The Right Cook Pot Can Save You HOURS Across a Climbing Expedition
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Ronald Reagan said, “…trust but verify.” While I’m not particularly a Reagan fan, I can appreciate the sentiment that we can be trusting of those who deliver well-intended information, recommendations, or advice and still hold ourselves accountable for checking on the veracity of that information or the wisdom of that advice. Heck, we need not look much beyond social media to see how we need to carry these seemingly contradictory thoughts in our head.
So, I don’t know why it took so long for me to come around to the “verify” part of the advice I was given. My climbing mentors, many years ago, told me that a larger cook pot would prove to be much more efficient when we need to convert snow into boiling water. The idea is simply that more volume, all at one time, will reduce the number of boils we need to make, thus reducing the overall time.
But that was during a time when conventional wisdom held that gas stoves were the only reliable solution in cold temperatures. Gas stoves were still the way, and I remember more than one mentor working to develop elaborate hanging kits that would allow them to use these liquid fuel stoves in vertical landscapes. In other words, a lot went into making these gas stoves as functional as possible, and that was a demonstration of commitment to the gear and the technology, such as it was.
Maybe it never occurred to them to see if the things they “felt” they had learned was not backed by the evidence… at least wasn’t backed by the evidence in all cases. They had their system, and they knew what “efficient” was like when working with their system. Well, what about other systems?
Therein lies the designs behind my experiment: if we change systems, stove types, etc., does the logic of “use a larger pot” still hold?
If you are interested in owning any of the stoves from this video, they can be found, here: