iCampingAdventure.com

Price : $16.95

Features

• 3 x 1 rib leg
• elasticised arch brace
• flat knit side panel
• flat knit toe seam

Product Description

Hiking, runnig, biking– the Hiking Medium Crew Sock form Samartwool will do them all in comfort. Wool, when construicted wit ht the care and durablity from Smartwool, will provide warmth, dryness, and comfort many miles longer than your traditional synt

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-09-15
Socks feel great, unfortunately when I ordered I thought it said something about two pairs for what $18 or something, but alas it was just the one pair. I believe it is on the site now as (1 Pair). Too expensive for my tastes really, 10$ plus 3$ shipping would seem more fair with an occasional sale price of 6$ for a pair. Ooops!

The idea of celebrating the New Year began about four thousand years ago in ancient Babylon. This celebration coincided with the start of spring and the planting season. Babylon was also the birthplace of the New Year?s Resolution. The idea was to give people who had borrowed farm equipment from their neighbor a chance to remember what they had done and return it before planting began. Most of today?s New Year?s Resolutions follow in that tradition. They are ideas, goals and challenges designed to make practical and positive changes to our lives during the coming year.

There is a school of thought that says most people either love or hate the holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Years, with no middle ground. Most people who take a definitive position on the Holidays probably also fall into the optimistic ?glass is half full? or pessimistic ?glass is half empty? measurement of personal outlook. Surprisingly, that?s not a bad thing.

People who take a positive or negative position on life are great candidates for change. If you?re lost in some desert or jungle, the hardest part of that experience is finding out where you are. If you already know where you are, mapping out the journey to somewhere else is much easier. The same is true in life.

Almost everyone chooses some positive change as a New Year?s Resolution. Such change usually involves weight loss, quitting smoking, attitude adjustment, moving to a more comfortable dwelling, getting a better job, finding a soul mate or making more money. People start thinking a lot about change as a New Year approaches. From a practical standpoint, this is probably the worst time to alter your life. From an emotional standpoint, it?s the one time of year when people are willing to put forth serious effort to change. It would be unwise to waste that kind of an opportunity, even if it means merely laying the groundwork for serious life modification.

I?ll spare you the usual happy talk about goal setting and get down to the nitty gritty of what it takes to make any New Year?s Resolutions you have in mind come true. I?m assuming that you?ve already given much thought to the changes you want to make. The most successful Resolutions involve issues that have been tugging at a person for some time. They?ve already considered the pros and cons are ready to take action.

The end result of any New Year?s Resolution should be personal growth in a positive direction. Given that, it might be wise to wait before calling the divorce attorney or telling off your Boss on January 2nd. What seems like a terrific idea during the Holidays may turn out to be a real nightmare in the emotional doldrums that often follow the glittery holiday season. Some changes are better left to times when cooler heads prevail and less alcohol is consumed.

If you?re ready to move your life in a positive direction, you will have to create a good support structure to complete the change. People who want to lose weight, quit smoking, drinking or some other habit can really benefit from having others around who are trying to do the same thing. Beyond the paid weight loss, quit smoking and addictive substance services, there are a number of free support groups and non-profit organizations willing to help. Most people who try to lose weight or quit a habit without a support structure tend to fail. In many cases, inspiration can also come from within. The idea is to make a conscious decision to change and follow through with a strong force of will. It?s the ?follow through? part that gets most of us. That?s because we?re unwilling to actually take the plunge when we have the chance to do so.

There is no substitute for action. Positive thinking is good, goal setting helps, but action rules! That means making time to act on the changes you wish to make in your life and following through. Write down a long list of things required to make changes. Consider each item, and then turn your long list into a short list. Make your list very personal. While people can help you by providing support, it?s imperative that you become the main source of inspiration and support for change in your life.

Part of creating a short list is being realistic. Make sure it?s a daily, not long-term list. It?s always easiest to focus in on and accomplish small tasks on a daily basis that will help you create the kind of change you desire in your life. While long-term goals are always beneficial, short-term tasks are usually required to reach them. The idea is not to overwhelm yourself with unrealistic expectations and impossible deadlines. Take it one-step at a time.

If you want to lose 100 pounds, start by deciding to eat just one meal each day. Be sure that meal is in the morning and, based on your own metabolism, doesn?t exceed your body?s ability to process what you intake and still burn off fat. Diet programs tend to be designed for people who can eat three or more small meals a day and still lose weight. Most people who are seriously overweight do not fall into that category. For them, a slice of low fat lunchmeat, a couple of tomato slices and one slice of bread with low fat margarine or mayonnaise are about all that can be eaten most days in order to lose the weight. Hunger pains can often be handled by drinking black coffee or low calorie beverages. The idea is to lower the hunger threshold, rather then eating to feed the fat.

Any change requires progressive implementation. A person who is seriously overweight cannot really get the exercise they need until after losing enough pounds to make that kind of bodily strain safe. Smokers are in the same boat. They need to cut down on smoking until reaching a point where they have the breath needed to take long walks, jog or do other exercises designed to clear out their lungs and help satisfy cravings.

