If you have any handy hints or have comments on any of the below, please E-mail us at dungarvanhillwalking@gmail.com
Boot Care
Boots are not cheap so it pays to look after them. When they get wet, always remove the laces and stuff the inside with newspaper to help them retain their shape. Allow them to dry naturally – never dry directly in sunlight or on radiators. Once dry, clean or brush off dirt; polish and finish with a coat of water repellent spray or wax. Any metal hooks or eyes can also be protected against corrosion by wax or vaseline. When waxing boots, avoid using a cloth as most of the wax remains on this. Instead, put on some surgical gloves and use your hand and fingers to massage the wax onto the boots.
Can You Whistle?
Many of us carry a whistle on the hills but how many of us know the signal for help? If you need assistance, give a series of 6 whistle blasts in quick succession. If you need urgent help, use a sequence of 3 short blasts, 3 long blasts and finally 3 short blasts. Leave one minute intervals between your calls for help.
What Is Lapse Rate?
When air hits a mountain, it is forced to rise. As the air gets higher, less atmospheric pressure is exerted upon it, allowing it to expand and cool – leaving you shivering on the summit. The rate at which air cools with height is called the lapse rate. On average, you can expect a lapse rate of 1 deg C for every 150m height gained. Drier air cools more quickly than moist air so, on dry, windy days, the lapse rate can increase to around 1.5 deg C per 150m dropping to 0.75 deg C per 150m on humid or rainy days.
Poles Apart
Love them or hate them, trekking poles improve your balance, reduce concussion and speed your progress during descent – if used properly!
Still not convinced? – then try this. Put on a loaded rucksack and head for the bathroom. Stand on the scales and note your weight. Now grab the poles, place them either side of the scales, leaning on them with a similar force as if you were walking downhill. If you’re using the poles effectively, they’ll knock a quarter off your bodyweight – that’s the equivalent of saving around six tons of pressure on your feet and leg joints over one measly mile.
The most common mistake is holding the poles incorrectly. Place your hand through the strap from below, so the poles hang from the wrist. Now bring your hand down onto the pole handle. All your weight should be on the strap – you need only have a light hold on the handle to guide the pole in place.
Lengthen your trekking poles before starting your descent – they should be long enough to allow you to place them in front of you without compromising your balance. Use the poles in a natural rhythm with your arms, planting the right pole just before your left foot hits the ground. Place each pole well in front of your leading foot and don’t be afraid to lean forward and load some of your weight into it so it effectively brakes your movement. As soon as your body starts to draw level, flick the pole out again. Used correctly, for every 6 miles, your poles can save a whopping 1 mile’s worth of jarring on your knee joints.
If you don’t want to mistake your poles or have someone else mistake yours – especially when they’re piled high with a dozen others in the boot of that car or bus – then personalise them by wrapping some coloured tape just below the handles – insulation tape is great as its bright colour will stand out.
Base Layers
Ever wondered why base layers perform better when they are tighter fitting? Two reasons. Firstly, if there’s a big gap between your skin and the fabric, the moisture generally given off as vapour passes through the cooler air and therefore cools down and condenses before it has a chance to pass out to the outer layers. Secondly, in terms of insulation, you are looking for a layer of warm air trapped between your skin and the outside world. If this layer is too big, it won’t do its job of keeping you warm!
Bottle Those Sarnies
Ever thought of how to protect your sandwiches without having to lose half the volume of your rucksack because of a lunchbox? Use an empty 2 litre plastic water bottle with the top section cut off a third of the way down. It can store sandwiches or fruit – especially those bananas that always get squashed – and can be neatly tucked away into the side pocket of your rucksack. The discarded section can also be recycled for use as a funnel for filling your drink bottle.
Pack That Sack
Ever wondered why you take so much – or so little – in your rucksack? Can’t decide what to leave out? Here are some useful do’s and don’ts.
Do
- Weigh your packed rucksack - it should be a third of your bodyweight at most
- Line your rucksack with a bin-liner to ensure it is waterproof
- Roll your clothes up tightly, and squash in loose items, such as walking socks, at the end
- Pack heavy objects so they sit close to your back to help your balance
- Put anything you need in a hurry in side pockets, or at the very top of your bag
- Leave bulky, detailed guidebooks at home - photocopy the pages you really need and carry them in your map-case
Don't
- Take a big rucksack - you will pack it too full. Do not use larger than a 45 litre sack
- Pack any hard or angular objects in such a way that they dig into your back
- Put heavy objects near the top of the bag - they will strain your shoulders and neck
- Use a rucksack without a waist and chest strap
- Take too many clothes - one to wear, one spare and one in the wash is a good rule of thumb
Stay Hydrated
Almost all non-alcoholic drinks will prevent dehydration but try and minimise tea and coffee. Water is the most popular as it is cheap, accessible and very effective. Isotonic drinks can help re-hydration after serious exertion. However, try and avoid drinks such as cola, lemonade and high energy drinks that contain 10 or more grams of carbohydrates per 100ml as these drinks tend to take longer to be absorbed, starving the body of the fluid it needs. Here are some simple dehydration checks:
- Check urine colour - clear urine is good; dark urine is bad
- Check weight over 7 day period - stable weight is good; losing weight fast is bad
- Check weight before and after walk - small or no weight loss is good; major weight loss is bad
- Drink more water if you fail any of the checks above
Estimating Distance
Judging distances on the ground sounds easy but it’s not. While small distances can be estimated fairly accurately by counting your paces, judging longer distances can be more tricky and deceptive. This is a skill that only practice will teach you. Get into the habit of setting yourself distance challenges during rest stops. Choose a landmark and guess the distance between it and your current position; then check the map to see how close your estimate was. Once perfected, extend the challenge to your hillwalking colleagues and impress them! While you should never rely on this hill skill for accurate navigation, it’s a useful tool for the time it will take you to reach visible points.
