Signing off from the blog, and life in general, for a few days to head south seeking tropical air and mountain adventures in the interior of Belize, where the Mayan Mountains jut thousands of feet up from the jungle.

Navigable rivers and streams like the Macal drop through valleys, providing canoe and kayaking venues. I’ll be based at Black Rock Lodge for most of the trip, which is an eco-lodge in the dense rainforest above the Macal River in the Mayan Mountains. Hiking, caving, bird watching and animal tracking are on the itinerary. Will do a blog update or two if I can find a signal and log in somewhere far in the jungle brush. . .

The Gear Junkie: SOG PowerAssist Multi-tool
By STEPHEN REGENOLD

Innovation in the multi-tool category continues to press toward the creation of a perfect jackknife-and-pliers product. A new offering this year from SOG Knives (www.sogknives.com) has a seatbelt cutter, a gear-powered pliers, and switchblade-like action to fling open an edge at the touch of a finger.

The PowerAssist is marketed as a “high-speed extreme power multi-tool.” I’m not sure what that means, but the tool, which costs $115, has several neat enhancements, including the two aforementioned knives, which snap open like switchblades on springs.

The blades, one serrated and one straight-edge, need to be nudged about a quarter-inch with a thumb or finger before the spring action takes over. They then snap open and lock in place, ready for use in a blink.

Another notable touch, the pliers has an internal gear system to work when you leverage the tool’s handles. Tiny cogs rolling together cam the tool to double the operator’s grip strength, according to the company.

I tested the gear system pliers against a non-geared multi-tool. There is a noticeable power increase when you grip and squeeze the SOG, which crushed a finger-width cedar splinter easier than Leatherman’s comparable Skeleton model.

Beyond the blades and the pliers, which have crimper and wire-cutter areas, there is a file, screwdriver heads, bottle and can openers, and a V-shape blade touted for use as a seatbelt cutter or to slit open packages.

All these implements lock open then close unseen inside the handle. The tool weighs 9.5 ounces and comes with a leather case.

At $115, I was somewhat underwhelmed. The tool is made well, but its machining feels less precise than the Leatherman Skeleton and other models I own.

When squeezing the pliers, as one example, the SOG’s implement cover flexed and clicked. The mechanisms on the side to unlock the blades are too small and somewhat sharp, making them uncomfortable and tedious.

The tool is large — about 5 inches long when closed, and over 7 inches long when open. It feels heavy in a pocket, especially for a tool with less than 10 primary implements.

But its pliers is strong. The gear-assisted feature is cool. If you want a powerful grip, plus the basic ingredients of a jackknife with a little switchblade sprinkled in, the PowerAssist could be your tool.

Stephen Regenold writes a daily blog on outdoors gear at www.gearjunkie.com.

A new addition to the Gear Junkie Field Test crew, Bryon Powell, who lives in the Washington D.C. area, has been a trail runner for most of the past two decades. During that time, he’s gone from logging summer trail miles in preparation for New Jersey high school cross country seasons to racing ultramarathons across the country.

Powell publishes iRunFar.com, a site about gear, coaching and racing for trail runners and ultra athletes. Click to Powell’s three new gear reviews in the Field Test section here:

La Sportiva Fireblade Trail Running Shoe —
http://thegearjunkie.com/gear-review-la-sportiva-fireblade-trail-running-shoe

Atayne POV Tech Shirt —
http://thegearjunkie.com/gear-review-atayne-pov-tech-shirt

GU Roctane Energy Gel —
http://thegearjunkie.com/gear-review-gu-roctane

All Ways North
Two Americans prepare to ski unsupported to the North Pole
By STEPHEN REGENOLD
published December 31, 2008

One morning this winter, after waking in a tent pitched near the top of the world, Tyler Fish will check a compass and ski north toward mist undulating over open water. He will pull two sleds, each more than 100 pounds, to the water’s edge and gaze at a swath of Arctic Ocean deep and black between ice floes on route to the North Pole.

Fish, 34, of Ely, Minn., will then put on a waterproof suit. He’ll zip it up and ease into the ocean, the crush of cold closing in as he swims through saltwater, air pockets buoying a body backstroking across a void.

The Arctic Ocean swim is one challenge Fish and partner John Huston are trained to face this winter on the Victorinox North Pole ’09 Expedition. Then there are the more expected obstacles — polar bears, ice fields, extreme cold — the team may encounter when, beginning in March, they head north from Canada’s Ellesmere Island in attempt to become the first Americans to ski unsupported to the North Pole.

It’s a 475-mile route polar veteran Richard Weber has described as “the hardest trek on the planet.”

“We are fully prepared to be overwhelmed,” said Fish, a cross-country ski racer and Outward Bound coordinator.

