Keeping Your Stove Pressurized: My buddies and I have a tradition of having coffee on the top of mountains that we ascend. It is like a backrub from a loving girlfriend followed by a foot rub: making something good just a little better. We ascend with canister fuel stoves and a titanium pot to keep everything light. There have been a few problems with ½ full canisters of fuel being cold on high peaks and not wanting to pressurize properly. No coffee on the summit is out of the question. One way around the problem is to keep the canister close to your body as you ascend to keep it warm. This could be uncomfortable depending on your choice of layers so the other option to maintain good stove pressure is to place a hand-warmer heat pack under stove either in your pack during the hike up or directly under the stove starting 5 minutes or so before and during its use. It gets just hot enough to get the electrons in the canister moving, but not so hot as to cause any danger.

Helmet First Aid Kit: Climbers like to travel light and fast. A bit of food and water, light raingear, and a headlamp make up the average kit for a one-day rock climb. The first-aid supplies, however, are almost always left in the climbing pack at the base of the route, and even if you take a pack on a route it’s a good idea for each climber to have a small stash of emergency supplies. This is especially true if one pack is shared by both climbers. The question, therefore, is where do you realistically stash the bare essentials? The small space between a helmet’s suspension and outer shell can often accommodate a bare-bones emergency kit. However, not all helmets offer this improvised “storage” space. Foam helmets while a good choice in many respects, generally have no vacant cavity. Suspension helmets, such as the Edelrid Ultralight or Petzl Ecrin, are better suited to carrying a helmet kit. Regardless of what type of helmet you use, space will be limited. Hence, you should be very selective about the items in your helmet kit. Consider which small first-aid items are most necessary, and hardest to improvise. A good starting kit should be composed of latex exam gloves, a few 4-x-4 sterile gauze pads, a small, flattened roll of half-inch tape, and some pain medication. Stow these items in a sandwich-sized Ziploc bag and include an empty Ziploc for litter and biohazards. Insert the kit between the suspension and the shell of your helmet. Don’t overstuff the kit or include any items (e.g. hard or sharp objects like a knife or scissors) that might compromise the protective qualities of your helmet. Of course, your helmet kit need not be limited to first-aid supplies. You could just as easily carry a couple packets of energy gel, a topo for the tricky descent, a silk-weight balaclava, an emergency heat blanket, or whatever else safely fits. You can also attach a few 6-inch strips of duct tape to the outside of your helmet for emergency rigging/repairs or to back up your headlamp clip. While the helmet kit certainly isn’t up to the challenge of a major accident, having a few necessities close at hand may buy you the time to get back down to your pack.