartphone or digital SLR while you cook your Alphabetti Spaghetti.
Further down the camping tech wormhole, I stumbled upon Zipstitch – a clever little bandage that helps you close medium-sized wounds without having to attempt painful, amateurhour needlework. Simply line up the bandage so that the Zipstitch’s two super-sticky patches are sitting either side of the wound, then pull on tabs on either side of the bandage to close up the cut.
By this stage I was starting to feel like Marty Mcfly when he first encounters a hoverboard in Back to the Future 2, but there was more – much more. A dizzying ten-minute internet trawl threw up the magical Revolve bike wheel, which can fold down small enough to fit comfortably inside a backpack; the Scorkl mini scuba tank, which can be refilled using a bike pump; Phantom ski wax from DPS, which apparently never wears off (although I’ll believe it when I see it); and the Thermacell MR150 Portable Mosquito Repeller, which creates a 15-foot radius insectfree zone by emitting Allethrin, a synthetic copy of the natural bug repellent found in chrysanthemum flowers.
After sitting stunned for a few moments, my mind comprehensively blown by the ingenuity of all this, I finally came to my senses. Yes, I could think of a million ways in which this gear might have come in handy in the past, but that didn’t necessarily mean I needed any of it in the future. I had somehow managed to survive into my fifth decade without a phonecharging stove, and my snowboard worked fine as it was, thanks very much, even if its base was starting to look like a Swiss cheese.
I was just about to bring my foray into the brave new world of outdoors tech to an end, when I spied an ad for the Wacaco Minipresso GR, a portable espresso machine which, thanks to a semi-automatic piston, allows you to make a decent cup of coffee anywhere in the world as long as you have access to coffee beans and water. Now that, surely, is a bit of kit that nobody should have to do without. n
Zipstitch helps you close wounds without having to attempt amateur-hour needlework