I got back yesterday from Iowa after participating in the 38th addition of RAGBRAI. For those of you who don’t know what RAGBRAI is, the one sentence explanation is that it is part state fair and part Bay to Breakers¹ executed on bicycles across the state of Iowa. It’s a lot of fun. I did a couple of days of last year’s RAGBRAI, and this year our group did four of the seven days, starting in Clear Lake and finishing in Dubuque.

Most of the four days was fairly uneventful bike riding covering some 220 miles, with the exception of a major storm system on the start of my third day (RAGBRAI day 6) and almost wiping out on one of Iowa’s less well maintained roadways. However, the last day held something a little special for everyone this year: Potter’s Hill. I had heard rumor and conjecture about some “monster” or “killer” hill, but it wasn’t until heading down a large hill into the lovely town of Graf that I realized the legend of the hill might hold some weight. You could really open it up going downhill into town; a couple of people told me that their bike computers recorded them going 45 miles per hour. It occurred to me there was likely a similar slope on the other side of the valley, only we’d have to go up it. It turns out Iowa isn’t as flat as it’s made out to be. But still, riding through the valley town I didn’t think too much of what was to come. And then we turned the corner out of town, and I saw what could only be the “monster” hill: Potter’s. It was obvious because everyone, and I mean everyone, was walking up it. I was shocked. There were literally a thousand people walking their bicycles up. I’d seen people walk bikes up hills in RAGBRAI before, but not like this.

Being that I live in California, I’ve been on some hills and although imposing I thought Potter’s Hill was doable. So I gritted my teeth and shifted some gears. The rest of my group dropped off, but I just shifted lower, and when there was no where lower to go, I got out of the saddle and grinded it out. It was made significantly more difficult by the masses of people walking bikes and three vehicles going up the hill in left lane. But I kept thinking that I could do hills in Cali and this couldn’t be as difficult. In fact, I was thinking of one hill in particular that I ride sometimes after work, Moody Road in Los Altos. It’s a fairly difficult climb, much longer, and seems to evoke a sense of awe in the local cyclists. So as I was weaving through walkers, dodging am RV, breathing hard, and cursing like a sailor, I kept thinking if I can do Moody I can do this. Moody Road had beat me a few times, but I wasn’t going to let some hill in Iowa beat me.

So I did it.

But I also didn’t see anyone else do it. I honestly passed a thousand people all walking their bikes up this hill. Now granted, I know other people must have done it, (I am fairly certain that a old man with a ZZ Top beard and only one arm who passed me on a later hill must have been able to do Potter’s), but I did not see any of them. And granted this was probably at one o’clock in the afternoon, towards the back of the RAGBRAI pack and not with the more serious cyclists who probably uniformly cranked it out earlier in the day. But still, to not see anyone climb the hill was shocking, and as I’ve had time to let it sink in, only more so. It lead me to wonder: how hard is Potter’s Hill?

Now, I’m fairly new to this whole cycling business. It’s been exactly a year, since last RAGBRAI, that I starting biking again after what I can only think has been a 16 year hiatus, having stopped sometime in junior high. So my actual experience on a bike is pretty limited. In the last year I’ve purchased a bike² and done some riding around the Bay Area, but it hasn’t been as much riding as I had hoped. My only real world experience for a point of comparison is Moody Road. So that’s the comparison I’m going to make.

Above are the profiles of the two hills. I got both Potter’s Hill and Moody Rd off of MapMyRide and replotted them together. It is probably a good rough estimate of the real profiles. As you can see Potter’s Hill is clearly more difficult than Moody. They both climb about the same altitude, but Potter’s does it in about a third of the distance. The average gradient of Potter’s over the entire climb looks to be ~7.5%³ where as Moody’s average gradient is ~3%. With even finer resolution, it gets more pronounced. I used an 500 ft interval to calculate something closer to an “instantaneous” gradient:

I’m not entirely sure about the 23% point, but MapMyRide has that section at 19%. Suffice it to say, the middle of the Potter’s Hill climb was very very difficult, if only briefly. Much more difficult than Moody Road overall.

