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Posted by David Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 02:06:14 :
In Reply to: Another Appalachian Trail adventure posted by Tim Holloway [67.140.195.37] on Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 23:09:42 :
You were smart to get up and get going even though you were soaked and it was still dark out. I did all my hiking in my early years in the Cascades in Washington, and on the Washington coast, where you can pretty much figure on getting rained on no matter when you go. The most dangerous thing in the wilds is cold rain. I listened to a hair-raising story from a young man once who didn't know how close he came to death when he and his friend spent a night camping on snow in a rain storm in one of those old cheap plastic "tube tents" that's basically a glorified garbage sack. He was so hypothermic that he just wanted to sleep, but his friend insisted they had to get up and get going. On the way out they were both hallucinating. It was close to a 20 mile hike out to the car, but they survived. If you keep moving, you can survive about any kind of weather, but if you stop, it can catch up with you real quick. Death by hypothermia, or what they used to call "exposure", is still the main killer in the woods, and the worst hypothermia weather i what we'd call "steelhead weather" on the coast -- temperatures in the thirties, and raining steadily.
As far as tents and clothes go, the only thing that's truly waterproof is a sheet of solid plastic. Anything "breathable" is going to leak to a greater or lesser extent. A garbage sack over the pack, and a coated nylon army poncho were the standard low-budget rain gear when I started hiking, and if you're going to be in a tent in serious rain, the only way to really keep it from leaking is to through a good plastic tarp over it.
Once I moved inland, it took me a while to get used to the fact that in most of the world, it doesn't rain for days or weeks on end. In the Rockies or the Bitterroot, it will actually rain for a couple hours and then quit and get sunny and you can get all dried out. On the coast, once it starts raining, you'd better figure on it continuing for a few days at the least, which means anything that gets wet is going to stay wet. If you can build a fire on the north coast in January, you can build a fire anywhere.