CHICAGO, UNITED STATES (Team Geared Up) - Apologies to AltusLumen who sent us this product to review months ago. In-between my country transitions, only having a quick go myself, and handing it around a few people (engineers, outdoors & DIY dad’s) we’ve come out with a review!

If you need a lamp that stands up high on itself, spins 360, or can be used in the hand, it’s a great product, very well engineered and very robust. The general consensus is, it should last for years. Particularly useful is the ability to slide it into a pocket, yet the tri-pod is self-contained.

It gives off a very good even light on lamp mode and a nice narrow beam for detailed work (but I would imagine a headtorch is better in this role), the even light is excellent for working with. I could see good uses for this as the addition to a bike tool kit, for night-time transition stops in adventure races and all around the DIY workshop.

We didn’t empty the rechargeable batteries but AltusLumen states the runtime is around 1.8hours for ‘Area Light’ and around 8 hours for ‘Spot Light’ once the battery is fully charged and an extendible battery pack is available. I like rechargeable things - although they don’t transition to the outdoors (or cold) particularly well.

The recommended retail price is US$99, which compared to other head torches is expensive. This may be an unfair comparison as AltusLumen are focused in designing and manufacturing professional LED lights for engineers which reflects in it - it’s built strong and designed for shedding very bright even light on very concise detailed work.

If you’d like your own, you can pick one up in their online shop.

-Robin.

(Image Credits: Photos taken by the Team Geared Up Blog authors & friends. Permission granted to AltusLumen to redistribute with credit.)

SINGAPORE (Team Geared Up) - Team Geared Up are delighted to help out a regular reader over the last 7 months, Avril Copeland who with her team ‘Hunky Dorys Adventure Racing’ will partake in the world famous Eco Primal Quest in 68 days.

You can follow their preparations for the worlds toughest endurance race on their TGU microsite blog http://hunkydorys.teamgearedup.com/.

Their team is spectacular, Avil Copeland, Peter Spagnoli & Scott Pleban - Make sure to read their bios. To give you an idea of the experience…

• Adventure Racing World Championships, Scotland
• Eco Primal Quest Utah
• Subaru Primal Quest Pacific Northwest
• Eco Challenge NAC with Team New Balance
• Primal Quest Adventure Race
• 2006 Eco Primal Quest
• Salomon X-adventure World Tour, Utah
• 13 time United States Champion - Ski Orienteering
• 7 World Ski-Orienteering Championships
• World Masters XC-Ski Championships
• AR World Championships, NZ
• Subaru Primal Quest
• AR World Championships, New Foundland

Here’s a great short video about the race…

Head to their team blog to continue reading hunkydorys.teamgearedup.com! Expect to hear updates on TGU - and don’t hesitate to ask a training question on their blog.

-Robin-

(Image Credit: Avril ascending a rope section, Hunky Dorys Gallery.)

DUBLIN, IRELAND (Team Geared Up) - Deadliest Scoop! A furious account of life on and off the Bering sea. Listen to the interview here.

For those of who unfamiliar with Deadliest Catch, it is a show about one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. The series follows eight to ten crab fishing boats and their crews throughout two of the dangerous crab fishing seasons, the October king crab season and the January opilio crab.

Battling two storey waves, callous wind, battering ice-cold rain and the merciless and stubborn Bering Sea, the crews featured in Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch” test the limits of human endurance on the short but deadly crabbing seasons out of Alaska’s Dutch Harbour and have created a cult show out of what appears at first hand to merely be a documentary about fishing but in truth is testimony to man’s determination to dominate and conquer nature, despite its formidable opposition…….so who in their sane mind would decided to do it? The answer is the Hillstrand brothers.

Johnathan and Andy are co-owners of the vessel the Time Bandit. Johnathan captains during the King crab season and Andy skippers during the opilio season. Although these two are brothers there is a stark difference between the them. Johnathan is a captain with a love for life on the edge and a passion to speak his mind and will to do the impossible. When not battling with the Bering sea his hobbies include riding his Harley which has been souped up 120mph (193km/hr) at the touch of a button. Andy Hillstrand is the skipper during opilio crab season and heads up the business side of the family’s fishing venture. During the off-season, Andy lives on a ranch in Indiana where he engages in his other passion which is training horses. He’s happily married and light heartedly says that himself and his loving wife have learned that they have both learned to adjust to his marriage to her and his marriage to the sea.