But how does it compare to the real deal, what the pros ride? How does it compare to say, the 2010 edition of the Tour de France? A cursory look at the Tour’s website revealed to me that most category 4 climbs⁴ on this year’s Tour were more difficult than both climbs. In fact, by my no-means-complete survey of the climbs, they all seem to be just barely more difficult than Moody and longer than Potter’s. But one jumped out as seeming to be less difficult than RAGBRAI’s climb: Stage 3 went from Wanze to Arenberg Porte du Hainaut with only one categorized climb, a category 4 climb that was 1.4 km long with an average gradient of 3.4%. So there is a chance that if Potter’s Hill climb was included in the Tour that it would be categorized. Granted it’s certainly not the Col du Tourmalet, but still a categorized climb is supposedly a challenge even for professionals, a rare thing. So yeah, tip of the old cap to you Iowa, you really are not that flat. Only mostly flat, with some rare steep parts.

So why am I talking about this on McChoppin’? After all, as the Slickman is quick to point out, riding a carbon fiber racing bike isn’t exactly old timey. But McChoppin’ is also about pushing yourself to the limits. And I think I pushed myself beyond what I had previous thought my limits were on Potter’s Hill. That feels really good. Thanks RAGBRAI for throwing a serious challenge into an otherwise low-key bicycling event. I know not everyone enjoyed it, but I honestly think more people could have done it with the right mindset. I know for a lot of people on RAGBRAI the challenge may just be to do one day out of the whole week, but hopefully at least a few other people did Potter’s Hill who might not have otherwise met the challenge. I’m left with the thought that if I could do Potter’s only because I was thinking the entire time that it wasn’t as bad as Moody, what else do I have in me? What else can I do? And that’s what McChoppin’ is all about. And besides, it’s my damn blog, and I’ll write about whatever the hell I want.

¹If you don’t know what Bay to Breakers is, I’m not sure what to tell you
²Which by the way, has as it’s lowest gearing a 39×23 ratio for a gain ratio of 3.3
³RAGBRAI has it at ~6.5%, so I’m told
⁴Category 4 climbs are the least difficult of the categorized climbs. Category 1 and hors catégorie are the most difficult. When included in the Tour, the Col du Tourmalet has been a HC climb since 1980.

Do it. Make One.

I did and it worked smashingly.

And I definitely have the best looking sleeping bag of anyone I know.

Who do you know with a striped worsted wool mummy bag? Make one of your own and get the envy of your camping buddies.

McChoppinites, I’ve returned! To talk once more talk about my hero Shackleton.

One of the perks of working in a research environment is I get to hear about other people’s interesting research, and, way before it’s on NPR. Today I got to hear about Dr. Stephen Rock’s, a professor from Stanford’s Aeronautics & Astronautics Department. He came to tell us about robotic submersibles, which is totally awesome. Sure underwater robots are very topical right now, but he actually wasn’t there to talk about turning off the well head of Deepwater Horizon. He was there to talk about icebergs!

As it turns out, the place to go to find icebergs is the Antarctic, of course. Specifically the Weddell Sea. What else is in the Weddell Sea? Oh right, Elephant Island! That’s right, Shackleton!

Dr. Rock is interested in developing technology that would autonomous map an iceberg to allow an unmanned craft to collect ocean samples at specific points relative to said iceberg. Interesting stuff to me, but I realize it might not be exactly McChoppin’ material. But that’s not what I want to talk about. See, Dr. Rock was doing a technology demonstration for a future program that is driven by the needs of oceanographers and marine biologists that want to study the ecology of the sea around an iceberg. More importantly, he was doing this work on an icebreaker in the Weddell sea with a bunch of biologists who actively study icebergs. So while he was gathering this data for the proof of concept, they were studying the icebergs. One of the things that the biologists are concerned about is better tracking of the icebergs. See, they wanted to put a GPS device on the iceberg. But the ship can only get so close to the iceberg; icebergs being dangerous and all.¹ So how do you you get a GPS transponder onto an iceberg? Well, their idea was to shoot it onto the iceberg. But not with a gun or cannon. Their idea was to shoot it on with a water balloon-style launcher. Being that are good scientists and wanting to test their device first, they decided on a test shot. What did they test it with? A coconut, of course.