Polar Workday
Huston, 32, of Chicago, led an expedition earlier this year on the other side of the globe. He set a daily pace for a team of South-Pole-bound skiers to stride and push for 90 minutes at a time between water and food breaks, a strategy he and Fish will employ on their trip this March.

“You start to think of it as a normal workday, a nine-to-five routine,” said Huston, who successfully completed the South Pole trip after weeks of effort.

On the North Pole expedition, it might be 60-below zero when the alarm beeps each morning. But Fish and Huston will unzip their sleeping bags and flick a stove to life. They will melt ice to make water, prepare breakfast, then get out of the shelter to start a new day.

An average leg of the journey — which has been accomplished by Russian, Norwegian and other teams, but no Americans — involves endless miles of skiing on a featureless plane. More challenging, immense fields of jumbled ice create a chaotic medium that takes hours to traverse. “It’s like the world’s biggest puzzle,” Fish said.

For open water, the team will pause and pull out dry suits and ropes. They will tether their bodies and four floatable sleds for a swim across the expanse, a process the pair perfected on a training trip last March. “Getting in the water is not as big a deal as it seems,” said Fish.

Arctic Mentality
Understatement is a trait with the Fish and Huston team, both Zen wilderness types who met eight years ago in Outward Bound. Superlatives rarely grace their vocabulary, and they are honest about the realities of polar exploration.

“Plodding on an ice cap can be a very boring existence,” Huston said. “You’re alone in your head for hours at a time.”

But the polar existence can produce a meditative state, Huston said. “It’s a mental purgatory where life flows and time passes fast.”

For the North Pole trip, the team will face up to 55 days alone on the ice. They will focus on their schedule and the time put in skiing each day, not on the slow miles gained, as they plod ahead in a white void.

Along the way — in addition to the expeditionary feat — the team is working to raise $100,000 for Twin Cities-based CaringBridge, a nonprofit that provides free websites to families who are going through a medical crisis.

Fish and Huston will travel with no outside assistance and no supply drops, towing all the food, fuel and gear needed to survive for weeks.

Near the North Pole — an unmarked and roving geographic point on ocean ice — they will hold a GPS unit to the sky. They will search to identify 90 degrees latitude, the elusive coordinate that marks the top of the world.

“It could take hours of skiing in circles,” Fish said of the final anticipated task of their journey. “But eventually we’ll find the North Pole.”

See www.northpole09.com for more information on the expedition.

The Gear Junkie Scoop: Sugoi Majik shell running jacket
By STEPHEN REGENOLD

Sugoi, a Vancouver-based apparel company, calls its pricey new Majik shell “an elite waterproof jacket that offers amazing breathability.” But after testing this aerobic-sports jacket for a month, I call that an exaggeration that verges on fib.

To the point: No other comparable jacket I have tested keeps so much moisture inside, collecting droplets of sweat along its smooth inner fabric to actually pool in the sleeves after 20 minutes on a run.

Indeed, at home after a 45-minute run in cool weather I could literally pour accumulated moisture out of the sleeve, my sweat pooling in the drooping fabric under my forearms. It sloshed there with each stride and movement of my arm, and when I pointed a hand toward the ground droplets trickled out and splashed on the sidewalk.

In the chest pocket, a hand-size compartment with a waterproof zipper, moisture accumulated enough to soak a stashed fleece hat.

New this fall, the Majik (www.sugoi.com) comes in a men’s and women’s model and costs $170. It is marketed as the result of Sugoi’s “quest for truly waterproof laminate protection for aerobic activities.”

The conundrum of creating a waterproof shell that breathes enough for aerobic activity is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the outdoors world. Say you want to run in the rain or sleet. You need a waterproof shell to keep you dry. But your body pumps out sweat, creating its own weather system inside the shell fabric.

No fabric technology I know of — not Gore-Tex, not eVent, and especially not the polyurethane-based Sugoi fabric — can wick sweat or transfer moisture fast enough to compete with a body in aerobic motion. Get your heart rate above 140 beats-per-minute and stride like that for a mile or more through the rain or sleet. You’re going to be wet — from the inside with sweat or from the outside via the elements above.

The solution lies in regulating body temperature. This is possible in the winter, when cold temps combined with the right type of ventilating outerwear can acquiesce a tenuous equilibrium between the body overheating and the skin or your core getting too cold.

In rain and sleet I have found it’s almost impossible to stay dry. This isn’t a concern for a nightly training run. You can come home and shower or change. But on long outdoors endurance events that mix aerobic output into a wilderness survival scenario — adventure racing, as one example — too much sweat can soak a body to the edge of hypothermia.

For now, when I race or do a long training run, I’ve surrendered to staying wet. I try and keep warm when I stop, but usually if the weather is bad you just cannot stop for long before the cold starts to creep.