So how did these two men get into crab fishing in the first place? Going back to their father who was also a fisherman, the Hillstrands became involved in the family business at a relatively early age. Andy not content working in a doughnut shop at a young age, yearned for something more (No doubt casting an envious eye at the bait shop across the road). Along with their father, they help in designing the Time Bandit for fishing crab. What many fans find hard to believe is that their designs included staterooms, a 4 person sauna and queen size beds. Not what you expect on a crabbing vessel. That is not to say that they have life easy!

Explaining that all they wear on deck can amount to a few layers of clothing then covered by waterproof overalls. There is no easy way to endure 30shorts in rolling seas and tempestuous waves. This all adds to the danger of the job whereby the injury rate is believed to be 100%. Andy goes on to say that many of the injuries that they have include broken bones and cases of frostbite. If you get wet during the opilio season you can be in trouble as the water will freeze on skin it’s just that cold. Also a topic of popular concern is that of the cameramen. Do they have difficulties? do they have the same guys every year? The Brothers explain that they have to look out for the cameramen and that they have helped save their lives on more than one occasion. Crab pots weighing up 900lb can easily kill if they fall on an unsuspecting person. They never have the same cameramen from one season to the next so there are always a few problems to work out, so say the Hillstrands. Though the people always change the brother captains say that it can be good especially in the wheelhouse, when normally you are alone for hours, you have someone to talk to.

Thankfully they have never lost a man but were especially reminded of the risks when in the last season they were lucky enough to be near another vessel when a man was swept overboard and managed to pull him from the water quickly. As most fishermen know, the life expectancy in the Bering sea is mere minutes without survival gear. Risks are part of the game they explain, last year Johnathan braved a moving ice pack and freezing harbour to offload $10,000 worth of crab causing hull damage and risking the vessel sinking. Now with his son Scott joining the crew season 4, when asked would he take the same risks with him on board the answer was an undoubted ‘yes’. This job is their livelihood and with risk it seems, comes great reward.

Fans will be looking forward to season 4 say the captains. Back with more insane pranks and some life threatening situations for the crew of the Timebandit, The hillstrand brothers are back this April 15th on the Discovery channel in the US and also have more to be revealed in their upcoming book ‘Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World’s Deadliest Jobs’.

So what now for the delicious Hillstand brothers of the Time Bandit? They look set to continue fishing for crab on the unforgiving Bering sea and also to travelling to promote their book. More information can be found on the Discovery website and their own re-vamped website http://www.timebandit.tv/.

-John Carroll (Furious J)-

—

EDITOR: Many thanks to John for stepping in to do this Guest Post for Team Geared Up! We’re very grateful - and next time we’ll try have someone in the right timezone! It was great to see our cyber buddies Backcountry Blog: The Goat on the call to! Thanks to the screengrabs from Deadliest Reports. Thanks to readers who asked questions - Ken, your music one was answered at 19mins!

Ah go on…

BANGKOK, THAILAND (Team Geared Up) - Ben Saunders clearly has a love of the cold. An unknown name to me until last week, I found out that Ben was the youngest person to ever ski solo to the North Pole.

Born in 1977, Ben grew up in Devon, was educated at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and lives in London. He is passionate about the great outdoors and is a record-breaking long-distance skier, with three North Pole expeditions under his belt. He is the youngest to ski solo to the North Pole and holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey by a Briton. Since 2001, Ben has skied more than 2,500km (1,500 miles) in the high Arctic, which he recently worked out equates to two percent of his entire life living in a tent.

Starting late March, Ben is going on an expedition to the geographic North Pole, with the aim of setting a speed record, less than 36 days, solo, unsupported. Ben is also planning SOUTH (October) which will be the first return journey to the South Pole on foot, and back to the coast again. At 2,900km and four months, SOUTH will be the longest unsupported polar journey in history.