I think the only question left unanswered here is: what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen Antarctic Swallow?

(photo badly Gimpped together from egvvnd and tim ellis)

¹ For anyone who doesn’t know about icebergs we are talking about an iceberg 40 km long and 20 km wide… dangerous? yes!

I had previously promised that I would write a post about the winter campout after I got photos from it developed. Just before going back East for the holidays I had discovered this laying about.

(photo by www.D2k6.es)

Well, I had not used a film camera in a long time and I had never used a manual camera ever, but I did not let that deter me. I got some film and read a bit about it; I figured I was all set and at least some of the pictures would come out okay. So I took the damn thing camping. Unfortunately, I failed to learn how to properly load the film. So not a single photo was taken. I guess I am not Frank Hurley.

Since that time I have learned how to load the film properly. I am happy to report that the camera is fully functional and despite with my total lack of photography skill it takes rather good pictures. So, I am excited about using it a bit more, you know, learn a few things about film speed, aperture, and what not. Eventually I would like to get a good digital camera. I’m rather excited to find out that camera companies are making models that are not quite SLR’s¹ or point-and-shoots. It sounds like the candidate name for these cameras are Interchangeable Lens Compacts. I really like the one by Olympus, the PEN EP-1, but that will probably have to wait. In the meanwhile I’ll continue to cut my teeth on the Pentax. The thing is a beast and besides its old-timey appeal, it will be able to take the abuse of winter camping better than any digital camera will, I suspect.

¹Not only do digital SLR’s look ridiculous, it is an awkward marriage of old manual camera technology with the new digital. I’m sure people out there will argue a bit, but I can not see any reason to have a reflex mirror lens system in a digital camera. I’m actually surprised it has taken the camera industry this long to realize that people would want camera system that essentially acts like an old manual SLR without looking like, or even being, one.

How many times have you come back from winter camping and in the process of relating your story been forced to say things like “Well, it was cold. It was 10 degrees in the valley, so I’m sure it was below zero up on the mountaintop, where we were.” It is not so satisfying, is it? Wouldn’t you like something a little more exact? But, considering the demands of the winter campout, you don’t exactly want to bring a mercury-type thermometer and have to write down the temperature at intervals. Especially when the most interesting time to take the temperature is probably in the middle of the night, when you have much more important things to do, like stay in your sleeping bag.

Well, even if you have never been troubled by this problem, I have been. After this past winter’s campout, I was pretty disappointed that the best I could do for the answer to the “How cold was it?” question was say: “Well, my dad said it was 2 degrees outside his house down in the valley when he woke up.” I wanted to know exactly how cold was it overnight where we where. I think it was colder, but how do I know? Also, I only had one temperature point to go off of: 2 degrees. What about the rest of the time? We were out there for two days. From my days of undergraduate physics I know that dataloggers exist and I suspected that there existed one that would meet my needs, which was a simple device that would automatically record the temperature at intervals and save it to later be downloaded to a computer. I recently found one such device: the Lascar EL USB-2. Indeed I think that it meets and exceeds all of the requirements that I could come up with.