Estimating The Width Of A Stream
When planning a route, it’s useful to be able to guesstimate whether a stream will be just a short jump across or a serious socks-off wade. On 1:50 000 series maps (OS Discovery), streams and rivers are marked in three ways
- Single thin blue line: less than 4m wide
- Single thick blue line: 4-8m wide
- Two blue lines with a tint in between: more than 8m wide
Don't Turn Off Commonsense
A GPS should be treated like a mobile phone – if you can use it on the hills, then that’s a bonus – but always plan your journey on the basis that you cannot rely on it. However, while commonsense should not be turned off when you turn on your GPS, the advantage of such a tool should not be underestimated. Here are some useful safety tips:
- Always take a map, compass, GPS and spare batteries.
- Just as a compass is not much use without a map, neither is a GPS. While it may give you direction of travel - as the crow flies - you still need to know what features lie between you and your destination.
- Replace run down batteries before you set off and so avoid a battery change on the hills.
- Practice using your GPS in good weather.
- Before you set off for a day on the hills, enter an escape route into your GPS.
- If the weather turns bad, reverse your route to get you home safely. Even if you don't use your GPS to navigate a pre-loaded route, you can switch on your GPS from the start and then use tracklog to create a trackback route that will guide you back to base.
- Your GPS will only work correctly with an OS map if its map datum and map format are correctly set.
No Wind Up
Weather forecasts give an expected wind speed for the general area but don’t forget that at a height of 900m, wind speed is normally double that at sea-level. The greater the wind speed, the greater the force it exerts on an object in its path (hillwalkers). This force is proportional to the wind speed squared – in other words, if the wind speed doubles, you’ll feel four times the force; if the wind speed trebles, then the force will be nine times the force at normal speed. To avoid the effects of wind, keep yourself less of a target by reducing the volume of your profile. Lower your centre of gravity to improve your balance by bending your knees and, if necessary, crouch. Trekking poles can help by widening the area over which your weight is spread. Avoid exposed areas and stick to leeward slopes. Steer clear of cols and gully heads where the wind will be funnelled at higher speeds.
Remember wind chill is a common cause of hypothermia; the effect of wind chill on wet skin is even higher.
Fry Up
From May to August each year, there is a sharp increase in frequency of lightning strikes – or CG (cloud to ground – as meteorologists call them). The following might then be useful
- Two triggers are needed for a thundercloud to form and for lightning activity to occur - moisture and heat - this is why the summer months often bring frequent strikes. The most common scenario that triggers a CG strike is when air is forced upwards over high ground, putting hillwalkers at particular risk.
- Sound travels at around 300m per second; count the seconds between the flash and the thunder clap to estimate distance between you and the storm.
- If you are caught in a thunderstorm, make yourself as unattractive a target as possible - if you're up on the hills, you are probably the best conductor of electricity out there. Don't linger near ridges, summits, under isolated trees or on exposed moorland where you'll be the tallest object, or standing next to it.
- Caves, hollows and below boulders may seem like obvious spots to seek shelter - but they're some of the most dangerous places to be during a thunderstorm. If you place yourself in a gap between two lumps of rock, then you're offering your body as a tempting conductor for any electrical currents passing through that area.
- Because a summit or substantial rocky projection will attract the electrical current, it leaves a relatively safe zone on the flatter slopes around it. The horizontal zone equates to the height of the peak: but bear in mind that if the peak is hit, the projection will shed some of the current -so keep at least 3m away from the edge of the projection.
- The best place to be in a thunderstorm is in the open. Sit on your rucksack, with the soles of your feet on your sack and your hands in your lap. Your vital organs are thus protected from any current!
Avoid The Shock
Ever wondered if an electric fence is on or is it just a deterrent? Here’s a safe way of finding out. Pick a longish blade of grass and holding it at the root end, rest the tip on the electric fence. If you don’t feel anything, slowly move your hand closer to the fence until your hand is just a few centimetres away. If the fence is on, you will feel a gentle warming through the grass. If it’s off, you won’t feel a thing!