Favorite Hiking Gear Linkies

As you have probably noticed, getting into backpacking leads to an abnormal obsession with gear, much like scuba can be. You’ll notice that its very hard to turn hiker’s conversations away from gear when you’re on the trail… its a habit I describe as “backpacker busybody-ing.” I don’t want to support this terrible habit in any way and please, if I start doing it, please stop me! However, I do want to pass on anything useful I have in my bookmarks that might save you money, improve your kit, lighten your load, etc.. so here are the best shortcuts I have:

http://www.steepandcheap.com
This is an evil little spinoff of backcountry.com that sets up one uber-deal on some random thing at a time, and it sells till it sells out. The downside is, you will buy things sometimes when you don’t really need them, just because they are so cheap… and sometimes they’re not exactly the _right_ thing, if you know what I mean.

http://www.spadout.com/wiki/index.php/daily_deals
I luv spadout.com in general. Its a really neato search engine for gear geeks who want the very best price on something very specific. The page linked above, however, summarizes daily awesome deals into categories so it enables you to browse a bit more, rather than just zooming in on the one and only thing you want. They also have some of the very best gear reviews I’ve ever seen.

http://www.campmor.com
The gear on this site tends to be slightly lower-end (like what a boy scout troup might want) but sometimes they have awesome deals. I’ve seen the best prices on clothes and shoes here.

http://www.mgear.com
The gear on this site tends to be high-end and specialized. They are great for really oddball, neato stuff. Sometimes they have uber sales. Just wait till the item has lost that “new kid on the block” shine.

http://www.backpackinglight.com
This is an ubergeeky ultralighter’s heaven. They review and sometimes sell really weird ultralight gear, which is often limited production and hard to find.

http://www.sierratradingpost.com
This is the randomest, oddest site I have. They sell everything from high end to low end, past season to new hotness, housewares to sensible shoes to mountaineering boots to kayaks and the occasional bicycle or canoe. They tend to have extremely low prices so if you’re up for rummaging, you can find some great stuff. Be careful, however, that you don’t get something that is _almost_ what you want because its cheap.

http://www.geartrade.com
This is a real deep dive. Its kind of like if most of the online gear stores took their discontinued, returned, and old merchandise, and got together to make a sort of gear-ebay baby. Individuals can sell used stuff too. You will find _incredible_ deals here, and score big if you find exactly what you want. I picked up a $110 pair of hiking shoes that I _knew_ I wanted (tried them on in a store) for $30; they were a store return and had never been worn. Beware, however, that sellers like backcountry.com do not combine orders so you pay a flat shipping fee on each item.

What a root canal might feel like

OK so I had a “classic root canal” last week. If you’re wondering what a root canal is like, here is my story, but it might be different from yours.

I had a filling that cracked and had to be re-done several times, making the hole so deep that a root canal was inevitable. After a weekend of mind-numbing pain (which I thought was a hangover headache but turned out to be tooth related), I woke on a Tuesday morning in so much pain I literally couldn’t think or problem solve. My dear Jack woke up, struggling to think himself, and finally issued the wise decree, “Go to the Dentist.” So off I went; I was so uncomfortable that what follows was by comparison not nearly as painful.

After anesthetizing (injection high in the gum area), the dentist put this cool rubber ring thing around the tooth to keep all the yuck out of my mouth while they worked. It was hard for me to see around it. He drilled out the filling very quickly, and then used these funny, flexy, wirey thingies to scrub the nerve tissue out of the root canals in my tooth. He showed me an Xray of my tooth (a molar) where there are 3 canals of nerves. These have to be cleaned out and packed with strands of some kind of inert, pink material whose name escapes me. That means I have no more nerve there and its basically a tooth root, on top of which they will overlay a nice, shiny, indestructable crown (once its healed). So after much vigorous scrubbing and some minor drilling that felt like it was in my brain, the new canals were filled with the pink filaments and then a flat, white filling was packed in over the whole shebang to “build up” my tooth to house the eventual crown. The weirdest part was the scrubbing. I see the dentist’s delicate little tweezers go back and forth, getting different size “scrubber” thingys, and then there would be a rubbing sound and I’d feel a little shooken, and then spraying cold water and vaccuming it out, and repeat. This took a long time, maybe 35 minutes. I felt bad for the dentist, it seems like a lot of work. The hygienist put little props up when my jaw got tired so I didn’t have to hold it open any more. I felt like I had 4 hands deep in my head sometimes, scrubbing and rinsing and drilling. The drilling was the second-weirdest, since its so deep in the tooth. I think it is just to thoroughly clean out the root canal and prep the surface for the new synthetic packing material. The drill tips were very small and all the drilling was very short and not that scary “big scrapey” sound you hear sometimes when you’re getting a filling.

So once the area was packed and the “crown buildup” filling was done, then the dentist smoothed the area and I was suddenly done. My mouth was tired and I felt kind of light-headed, but I went to work anyways. As the anesthetic wore off, I could feel my weird, half-finished tooth, all sharp on the edges and flat and kind of grainy across the molar surface. I kind of felt like I’d had major surgery in my mouth, like when I had my wisdom teeth removed. Later on the pain continued, only because I was really messed up and so I had to go on antibiotics. But at least I could think. Yay Ibuprofen!