The Lascar Easy Logger USB 2 is a small digital datalogger that records not only temperature, but also, as a bonus, relative humidity.¹ The temperature range that it covers is from -31 to 176 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the range I would normally expect to encounter whilst camping. It is waterproof and has a very compact, minimal design with no buttons, so it should be durable enough to withstand the trials of winter camping. It has a long battery life of one year and it can store 16,382 measurements. At measurement intervals of one minute this means it will record for almost eleven and a half days. It is operated entirely through a computer interface which is very straight forward. There, one can set the measurement interval (every 10 seconds up to a half day intervals at specific intervals), the time when it will start (immediately or some preset time), and various alarms (like high or low temperature alarms; I don’t yet think I have much use for this functionality). So, basically you plug the thing into your computer’s USB port, do a quick setup, and go off recording. When you are done, you plug it back in and it the software will display a nice graph. I took it to Tahoe with me over the weekend.

You can click on the image to enlarge it. I annotated a few major portions of the graph. The first night I left the datalogger outside in my truck. The temperature in the truck seems to have steadily declined until reaching an “overnight” low, which occurred some time around 8 o’clock in the morning and was 34 degrees. The second night I had it inside our cabin. Again the low occurred at 8 in the morning and it was 58 degrees. My girlfriend had decided it was necessary to use a number of blankets whose combined loft easily exceeded the sleeping bag I used during winter camping. At some point in the middle of the second night I woke up rather overheated and threw off almost all of them. I can clearly point to the graph and show her now that since it was above 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the cabin we clearly did not need so much covering. Such are the dangers of winter cabining, I suppose.

¹ Lascar has a model, the EL USB-1, which takes only temperature but is otherwise the same. It is cheaper, but I thought having relative humidity might be interesting. One could investigate the effects of humidity on your camping experience, but that is probably subjective at best. Temperature is probably the most interesting feature for logging camping conditions and so if one is more concerned about the cost than I was, I recommend the EL-1 for providing your camping datalogging needs.

I just recently finished making my own sleeping bag. So, let’s say you are like me and you want one as well. One of the initial things that you will want to do is gather your materials. Although it’s a lot more interesting picking out the fabric to use for the shell, the major material in terms of amount and cost is the insulation. Since you are building your own sleeping bag I am just going to assume that you will be using down feathers as your choice of insulation. I can not actually imagine why anyone would go through the trouble of making their own sleeping bag if they plan on using polyester filling as insulation. If you are that type of person, I suggest you just go purchase one of the ubiquitous synthetic material bags on the market. If you still want to do this, you might as well read this post as well, since it will at least give you some idea of what you need to think about for how much insulation.

The function of the sleeping bag is to provide long path of low thermal conductivity material between you, the thing being insulated, and the outside, the thing that acts as a heat sink. The way it does this is by trapping a large amount of air and changing the mode of heat transfer from convection to conduction. Air is a good thermal conductor when it is free to transfer heat via convection and a very good insulator when it is limited to only conduction. This is why sleeping bags can be so light; you are utilizing the air surrounding you as a thermal insulator by limiting it’s mobility. Down, it turns out, is very good at limiting convection in air without adding much additional weight. It also has the very desirable quality of being a resilient material that resists permanent deformations. These two qualities together make it ideal for outdoor activities. And of importance to the McChoppin’ mindset, it’s an old-timey material. You know, something that Shackleton himself could have used. ¹

In the sleeping bag business world the lowest temperature that can comfortably be tolerated in the sleeping bag is normal equated to “loft.” Loft is the path distance between you and the outside, or, in other words, the thickness of the sleeping bag from the inside to the outside. The total thickness of the bag should be twice its loft. However, in determining things for making your sleeping bag, in particular, how much down feathers to purchase, we care more about equating the temperature to the weight of the down that we will need.

It turns out not all down is equal. It’s actually all equal from thermal conductivity stand point; down as a fill insulation is mostly air and therefore has essentially has the thermal insulation properties of air. The major difference in down from batch to batch is the density. The inverse of down’s density is expressed by down feather merchants as “fill power.” Because it is the inverse, a higher fill power is a lower density. Numerically, fill power is equal to the number of cubic inches 1 ounce of down occupies. I imagine they choose inverse density as the metric because, for the purpose of purchasing things, larger number means better to most people and therefore they can sell 900 fill power down for more than 700 fill power because most people would rather have less dense down.

