Outdoor Discoveries

A little something for knocking around

My first pair of walking boots were suede items from Salomon and I have stuck with them until long after that suede began to crack up due to wear and tear. Once they seemed too worn to be taken out on more demanding hikes, they were relegated to low level nearby trots. Currently, they reside at my place of work though I never really got to using them for lunchtime escapades in the likes of Lindow Common or The Carrs.

The hill wandering duties originally performed by those Salomons are now undertaken by a pair of Meindl Burmas that now are beyond four years of age and look as if they have many more miles in them yet. The leather may be scuffed and the soles showing a share of wear, but neither is anything that precludes their use on longer hill wandering outings. Prior to my fitting them with Superfeet insoles, they always felt hard on my feet at the end of long walks. That was something that I put down to my getting them in a sale for around £100 and does not stop my buying more boots with the Meindl name on them.

Even with that hardness more or less addressed, wearing them on lower level walks does feel like overkill. For that reason, I have been considering the option of fabric boots for those lower level walks. A review comparing a selection of such items caught my eye in Country Walking recently and what really surprised me were the prices; many cost more than my Meindls. Paying £150 for a pair of fabric boots is not that different from the amount of money that leather boots cost so I was resigned to remaining on the fence unless a tempting offer came my way.

Yesterday, such a thing did happen: I saw pairs of Regatta Crossland Mid boots on sale for £32 each in Matalan yesterday. Even without knowing that the recommended retail price was £70, it looked a good deal and I settled on a size 9 pair in grey and black for myself (size 8 ones felt a little too cosy around the toe for my liking). The soles do have chunky lugs and there is own-brand waterproofing, but my intended use for these is for low-level strolling when conditions get a little too muddy for trail shoes. Already, the new boots have been out on a short stroll by the River Bollin and there are no complaints from me about them so far. That revealed that the soles are not the stiffest since it was possible to feel the ground over which I was travelling, especially on gravel tracks. Because there have been times when stiff soles have divorced my feet so much from the ground under them that confidence in their gripped is dented, I am not complaining about this hint that these are not mountaineering boots. The main thing is that they fit me and that the lacing secures my feet in them.

While I get to make more use of the Regattas, I may add a stronger pair of fabric boots to their number. It’ll stay on the back burner for now because there are plenty of other higher priority matters in life for me at the moment. A wish list never is a bad thing to possess either, though.

Another pair of TNF Hedgehog shoes

For the last four years, I have been well served by a pair of The North Face Hedgehog trail shoes. They may look more tatty these days but they have plenty of life left in them yet and I am not planning on retiring them prematurely either. Good service and durability has been what they have given so I have no complaints. In fact, they feel more like slippers than some footwear that I have and the shoes that I use for work come into this category.

The past two weekends have seen me head to Knutsford and Tatton Park on consecutive Saturdays. The first of these wasn’t so successful in that blundering in the name of finding another entrance to that park resulted in a misadventure involving barbed wire that ripped a coat and had me inadvertently find the source of Tatton Mere. In so doing, I submerged my TNF Hedgehogs in utterly sodden earth and left them both wetter and browner than they should be. Only for a wrong turn taken in innocence and some bloody-mindedness, I would have avoided annoyance at my foolishness.

By the time that I was along the track through Dog Wood with warning signs to keep to its course because of the bog of water that makes it a Site of Special Scientific Interest; there apparently aren’t that many sodden woodlands in Britain and I had to blunder about in one of them… As it happens, it isn’t so unsound away from that track but it’s best to stay near it in my experience.

The sunlit scenes for which I was hoping were stymied by advancing shower clouds but I rounded Tatton Mere regardless and pottered into a few of Knutsford’s shops too. There were those into which I didn’t venture and one was Rohan. Looking at the window display, I noted that they have DWR-coated down jackets on offer this winter and I was wondering if such items were available last winter. The fill is 800+ too so they should be toasty and I cannot say that I am not tempted. However, online investigations revealed that the price tag is a little hefty at around £245 for the Nightfall jacket so I’ll sit on the idea for a little longer.

As if to wash my shoes, a rain shower did make its appearance before I left again for home. On arriving there, the Hedgehogs got a good scrubbing to make them more presentable. Then, because of the deliberate and not so deliberate wettings, they took a few days to completely dry afterwards. Even with any mud that I failed to remove, they look more like their true colours again so they’re not getting hidden away just yet. In fact, there were a pair of Columbia trail shoes that came apart on me after crossing a wet Irish hillside so the way that the Hedgehogs survived the aberrant episode says a lot for their quality.

Nevertheless, I got to reckon that a more respectable pair might be a worthwhile acquisition and so around £100 got me newer ones by mail order from Ellis Brigham that look like the one you see above. The colours have changed since I last looked and the demure blue and grey scheme of the older specimens that I have is not available any more, hardly a surprise if truth be told. Still, the available colours left me indecisive as to which ones to pick. The black ones weren’t to my taste and I wasn’t too sure about the grey and khaki ones either, though subsequent inspection in the Macclesfield branch of Millets would have reassured me enough to get ones in that scheme if I had looked there earlier. Still, the blue ones look just fine and I’ll stick with them.

