Catastrophic Gear Failure

After posting yesterday, I went out for a hike.

I had a catastrophic failure occur and now I'm down one piece of gear. I have no doubt it'll be fixed under warranty but it's sure not working right now.

That piece of gear was my camera.

Funnily, the failure was relatively minor but in the setting and situation, it was catastrophic. The plastic housing that the tripod screws into came away from the body of the camera while I was trying to film myself "Survivorman" style.

Had that happened here in the house it would have been a minor inconvenience. Out in the woods, however, it meant the camera with the open viewer fell down, down, down into the snow and onto the frozen trail. CRASH! CRACK! POP!

I'm going to see if I can pull some video off of the memory card because I thought my dialogue was relatively entertaining and educational. Then you'll be able to judge for yourself. :)

The good news to come out of the hike is that I can start a fire with found materials, my firesteel, and my SwissTool without much effort. A small fire is all that was needed to consider the effort a success and I had that easily using dead twigs and some dry weed heads I found along the trail.

It's not really much of a challenge, the SwissTool actually has more and better tools than my Swiss Army Knife (SAK) and all the tools lock in place so there's no risk of closing a saw blade onto my fingers.

Still, empty pockets don't occur naturally in my pants...it's good to know that I can accomplish such a basic task with alternative tools and materials.

Thanks for reading,


B