The fill power rating for most down sleeping bags seem to range from about 650 to 900 fill power.² As I said the only major difference is density. And since I’m not particularly concerned about the weight of my bag, I’m not terribly concerned about the fill power, other than cost. However, there does not seem to be much of a market out there for down feathers that is readily accessible directly to the individual sleeping bag maker. During my search I found my self pretty much limited to the 900 fill power end. And keep in mind that you pay for down by the ounce, but how much you need is dependent on the type of down you buy. Therefore the ratio of the fill power directly relates to the ratio of the price in down. In other words, let’s say that you find 900 fill power down that sells for 30 dukes for 3 ounces. You also find 700 fill power down that sells for 25 dukes. If you don’t care about the weight, which down should you purchase to reduce your cost? It turns out that you should go with the more expensive 900 fill power down.³ The 700 fill power down should be less than $23.33 if it is going to be more economical, assuming everything else is equal.

Alright, I’m going to assume that your pricing of the market is going to lead you to the same conclusion that it lead me to: 900 fill power down.⁴ So, how much do we need?

Well, I’ve gone through the little bit of trouble to get this equation that relates expected outside temperature to amount of down needed. It is , where T is the temperature in degree Fahrenheit you plan on taking you bag to in the outdoors and W is the weight of 900 fill down you will need in ounces to achieve this. A few thing recognize immediately is that at zero degrees you need 19 ounces of down. For every degree above that you need one third of an ounce less. For every degree below that you need one third of an ounce more. This equation also says that you need no down in your sleeping bag if you plan on going no colder than 60 degree Fahrenheit. That seem reasonable, as at 60 degree I can sleep clothed with little more than a light blanket.

So, that is pretty much all you need to know. Pick a temperature, plug it in, and that is now much 900 fill power down you need to buy to start making a sleeping bag. Go nuts. But there are a few more things you might like to know about the equation and what went into it.

First, if you don’t get 900 fill power down you can still use the equation. Just calculate the amount of down you would need if you were getting 900 fill down and multiple it by the ratio of the fill powers. So, if you needed 22 ounces of 900 fill down you will need 28 ounces of 700 fill power down.

Second, I made this calculation based upon my size: six feet four inches. If you are a lot different in size, than you will need more or less down. By “a lot” I mean that for this rough calculation, anyone less than 4 inches less than me in height will need at least 5% less down. A similar thing for your girth: I’m fairly skinny.

Also, keep in mind this is a rough calculation. The exact amount of down you will need is related to how much space you need to fill in your sleeping bag. Due to difference is construction and actual down quality you may end up needing a little more or a little less.

All right, all those caveats aside, you’re probably wondering where I got that equation from: using freely available data of the intertubes I did a linear fit to all the data points and got the equation. How good is the linear fit? What was the data?

The data I gathered from Peter Hutchinson Designs, Feather Friends,Western Mountaineering, and Thru-Hiker. The PHD results are easy: they already give 900 fill power down in terms of weight needed for a specific temperature. For TH, they give you a loft for a desired temperature. So I just calculated the total volume given the loft and my dimensions and divided by the fill power. Because WD and FF don’t give much information about the down that they use, I had to assume a fill power and correct for it to get everything into 900 fill power. Despite the fact that both WD and FF seem to hint at using a higher fill power, an assumed fill power of 750 seem to get the data inline with the PHD and TH results. FF and WM still seem to be pretty conservative with the temperature. But they all agree that no matter which down you choose you don’t need any at about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Personally, I choose to more heavily weight the PHD and TH results for a couple of reasons. First, they were the first two data sets I looked at: blatant human bias. Second, they both went for a more conservative approach with the amount of down needed: I wanted to buy less down. And finally, I suspect I will need less down then the market that FF and WM are going after: total hubris. So, keep in mind that my equation is likely to be on the absolute low end of the amount of down that you’ll need. I don’t recommend getting less than it tell you. If you think you might be want a little extra thermal protection, get more down.

