[pct-l] cold weather clothes

[chwillet at indiana.edu (Christopher Willett)]

I left KM in 2003 on June 10 and it was quite cold at night.  I was
carrying a 40 degree bag and a silk liner and tended to sleep in most of 
my clothes.  I would still wake up around 3 am and only sleep fitfully 
after that.  One of the biggest problems was my sleeping pad:  An old, 
heavily used Z-rest.  It had little insulative value left and I lost alot 
of heat to the ground.  If you take a foam pad, make sure it is
relatively new.  I got a new Z-rest in Sierra City and it was about 40% 
thicker than the old, used one.  As
far as clothes go, they were perfectly adequate:

Thermal top and tights
Long sleeve shirt
T-shirt
Long pants
Shorts
3 pair of socks
Underwear
Primaloft pullover
Warm hat
Liner gloves
Bandanna
Sun hat
Frogg Toggs anorak
Sunglasses

On a usual day I'd wear the pants and long shirt.  I switched to
shorts after my pants exploded during the ford of Kerrick Creek, two
days north of Tuolumne.  In South Lake Tahoe, I switched to the 
T-shirt.  Some
mornings I would 
leave camp with my thermals still on, though they were usually gone by 
10 or 11.  Temperatures in the lows 20s at night up high, low 30s lower 
down.  If you sleep lower down, in the meadows, you'll have to pay more 
attention to bears and mosquitoes.  Higher up, its colder, prettier, and 
you have less worries.

It was cold every night until I got to Sierra City, when the temps rose 
to the mid 30s at night.  By Chester, it was pleasant enough to sleep 
naked, but with the liner.  Only once more, the last night before the
border in Washington, did it get into the low 30s again.  I got about 3
inches of snow on June 23rd just before I got to Benson pass in Yosemite.
That was the coldesst night on the trail, by far.

If I were to do things again, I would probably take more or less the 
same clothing, but carry my 20 degree bag from Campo to Sierra City. 
Then switch to the lighter bag.

Suge


----------------------
Christopher Willett
Department of Mathematics
Indiana University
831 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN. 47405-7106
(812)-855-1448
chwillet@indiana.edu
mypage.iu.edu/~chwillet