More importantly, the fit is good too and shoes from The North Face tend to suit my feet anyway. They feel stiffer than the older pair, but that could be down to years of using the latter. The same might apply to any little restrictions that my big toes feel in the new shoes. There will be a little more internal wearing in yet before they go out of doors, which, of course, is the whole point of having them.

The thread pattern is more chunky in the new Hedgehogs and that’s a good thing given how the smaller lugs were prone to breaking off on my older ones; both generations may have Vibram soles but they are very different items. Laces are flat now and not round as they once were so lacing should be more secure. The newer lacing may pick up more mud, but I have been known to wash laces and they enclosed in socks; it may sound strange, but that’s how I cleaned those (third-party replacements for the originals, as it happens) of the older shoes after that muddy dunking and they came out looking fine too.

In the main, I keep trail shoes for less taxing walks and it was my Meindl Burma boots that I took on my second more successful outing to Tatton Park. The previous day’s rain had softened the ground and not just in watersheds either. There was a muddy encounter when leaving the park, so my choice of footwear seemed better than my choice of trousers; it was nothing that a washing machine couldn’t sort. There was plenty of sun around before then and I made of the most of what it did to liven up the autumn colours. Dog Wood and Tatton were passed again and I moved on towards Tatton Old Hall before being lured across parkland alongside herds of deer. Antlers may have been on display, but there was more grazing than autumnal rutting and quiet than guttural roars, whenever there wasn’t a passing plane from Manchester Airport of course (the newer runaway is not that far away from Tatton). Though the second trip undid the nagging unfinished business after the first, it produced its own reasons for a reprise of some sort: a new vantage point for making a photo of Tatton Hall was found but only after light started declining for the day. After recent experiences, it may not act as a testing ground for those new shoes until we have had a longer dry spell of weather first. Lessons are there to be learned though being a less messy learner would better.

A new jacket from a January sale

One thing that perplexes me about down-filled duvet jackets is that they’re incompatible with rain. It was something that dawned on me over the Christmas and I was mulling over the idea of acquiring one with a water-resistant coating. However, this winter has turned out largely mild away from Scotland and the cost of such things caused a rethink. In fact, a look at the January sales has resulted in a different outcome: the acquisition of a Páramo Cascada jacket.

Some may complain that they are too warm for them, but the combination of warmth and waterproofing sounds appealing to me. What really has surprised me after years of using jackets fashioned from eVent and Gore-Tex is the softness of the fabric used in the Cascada. The length is generous too and a far cry from alternatives using drop tails instead, not that I have used any of these; the mere mention tends to deter me for one reason or another. For some though, the extra length may be too long and I certainly would not consider using it for cycling and the extra warmth would work against that too. The hood does have a wired peak though it did seem a little on the floppy side to me at first; handily, it can be folded away too, though some frown on such things. Of course, it’s in making plenty of use of the Páramo that I’ll get the measure of it. Only then can more considered opinions be shared.

A “They’re On You!” Moment

With the deluges that have fallen over Wales, Cumbria, the North Pennines and Scotland, today wouldn’t have made for a pleasurable day’s walking. Last weekend, though, things were very different, and I took myself to Wales for a hike from Roman Bridge to Pen y Pass. The ground was waterlogged in many places then, so it leaves nothing to the imagination to realise how easy it would be for rivers to rise with heavy rain falling on the hills, like it has been doing today. Thoughts of visiting the castles at Beaumaris and Caernarfon may be entering my head, but I reckon that I’ll leave things to settle a little before any other Welsh outing after what came the way. Macclesfield may not have fared too badly, yet you only have to hear of railway line closures to realise how hard a time other places are having.

Regarding last weekend’s hike, my usual practice of saying more in a little while applies here too, but one happenstance really stands out in my memory, so I’ll recall it here. Whether it was due to my being tired at the end of the walk or my being distracted by the need to catch a bus, I managed to stuff my head torch into my trousers pocket only to let it fall from my brain that I’d done so; daylight was failing while I took a little longer than I’d intended, so the extra lighting was a big help. The item itself is a Petzl LED affair, but it did nothing to make its presence known to me when I went looking for it again until it finally dawned on me where it might have gone. It’s a reminder both of how smaller some things are getting because my older Petzl would be nowhere near as compact with its need for rather old-fashioned oblong 3LR12 batteries to provide its power. Next time, I think that I’ll make a conscious note of where the newer lamp is being put to curtail any subsequent head scratching.

New laces for my TNF Hedgehogs

Am I the only person whose trail shoes outlast their laces? Well, it's happened me with a few of them and my North Face Hedgehogs were the latest to gain disintegrating laces and these are very thin too. Being long and narrow has meant their getting wet and getting caught in the chainset of my bike so the wear and tear can be explained easily with the other sheath coming off to show the white layer underneath. A call to a shop didn't seem to yield success so I went having a poke around the web to discover that a Leicestershire company called Fabmania appeared to have what I needed and I gave them a go. After all, the cost was around £3.30 plus postage and that can't break the bank with PayPal handling payment processing duties. Delivery was via Royal Mail so they dropped through my letter box without further ado a few days later. Changing from old to new was without any stress or strain too. Whatever concerns I had about the laces fitting through the eyelets on the shoes proved groundless and an old pair of trail shoes show look a little less tatty than they did.