All right, so I was going to talk about how well this simple model for projecting the amount of down you need compares to an actual (but still relatively simple) thermal model of you, the sleeping bag, and the outdoors, but this post is too long already. For example, my equation predicts a number for sleeping in outer space. Which, for the sake of this discussion, is 0 Kelvin.⁵ Or -460 degrees Fahrenheit. It tells you you need some 170 ounces of 900 fill power down. At 30 dollar for 3 ounces, that equates to a cost of 1645 dukes. Down is by far the highest cost involved in a home-made sleeping bag, so we can use that as an estimate for the total cost of the bag. Western Mountaineering’s best bag only goes to -40 degrees F, but costs half as much! By the way, it turns out that that much down (170 ounces) would offer 3 feet of loft. I’d be in a sleeping bag that had a diameter as much as I am tall. But would that really work? I suspect not. But we will check it out in a future post.

¹ Shackleton, if my memory serves me correctly, actually used sleeping bags stuffed with Reindeer fur. An intriguing idea, one that I’d be tempted to try, if it weren’t for the fact that during their 800 mile open-ocean voyage to South Georgia the bags got wet and started to rot. Shackleton and this men later complained that everything was covered in hair and that it often found its way into their mouths. It does not sound like a pleasant experience.
² I will ignore the “+” part of the description of down because I feel that it is even more of a marketing ploy; if 650+ down was really significantly different than 650 fill power, why not just label it 700?
³ Unless you want a sleeping bag that needs less than 3 ounces of down insulation at 900 fill power. But I’m imagining that you aren’t planning on making sleeping bags for for pet canary, in the quantities that you will likely need we can ignore the fact that the economics depend slightly on much down you are getting.
⁴ Unfortunately there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of other reputable options. If you can find any I would be interested to know of them.
⁵ Also, nevermind that the major component of heat loss in outer-space is is radiative heat loss and not convection and conduction, which is what your sleeping bag can protect you against. If you want, you can imagine that your in an air filled bubble at standard pressure floating around in outer-space and you need a sleeping bag to keep warm. And please don’t bring up any other objections, after all I am a physicist.

Happy New Year everyone. Hopefully you too are enjoying a lazy New Year’s day with good food and drink.

And in case you haven’t heard, the winter campout was wildly successful. I’m currently awaiting pictures that need to be developed,¹ but after I get them I’ll cover the winter campout of 2009.

¹ Because taking photographs with a film camera is a lot more old-timey. That, and I doubt a digital camera would survive the winter campout.

The forces are assemblying and converging on the VT. The Slickman is arriving by land, I am coming by air, and word has it that Dan the Man may be coming by way of the sea. It’s blitzkrieg on the Northeast, McChoppin’ style.

I’m currently in a staging area south of the theater of operations awaiting resupply before the final push. Whilst I was in route I met a comrade, a friend of old timey ways. A fellow who, not only goes camping, but, does so with a wool blanket. I know you’re out there, fellow McChoppin souls. It gives hope to our cause.

Phase two of the plan is set to commence in the morning hours of Sunday. Operation Old-Timey Freedom: a Coalition of the Woolen ride out north with the stated goals of succesful winter camping and the establishment of old timey pratices as a role model for camping. It is to be a two day operation involving handmade goods, spot-built shelters, and an assortment of salted meats. Early intel suggests favorable conditions for operations that should minimize casualties.

In the spirit of Shackleton we go.

I finished my sleeping bag. Just in time for the impending winter campout. It looks awesome. And it has slightly more loft then my synthetic fiber sleeping bag from EMS. Surprisingly though, it weighs the same or maybe a little less.¹ This is surprising because I choose to make the outer shell out of wool fabric as opposed to nylon. Part of wool’s old-timeyness is that it weighs quite a bit more than nylon. I suspect that all the weight saving came from using down as opposed to polyester as the fill material.

