Yesterday Anton reminded me that I need to write more posts about what’s in my backpack. I refer to those posts as "geek posts," because it takes a geek to be interested in stuff like that. But that’s okay, being a geek. I understand. I am a geek too.
In my pack are eight pairs of socks, six of them cotton and two of them wool.
When you spend most of your time indoors, the difference between cotton and wool isn’t that important. But when you spend most of your time outdoors, the difference is huge.
As wet cotton dries, it pulls heat from your body fast and hard. That’s great in the summer, but it’s deadly in the winter. Wet wool doesn’t pull nearly as much heat from your body as it dries.
At the start of the walk the weather was warm and dry, so cotton was my fabric of choice. Now that it’s getting colder and wetter though, cotton is almost useless to me. In fact, in about a month I will be ditching just about every single piece of cotton in my pack. If it’s made of cotton, chances are I won’t carry it.
Wool does dry much more slowly than cotton, which makes it hard to manage when you’re always on the move. At the beginning of the trip, when I washed a cotton Tshirt and strapped it onto the back of my pack to dry, it would be dry within an hour or two. A wet wool shirt, however, might take over a day to dry. So I don’t wash things as often now. I’m warm, but I smell worse.
The wool vs. cotton issue, and how that issue becomes more complicated when you throw man-made fibers into the mix, will show up in subsequent "geek posts." I have one particular polypropylene shirt I love wearing during the day, but can’t wear at night, and for the geeks out there I’ll describe why. But for the meantime, that’s it for now.