Ben has a book coming out in 2009. Keep your eyes peeled for it! See BenSaunders.com

-Robin-

(Image Credit: bensaunders.com)

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - TGU did it! We finished (just with a few technical mishaps) the London 2007 Rat Race. The Rat Race is an urban adventure race, taking all the activities of the outdoor arena but set in a city. Results are in, and we’ve come 150th out of ~190 teams in our class.

Arriving on the Saturday for registration it hit us - this event was big. It turned out to break all records and was the biggest adventure race ever held in the UK. There were over 750 competitors racing! Saturday at 3.45pm we were given our checkpoints for the prologue and spent 1hr before the race plotting them on the super scale map of London and fitting the best route around them. For a warm-up this was no mean feat as we set off at 7pm on a lap of London, aka a half marathon.

Here’s some video I took:

Saturday night was designed to disorientate & challenge you all on foot. Each ‘rat trap’ included an activity. We visited the Ministry of Sound and had head-torches out to find 3 different promotional leaflets in a flashing smoke filled maze of thumping music! On to the Imperial war museum and climbing cargo nets strapped over the large battle ship guns. Some parkour on the South bank, and up to a gym near Picadilly circus where we had to do 250m on a rowing machine, while other team mates went at it with press-ups and a cycle machine. Down to Stanford’s map shop where we got a bearing to Columbia from an atlas, then to the Ellis Brigham ice climbing wall which they’d set a cargo net up to reach and ring a bell. From here we hot footed it up to the City for some sudoku challenges and some hidden marshals around the Gerkin and tower of London. We got through the finish line after 2hrs 34mins of full-out running and scored 206pts which put us in 149th place out of 190 teams in the Adventure Class. We were pleased. We were given a map, and checkpoints for the Sunday race and after our free pasta re-fueling we headed home for 2hrs of map plotting into the night. The route was completed by midnight, but it was alarms set for 5am.

More pasta in the morning, and off to the race start at 7am. Sunday required massive effort and based on the recommendation of the race director we joined the other non-elite teams and took a 90min time penalty to skip the morning foot stage and get on the road straight away. It went something like this… a ~50km cycle out to near Heathrow and back including activities such as flights of steps, keg carrying, climbing over lorries, cycling over lorries, stripping off and jumping in the Thames to swim around a pontoon, flying-fox, rope bridges, abseiling off the highest part of Twickenham Stadium, a 7km foot race around Richmond Common, mud tracks, boarding & searching for checkpoints on the HMS Belfast battle ship and much more.

The whole course was tracked by fantastic wrist bands that tracked your time in/out of every checkpoint. These were then downloaded on return to the finish and we were all given print-outs.

Flickr Set

-Robin-

-Aisling-

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - TGU are on Jaiku.com MicroBlogging site as channel #tgu. Follow us there if you Jaiku yourself.

I’m @rgb, Alex is @ALXtreme. Feel free to add me anyway!

-Robin-

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - Have you ever seen a cooler shirt? The London Rat Race draws near for ‘Team Geared Up’. If you see a threesome running, cycling, kayaking & climbing around London in bright red shirts next weekend you know it’s us. The team with the reflective panels on their chests hoping to blind the competition.

These shirts arrived in for us today and I’m only delighted. They are super. I now need to order them for all my great bloggers to wear, you guys deserve it. The only problem is, I need to get Aisling’s logo on her back as none of the other runners will see it if she keeps coming 1st in all these races! It’s an interesting topic of discussion… Neal wants his logo on his back for climbing photos, where the climber is often face on to the wall. I’d want my logo on my front as I usually have a pack on - and it’ll be hidden and/or rub off. Where’s the best place to have an outdoor logo?

Competition: We need a really snappy cool tagline to print on the reverse side to the logo. Submit your entries here, and we’ll give a copy of the t-shirt to any reader who submits one we pick & print ourselves.

I’m thinking of something like: “If you can read this, I’ve lost my rucksack…”.

(Any readers actually want a t-shirt, seriously? I need a brand/company/shop to put their logo on the back and cover the costs for 100 t-shirts for our best 100 readers. Any takers?)

-Robin-

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - This is part II and our ascent of Castor (see Part I: Gran Paradiso). Castor is a 4226m peak located in Switzerland but we climbed from Gressoney la Trinite in Italy which climbs up a long valley from Pont St Martine, the devil town with no ATMs, Maps or Guidebooks. Italy really doesn’t have the same mountaineering tourism as France or Switzerland, and you feel it. On the positive side this means you get spectacularly empty routes - and we were about to experience one of the best climbs of the trip.