In the coming posts I plan on going in depth into how to make your own sleeping bag, or at least how I made mine. I also plan on looking at how sleeping bags work as a thermal insulation device to keep warm with the express attempt at evaluating the performance of different materials. And finally, I plan on discussing this year’s and past year’s annual winter campouts.

In the mean time, happy holidays. My work year is over and tonight I take a red eye back east. Although the NOAA local weather forecast shows some rain during the winter campout weekend, it looks like they’re predicting no rain for the days that we are planning on going. The only thing I want for the holidays is to break the three year streak of a dank winter campout. Well, that and a lot of egg nog.

¹ I do not have a sensitive enough scale to weigh the bags accurately. However, the weight difference either way is probably 2 ounces at the most, which, to me is inconsequential.

Owing to the fact that I grew up with three sisters, the closest thing I have to a brother is the Slickman. However, the closest thing the Slickman has to a brother is Dan the Man, his actual brother. Dan the Man is quite the character and adds quite of bit of color to the Slickman and mine’s already rather colorful stories. One for the ages is what I like to call: “Scrimshaw Shackleton or: How I learned how to ‘Pull a Shackleton’.” As previously mentioned, arctic exploration is a subject of particular fascination here at McChoppin’ and this story should go quite a ways in explaining why.

Dan the Man has always liked history. Especially the more McChoppin’-style history: you know, the man-vs-nature, frontiersman kind of history. I suppose the Slickman and I like our fair share of it as well, but Dan has always liked it with a bit more earnest. After all, he it was his major as an undergraduate.¹ Anyways, a while back Dan the Man read Endurance.² He was immediately taken in by the heroic tale of Shackleton and his crew. He was so taken in by the tale, that he actually started using this as a conversation piece at parties. This was not advised by the Slickman and I, but he continued to do it. It became his thing. He’d met some girl at a party and start talking about the epic tale of the Endurance. Sometimes it went well: “Oh man! Dan is pulling a Shackleton!” Most of the time it did not: “Oh no! Dan is pulling a Shackleton!” This behavior only became more acute when we discovered that a local brewery made an Endurance Pale Ale with the cheery face of Tom Crean plastered on the front of every bottle. I’ve always imagined that Dan the Man would make an excellent candidate for a Drunken History, but this really seems like a good fit. Seriously, I can see it now:

Late one night
Dan the Man drank eight Endurance beers
And then discussed this historical event…
Derek Waters presents
Drunk History

“Tonight we are going to talk about Tom Crean…”

It cuts to Thomas Jane portraying Tom Crean and then goes on with Dan telling some obscure story of arguable authenticity. Mayhaps it involved a story from Tom Crean’s later years, when he owned a public house in Ireland. Mayhaps Tom helps show a young lady how to lit, I mean, light a fire. Even more likely, in the middle of the telling Dan pauses to offer his assistance in helping a young woman lit, i mean, light a fire. And eight beers is quite a lot for Dan the Man, so I can only imagine he is completely successful in his attempt.

Either way, this episode cemented the whole arctic exploration theme into the McChoppin’ psyche forever. There had been previously been flirting with it, to be sure. I had already read Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of the Terra Nova expedition. I had also read Ben Jones’³ novel The Rope Eater which dealt with arctic exploration as a major theme. And of course, arctic exploration naturally fit into our interests. The mild obsession with the arctic exploration theme continued with a scrimshaw Shackleton sighting and finally culminated in pipe carving. But that is a story for another time.

¹ Castleton State College does not have a Bachelor of Arts degree in McChoppinesque History, but it should probably consider offering one.
² I believe it was the Alfred Lansing book. I read Capt. Frank Worsley’s tale.
³ A random connection: after I read Ben Jones’ book I discovered that my sister knew him from Bennington College and had even occansionally watched his kids.