Recreation
Outdoor necessities

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

Lost.

A solid pair of boots and a watch that not only tells time, but direction and altitude, can prove useful. Watch photo by Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser Boots photo by Russell Goo • Special to The Advertiser

The stream that was on my left heading up the trail was now ... where? My hiking party, which was right behind me, was now ... where?

I was on a weekend excursion at a place called Pralognan in the south of France. Bewitched by the towering snow-capped peaks around me, I had somehow taken an errant turn down one of a dozen side trails, then complicated matters by guessing wrong at a five-way junction.

Lost!

Anxiety rising, I wandered long, aimless minutes until I ran into a German couple sitting in the shade of an abandoned shed. In horribly scrambled Francais, I tried to explain my predicament. After much gesturing and mutual brow-furrowing, the woman looked at me very earnestly and said in halting English: "We are lost, too."

Now, discounting that one afternoon at Liberty House when I was 6 years old, this was the first time that I'd felt truly, seriously lost.

In situations such as these, common sense, a cool head and keen instinct are your best friends. Fair-weather ones for me, it turned out. No matter. I had the next best thing: my Suunto Vector watch.

The watch had everything necessary to remove my head from places unmentionable. Its built-in altimeter told me that I had descended some 200 feet below the plateau where the trailhead was located. The compass told me that I had been traveling northwest when I should have been going northeast. And the barometer told me I'd better get it all straightened out before it started raining.

It took about an hour of backtracking and several more glances at the compass before I made it back to the starting point. (I know this because — zowie! — the Vector also tells time.) Had I any idea how to pronounce "Suunto," I certainly would have toasted the Finnish watchmaker over my fat pot of vin rouge that night.

For many hikers, to love the outdoors is to love the little and not-so-little things that allow us to negotiate its difficulties — from multi-use knives and portable hydration systems to compact GPS units and ultra-bright headlamps.

True, there are still a formidable few who can disappear into the wilderness with a paper clip and dental floss and feel perfectly safe. But for the rest of us, a few well-picked items can mean the difference between a trip to remember and a trip on the medevac.

I got the Suunto watch as a gift last Christmas and it's already assumed a spot on my list of favorite outside stuff, along with my MSR WhisperLite Intenationale camp stove, Asics Gel Nandi DS III trailrunning shoes and North Face Serac 3D sleeping bag.

Russell Goo, a Mililani resident who's made a second home of Haleakala Crater, has two items on his list of absolute-essentials.

"If the going will be tough, my Army jungle boots are the first thing I take along," he said. "They've been on every difficult trail I've been on."

That includes everything from Denali to the swamps of Missouri as well as more than 20 trips into Haleakala Crater and all manner of day hikes.

The other essential item is Goo's Leatherman Wave

"After carrying a Swiss Army knife for 30-plus years of travel, three years ago I upgraded to the Wave," he said. "Given air, water and food, a versatile pocket knife is indispensible."

Paul Brandon of 'Ahuimanu figured out what his favorite piece of equipment was the day he succumbed to heat exhaustion while hiking into Halape on the Big Island.

"What saved me that day was a lightweight backpacking tarp," he said. "We stretched it across some rocks and I lay under it cooling off for about an hour.

"It was quite a humbling (and rather humiliating) experience," Brandon said. "If it had not been for the tarp, I don't know how I would have recovered because we were about an hour from our destination and, as anyone who has hiked the Ka'u desert knows, there is no shade to be found."

Brandon said he bought the tarp from REI in the mid-80s and used it over a decade's worth of hiking trips.

"I finally ended up throwing it out after 10-12 years because it took on a permanent mold odor," he said.