Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Brianne Goodspeed has biked solo through rural France, worked with farmers in West Africa, and hiked the Appalachian Trail. She now lives in Vermont and rarely finds reason to leave.

http://briannegoodspeed.com

This author has contributed 29 posts.

AUTHOR FEED

Now We're Cooking…

7 Comments

07/24/06

For the faithful converts of ultralight backpacking, the alcohol stove might just be the Holy Grail. Almost all of the long-distance hikers I know have long-since traded their clumsy Whisper Lites and wasteful Pocket Rockets for the stove that you can make in your basement. The alcohol stove goes by a variety of names, including pepsi can stove and beer can stove, depending on how it’s made, but the basic principle is the same. You cut the bottom off of two aluminum cans, fit them together, cut out a large hole for your fuel, and punch about fifteen little holes around the rim for the flame to escape. A metal stand, which you can also make yourself, holds your cookpot above the flame. A lot of people use pot cozies to continue cooking their food after the flame goes out so that they don’t waste fuel unnecessarily.

But the alcohol stove isn’t just a lighter alternative; it’s also a greener one. It runs on denatured alcohol rather than, say, isobutane-propane (which, when burned, is known to cause cancer, birth defects and other reproductive chaos), it uses recyclable materials, and you can make it yourself. For people like me, whose engineering skills are suspect, you can also buy them online at Anti Gravity Gear, Mini Bull Design, and Mo-Go-Gear. Sometimes you can find them on Ebay as well.

Alcohol stoves weigh as little as a half an ounce, plus the weight of however much fuel you carry. (Denatured alcohol is often sold in small quantities at outfitters and hardware stores in trail towns.) You won’t be making three course meals with this stove, but do you really want to lug all that food with you anyway?

alcohol, Cancer, cape, car, design, Food, waste

It's a Brave New Backcountry

3 Comments

07/10/06

Edward Abbey

I sometimes wonder what Edward Abbey would say if he could see Appalachian Trail thru-hikers resting cozily in their sleeping bags at night with the stars and moon above, tapping away on their tiny PocketMail devices so that they can post their daily blogs. So far from the asphalt superhighway, and yet still on it.

Well, who cares what Edward Abbey—the old grump—would say because it’s now a lot easier to learn about all of America’s long distance hiking trails at sites like Trailjournals. Started by two AT thru-hikers, “Leif” and “Zipdrive,” Trailjournals now hosts about 137,000 journal entries, and represents about 1,000 hikers and 1,500,000 miles trekked. It’s not just the Appalachian Trail either. You can read about the Long Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, the John Muir Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, you name it. Besides learning about the trails from the people who are on them, it’s pretty funny to see photos of hikers just starting out—often a little chubby, clean-shaven, and smiling—versus when they finish (looking a little bit like old Ed Abbey himself.)

Checking out this year’s crop of hikers, “Red Dane,” has a good site, as does “Stumpknocker,” an AT legend who has hiked the trail at least four times, and this year is walking all the way to Newfoundland. I met “Mango,” a recent retiree from Tennessee, in the White Mountains a week ago. My own trailjournal from 2004 is still up, though it’s sporadic since I relied on public libraries, rather than pocket mail.

bags, car, Hiking, magazine, rum, sleep

Mountain Clubs or Country Clubs?

1 Comment

06/30/06

Unlike bigger mountains out west, the craggy granite outcroppings of New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Vermont’s Green Mountains are within a day’s drive of about 75 million people. Each summer, mountain clubs and other non-profits get to work educating hikers about Leave No Trace and the responsibility of land stewardship.

But not all mountain clubs are created equal. The old and now-behemoth Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) is coming under frequent fire these days from hikers who claim that the AMC has abandoned its commitment to the mountains and the ordinary folks who trek through them. Instead, the AMC is building quasi-resorts such as Crawford Notch’s new Highland Center to attract wealthy visitors and corporate groups. Other smaller and less controversial groups inlcude Vermont’s Green Mountain Club (GMC), the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC), and the Guy Waterman Alpine Stewardship Fund.

The Guy Waterman Fund, which offers grants for land stewardship and education, was established in memory of a long-time dedicated White Mountain advocate who, along with his wife, Laura, was instrumental in raising environmental awareness in the northeast mountains. Their fabulously well-written and suprisingly funny books include Backwoods Ethics, Wilderness Ethics, and Forest and Crag.

Laura Waterman, by the way, also recently wrote a memoir, Losing the Garden, about her life with Guy at their Vermont homestead, where for twenty-seven years they lived without heat, running water, or electricity while penning over ten books and countless articles from the kitchen table of their two-room cabin.

Amazon, book, books, electric, electricity, ethics, garden, Home, Outdoors, rum, summer, Tea, water, wood

Grandma Gets Mean

4 Comments

06/27/06

Grandma Gatewood, courtesy of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy

I used to hear that for every woman on the Appalachian Trail, there were twenty men. That number is probably an exageration, but if you ask the women who walk the 2200-mile trail from Georgia to Maine, many of them will tell you that a boy’s club vibe prevails. The woods are, after all, one of the few places left in America where a man can be a man. By contrast, it’s said that the women who make the five-month journey just “get mean.”

So, cheers to the first woman who ever got mean on the Appalachian Trail. In 1955, a 67-year-old grandmother set out from Georgia in a pair of Keds, carrying little more than an old army blanket and a shower curtain for a tent. Five months later she reached mile-high Katahdin in Maine where a strong wind nearly blew her off the summit as she belted out “America the Beautiful.” According to Sports Illustrated (10/10/55), when asked why she hiked the Appalachian Trail, Emma “Grandma” Gatewood replied, “Because I wanted to.”

It’s worth noting that the Appalachian Trail of Grandma Gatewood’s time was tougher than the one popularized by Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Thru-hikers today can stay in hostels every couple of days, gear is lightweight and easy to use, and painted white blazes on the trees make it nearly impossible to get lost (unless, of course, you’re a creative non-fiction writer like Bill Bryson).

Grandma Gatewood went on to become the first person to hike the entire trail twice. She then became the first person to hike the entire trail three times.

car, sport, trees, women, wood