We arrived in Staffel at about 11am, and dumped all our kit out of the car onto the road - we proceeded to sort it all back into the packs we’d take up the mountain with us for the night. By the time we were packed we found out the cabel car only ran 3 times a day - and the next one was at 5pm, we’d never make refuge by darkness and climbing to an unknown route with no cable car descent open and no tent is not clever. We’d have to wait for tomorrow… at least we had a nice view! The peak you can see is the hump we would pass over to reach the hut. Castor at 4226m is hidden well behind this and to the left.

We got a room in a B&B and headed to the nearest bar - as luck would have it, it rained heavy and we may well not have survived a night on the hill with no kit, certainly with the thunder storm we would neither make the hut, or the climb in the morning. It could have been disaster. In the bar we were the only 2 people and managed to spend what was probably a week’s revenue for them in 5hrs. They fed us nibbles all night ‘courtesy’ of us buying extra big ‘formidable’ beers at a go. We ordered big pizza’s, it was great - well Eoin ordered two! We ended up ’shouting’ along to a DVD of the U2 Vertigo tour on our own much to the staff’s amusement, and at ‘kick-out’ time we were presented with free hats and a 1ltr bottle of the local spirit! Love it.

Waking very groggy & dehydrated at 6.30am after only a a few hrs sleep, not in the mood at all, we started up the cable car on the 8.45am lift.

It was from here the view just got better…

and better…

and better…!

We started out on the route, and it was a long rock path along a ridge, moving onto snow fields up the slowly rising giant.

The temperature had plummeted the night before and everything had gone into a deep freeze. It was odd for the height we were at as every lake we past was frozen solid. You could throw stones at the surface and not break it.

As we gained some serious height we hit cloud, and during the breaks in the white-out we got some spectacular views down what we had just climbed - we began to feel rather the vertical drops on either side that we’d been oblivious to in the cloud.

We got a fantastic breeze come in and sweep out the cloud around us - the panorama opened up and we could see the final ridge ahead that we needed to reach before we could take on the cabled section and the vertical finish to the refuge.

We eventually reached what we knew from our guide book was the last part of the ridge. This is where it got steep, but fantastic. Suddenly everything we’d seen on the route so far just got amplified and comments started stream out of us “wow”, this was good.

What we had underestimated was the length of the cabled section, it went on, and on! Can you see it running along the ridge below? This was about 1/5th of it.

There were wooden bridges in place to span the big gaps too - wooden bridges I was only just trusting!

In the heat of the moment we were even both caught wearing buffs as a bandana. Practical - but very un-trendy. I regret this photo.

Out of no-where, the hut appeared over the ridge-top.

Fantastic…

3585m, pretty high hut.

Even the first sign of other climbers that day - It had been wonderfully peaceful. Rare.

Toilets too - at this height… squat holes, but with a flusher - so not the end of the world!

Now this is a view to eat your dinner looking at! We sat down and ate a massive plate of pasta each. At about 1 million euro a plate to cover the helicopter fuel to get it up there!

The view of tomorrow’s route & the glacier we would cross before sunrise was clear and the good news was a track was already cut. What we didn’t realise at this point was there was only 4 of us out of the ~30 at the hut who would climb Castor the next day, this just kept getting better.

As darkness set in, we took our last look at the footprints we’d be trying to locate on the snow in the sickly feel of 4am.

The next morning was spectacular - we geared up in the gear room and stepped out onto the ice. It just got so good. I find mountaineering, and especially glacier plods are very much a visual slow moving thing. Your brain races along thinking of things but with your partner 20m ahead of you on the rope it’s a very self-finding experience. I think in this case my photos speak for the climb themselves.

Below is Gran Paradiso, which we climbed in Part I (the days before).

Our ridge…

Some tight navigation was needed!

And then came the summit… pure brilliance!

And the summit views…

There’s the Matterhorn…

And TGU on top! Bonus!

Map:

View Larger Map

Part III next week, with our ski mountaineering descent of the Breithorn.

-Robin-