Jackets like the Majik serve as a layer of protection from wind and water. You can hunker down and stay warm if you’re at least somewhat dry inside. The Majik and its ilk also work fine for biking, where wind cools you, or during moderate aerobic output like hiking or jogging.

But for running, I found the high-priced Majik to be far from mystical. Hocus pocus, maybe. But not magic.

—Stephen Regenold writes the weekly Gear Junkie Scoop for Outsidemag.com and TheGearJunkie.com.

The Gear Junkie’s Top 10 Adventures of 2008
By STEPHEN REGENOLD
published December 26, 2008

From a mountaintop in Norway to a scuba dive in a spring near the Great Salt Lake, 2008 proved to be a year of high adventure for the Gear Junkie. The following 10 destinations are my top picks — bike, ski, foot and underwater adventures, from Molde, Norway, to northern Minnesota’s deep woods, from the wild to the weird.

1. Ski Touring: Romsdal Alps, Norway
A four-day ski-touring trip in the Romsdal Alps outside Molde, Norway, featured daily high points like Kirketaket (see photo below), a ski-jump-shape mountain that towers above a slate-blue fjord. My group made daily mountain climbs to ski faces and bowls for 3,000 or more vertical feet at a time, skinning uphill for hours with alpine-touring (AT) gear then spinning on summits like Kirketaket, Smorbottentin and Kvitfjellet to gaze into the remote Romsdal Alps before skiing hundreds of turns on virgin snow to the valley below. Link to story: http://thegearjunkie.com/norway-ski-trip-report-1

2. Backcountry Skiing: Mount Ogden, Utah
The Banana Chute on Mount Ogden slices a precipitous alpine face in a 45-degree squiggle of snow, creating a dramatic entrance to a skiable descent larger than any lift-accessible run in the country. Indeed, at nearly 5,000 vertical feet, the backcountry run — which I skied with four friends last January — includes the aforementioned chute and then nearly four more miles of skiing downhill, from the alpine air, over ridges and meadows of untracked snow, then into a creek bed that funnels the backcountry line to its unlikely terminus at the residential grid of a midsize American town. Link to story: http://thegearjunkie.com/trip-report-skiing-mt-ogdens-banana-chute

3. Mountaineering: Kings Peak, Utah
A two-day ascent in October of this 13,528-foot mountain, which is the highest in Utah, was blessed with high pressure and blazing sun. I hiked and climbed the peak with three friends, making the 28-mile roundtrip through the High Uintas Wilderness, camping out under the stars, then getting up on a Monday morning to climb a chute and an immense talus field — then onto the very top of a state. Link to story: http://thegearjunkie.com/utahs-kings-peak-trip-report

4. Rock Climbing: Devils Tower, Wyo.
Among my favorite rock-climbing areas on the planet, I have ascended the 1,000-foot-high monolith of Devils Tower nine times. This year, I climbed “El Cracko Diablo,” a 5.8 cruiser, with an old friend, Frank Sanders, who is a local guide. The Tower — a geologic wonder of vertical cracks and columnar basalt — continues to amaze every time I make the trip to the deserted high plains of northeastern Wyoming. Link to story: http://thegearjunkie.com/trip-report-devils-tower

5. Ecological Tour: Big Bog State Recreation Area, Minn.
This day-long adventure — one of the weirdest of the year — started with a two-hour air tour in a four-seat Cessna. We motored down the runway then took off to reveal a view of land so flat that it looks concave. This is the immense and ancient footprint of Lake Agassiz and the current site of the Red Lake Peatlands, a remote and hard-to-access wilderness that is among the largest bogs on the planet. Stretching more than 50 miles east to west, and 15 to 20 miles wide, the Big Bog is a wet and spongy no man’s land half the size of Rhode Island. We hiked into the interior later in the day, jumping and bouncing on land that felt like a waterbed. Link to story: http://thegearjunkie.com/trip-report-big-bog-minn

6. Boat Cruise: Romsdalfjorden, Norway
Skiing was the primary objective when I went to Norway last March. But a big part of the adventure was also found on the water, where my group traveled the fjords of central Norway via the Anne Margrethe, a restored sailing vessel built in 1880. The 70-foot “jakt” (yacht) was captained by Bjarne Krekvik, a 55-year-old sailor from a small village north of the town of Molde, our home base. We “sailed” (powered by a 250hp Volvo diesel) the Romsdalfjorden to ports like Andalsnes and Eresfjord over four days, and we slept onboard in the boat’s cabins. A cozy galley was the social center, and each night involved rich meals and long conversation at the big table below deck, where we’d study maps and plan the next day’s adventure. Link to story: http://thegearjunkie.com/norway-ski-trip-report-2

