Camping in Ulster

Every since I first posted about my frustration with Esbit fuel tablets (more than four years ago now) and my eventual solution of developing a more efficient Esbit tray stove , I have received a steady stream of emails from readers asking if I could make them a stove and sell it to them. Despite giving away the instructions, a step-by-step guide, and a template, some people simply didn’t want to fiddle with making the stove themselves. That’s fine, I totally get it. For a while I tried making my Esbit tray stoves for those that asked and sold them for a few bucks just to cover shipping, but I didn’t have enough materials or the time to do it on a frequent or scalable basis. Successful DIY Builds Others have been making my stoves themselves and sharing their results via the Backpacking Light forums . John Abela of HikeLighter.com posted a wonderful, detailed review and analysis of my Esbit tray stove via his blog. John was the one who first coined the term “BGET” or Brian Gr...

Here’s a clever little Kickstarter project called the Compass Caddy . It let’s you carry your baseplate compass right on your trekking pole so that it’s easily accessible and ready for navigation while you’re hiking. The Compass Caddy is the brain child of Peter Knight an avid backpacker and hiker from Hadleigh, England. Fits all sizes Peter designed the Compass Caddy to accommodate different makes and models of baseplate compasses that have varying widths as well as attaching to different diameter trekking poles. This means that you can get the perfect fit for your particular compass and trekking pole combination. The image above shows a dummy compass being used in the same Compass Caddy that my Silva Polaris fits into. Peter very kindly made a 3D printed version of the Compass Caddy to work with my Gossamer Gear LT4 trekking poles. Despite my Silva Polaris compass not being the perfect width for this prototype it still holds very securely in place and the attachment to my ...