The Woods

NPR

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Why Some Rope Knots Hold Better Than Others : NPR

Special fibers that change color when they are under strain have helped scientists come up with some simple rules that can predict how a knot will perform in the real world.

There's a whole field of mathematics that studies knots, to explore abstract properties of idealized curves. "But that's not what you care about if you are, for example, a sailor or a climber and you need to tie something which holds," says Vishal Patil, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose new findings appear in the journal Science.

Breakfast at Basecamp

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WV Outdoors is an interesting channel on bushcraft and back country camping in West Virgina. People think West Virginians have a strong accent, but as you can tell from this video, the Northern West Virigina accent is pretty similar to Rural Eastern New York.

My propane lantern kept getting dimmer and dimmer

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My propane lantern kept getting dimmer and dimmer. Not only that but it was blowing black smoke and the globe was getting covered with soot from a bad air – gas mixture. 

I disassembled the lantern a few weeks ago and removed a tablespoon of mud and oily residue from the air intake which is hidden under the plastic cover near the brightness control knob. Propane in cold weather can get very oily and it attracts mud like a giant magnet. This is particularly true when your using it at temperatures below freezing with long hoses from a 20 lb tank. 

Now it’s super bright like new again.

A top concern for this long-weekend in the wilderness will be the mud

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A top concern for this long-weekend in the wilderness will be the mud … 🐷

Rain in the winter, especially after the snow means things will be muddy. I will try to camp somewhere elevated and stay out of the mud as much as possible, to avoid disturbing the ground, but some may not be possible. 🦺 I’ve camped out there enough in the rain to know what areas flood and are muddy, but the ground this time will be particularly weak being that it is mid-winter.