7. Diving: Bonneville Seabase, Utah
Seabase is an aquatic facility in the desert outside Grantsville, Utah, that’s been stocked with thousands of fish — from flitting minnows to a pair of nine-foot-long nurse sharks. Founded as an independent experiment in marine biology by two Salt Lake City scuba divers, the private tropical fish preserve is open to scuba divers. I jumped in during an October visit, sucking air through a scuba hose and swimming down through murky water to find a nurse shark unmoving on the bottom of the bay. Link to story: http://thegearjunkie.com/new-york-times-bonneville-seabase-story

8. Skiing: Crested Butte, Colo.
Deep powder snow — up to 18 inches one night — made an early-season ski trip to Crested Butte Mountain Resort in Colorado’s Elk Mountains a worthy last adventure of the year. My fondest memory from this five-day trip: The dreamy medium of knee-deep fluff through drooping pine trees and my fat Black Diamond Kilowatt skis letting me float, bob and weave through it all. Link to story: http://thegearjunkie.com/ski-report-from-crested-butte-colo

9. Endurance Sports: Rogaine Race, Jay Cooke State Park, Minn.
Six hours of solid backwoods bushwhacking to find 22 hidden flags with map and compass was what it took to complete the MNOC 6th Annual Rogaine last August, an orienteering race that put teams of two on a trajectory to run up to 20 miles offtrail on foot. My partner and I waded through thorns, thrashed swaps, ran when the woods opened up to utter exhaustion through 7,000 acres of rugged terrain in Minnesota’s Jay Cooke State Park. Link to more info: http://mnoc.org/news/2008/rogaine/

10. Road Biking: Trempealeau County, Wis.
Trempealeau County on the Mississippi River in southwest Wisconsin is cited by some as the best road riding in the country. It indeed does have a unique combination of unlimited scenic views, unlimited blacktop and very little vehicle traffic: Trempealeau boasts 382 miles of paved roads, many which see only three cars per hour on a given day, creating what one local called “a private bike paradise.” Link to story: http://thegearjunkie.com/new-york-times-tour-de-trempealeau-story

Stephen Regenold writes a daily blog on outdoors gear at www.gearjunkie.com.

A big weekend for snow in Crested Butte, Colo., where the Gear Junkie here is holed up for a few days. The adventures started Saturday morning, when I met with two local friends to skin uphill on resort trails before the lifts opened. We used alpine-touring (AT) equipment to stride and pole about 1,200 vertical feet with the Crested Butte avalanche patrol working hard to make the slopes higher above safe for the day. Indeed, hand-tossed charges were exploding every few minutes, big flashes followed by shock-wave BOOMS! as we skied up to the halfway point toward CB’s summit. A single downhill run was the reward after an hour of effort, though going up and getting a workout is all part of the adventure and the fun.

Lifts have been in order for most of the rest of the trip, with some intermittent hikes to powder stashes in between. Though it’s before Christmas, the resort has seen substantial snowfall, and we were able to sample knee-deep powder through pine and aspen forests. The best snow so far has been had in the trees off East River Express Lift, where ample woods kept fresh tracks available all day on Sunday.

A big portion of the mountain — mostly the upper mountain and the double-diamond runs — is not yet open for the year. I’m bummed not to be up there on the true steeps, though I guess now I have a good excuse to come back soon.

Gear in testing on this trip includes Black Diamond’s new high-end Method ski boots, which are made for downhill turns as well as touring and uphill travel. They look like regular alpine boots, and on the moguls and in tight trees at Crested Butte they perform as such. But flip a switch and the Methods convert to flexible boots with generous forward lean, allowing you to attach climbing skins to your skis — as I did the first morning at the resort — and stride uphill in alpine-touring mode.

My jacket for the weekend, Millet’s Super Touring shell, is made for skiing, mountaineering and other active winter sports. The jacket’s unique fabric, Polartec’s Powershield, has a slightly fuzzy interior and a smooth face. It’s stretchy and provides some warmth, though it’s made to be worn with sweat-wicking layers underneath to create a temperature-regulating system. The Super Touring is a minimalist shell, with three pockets, a hood and little else. But at Crested Butte, where my days have alternated between short hikes to access powder and wind-chill-inducing downhill runs, I have found the jacket to have great versatility. It blocks wind but breathes well enough when I am on the move heading uphill.

My ski setup — the same system I used, and loved, last year — includes Black Diamond Kilowatt skis ($539, www.bdel.com) mounted with Fritschi Diamir Freeride Plus bindings ($425); Black Diamond’s Ascension ski skins ($122); and a discontinued pair of adjustable-length poles from Indigo.

Signing off for now. One more half-day of skiing tomorrow before I head home for Christmas, that is if the airplane can get off the runway in Gunnison in this storm. . .