People who want to further their education and haven?t been to school for a while might want to seriously assess their ability to return to the culture of education before they leap in. Being technically perceptive and able to study is part of that preparation. If you haven?t yet mastered simple computer or internet skills, take on that challenge before you do anything else. Email has become an important part of the student and teacher communication process. Assignments and class information is often communicated to students via internet. Your ability to study and complete assignments will require time. Have you set aside that time? What about your reading and comprehensive skills?

If a new job or career is on your New Year?s Resolution list, but sure your ready to take the leap. Get your resume and letters of recommendation in order. Assemble some good Resume Stuffers. These are certificates of training or achievement, which always look good to perspective employers. They tell a future employer that you are willing to learn, grow and improve your skills. Most require little more then attending a seminar or short series of classes. Without those items, you?re telling a prospective boss that you know everything you want to know and are unwilling to learn more. You are saying that you will not easily accept new situations, methods or supervision. That is not what most employers want to hear.

Relationship changes are hard. Most involve one party telling the other to get lost. No one is going to take that news very well. It?s also true that the person delivering that ultimatum may not always realize the full ramifications of it. Relationship changes can seriously affect us on social, religious and personal levels. People often decide to opt out of a relationship for all the wrong reasons and without good cause.

Before you tear up those photos of you and your intimate partner on that skiing trip or posing with the Knights at Medieval Times, make sure that you are physically, emotionally and socially ready for such a drastic change. I regularly receive emails from people who end up back in relationships, for better or worse, because they had not considered their next move before walking out. Things sometimes get bitter between people, but that?s not always a good reason to break up.

Any good relationship involves work. Both parties have to be willing to give and take as those opportunities present themselves. If you are unwilling to work at a relationship, stay out of them altogether. There is simply no magical formula to create the perfect love affair. Everyone has faults and, eventually, those faults will make themselves known in a loud and clear way. Love often means being willing to accept those faults in lieu of a good relationship with long-term promise.

Part of making a successful change to your life is understanding the concept of self-esteem. People with low self-esteem rarely admit they are wrong. They make decisions and assign blame based on self-gratification and emotional highs or lows. People with high self-esteem are able to look themselves in the mirror and make a rational assessment of what?s right and wrong with their life. How is your self-esteem?

The first step to good self-esteem is understanding that you are the one responsible for everything you think, feel and do. If you smoke, it?s a choice you made even if your parents had a six-pack a day habit. If you?re overweight, it?s up to you to assess your ability to process food and eat accordingly, even if both your parents and all your relatives are overweight. If your partner makes you feel bad, you?re the one who allows them to influence you in a negative or positive way.

Developing good self-esteem is vital to making positive changes in your life. Part of that development is deciding where you stand on important life choices. Are you honest? Are you sincere? What do others say about you? Do you inspire people? Whether we like it or not, these are all considerations that affect our self-esteem.

In the end, making and following through with a New Years Resolution means having the desire and strength of will to make good choices that will cause a positive change in your life, without causing undue pain to others. Those choices must be based on good self-esteem, an ethical sense of doing what?s right and moving forward in a personal, financial and spiritual sense.

Author: Bill Knell Author’s Email: billknell@cox.net Author’s Website: http://www.billknell.com

Terms To Use Article: Permission is granted to use this article for free online or in print. Please add a link to or print my website address of http://www.billknell.com

A native New Yorker now living in Arizona, Bill Knell is a forty-something guy with a wealth of knowledge and experience. He’s written hundreds of articles offer advice on a wide variety of subjects. A popular Speaker, Bill Knell presents seminars on a number of topics that entertain, train and teach. A popular radio and television show Guest, you’ve heard Bill on thousands of top-rated shows in all formats and seen him on local, national and international television programs.

What is an Altimeter ?

Right back to basics, an altimeter is a device which measures changes in height or as the pro’s say - altitude. The simplest way of measuring altitude is to measure the way the pressure of the air around us changes as we ascend or descend, the air gets thinner the higher we go up. Unfortunately this change is very slight (unless you have a jet !) and you need an extremely accurate instrument to measure the change in air pressure experienced by walkers, or even downhill ski racers. Until recently the only way to do this was with a very sensitive mechanical device, too big, delicate and expensive for the average Joe to carry around. Then electronic gauges were made for aircraft - but these were incredibly expensive, very exotic. And then those electronics whizz kids went and miniaturised them, shrunk them until they fit into an ordinary watch !!! Now everyone can have one.

But air pressure changes with the weather too doesn’t it ?

Yes it does, but not enough to make the alti-meter too inaccurate and with a little care you can actually read the changes in the air pressure and get an idea of the weather to come. In other words you can have your own weather forecast on your wrist !

But what will I do with an Altimeter-watch ?

It depends upon what you do with your life, but just imagine how many of todays action sports involve going up… and then coming back down. Imagine knowing how far you’ve climbed from the bottom of the hill, your total height gain for the day on your mountain bike, how far you’ve ski’d down a hill - and how long you took. You can go back next week and try do more, faster ! There are other things, mountaineers can pin point where they are - if you are on a knife edge ridge, if you know your height you can read off a contour on the map and fix your position. If you’re camping in the wilds, you can watch the air pressure overnight and see if tomorrow is going to bring that glorious day you’re hoping for! Whatever you do from cycle touring to parachuting, wouldn’t it be good to know just that bit more about where you are and what you’ve done ?

Ok, I’ve bought one, how do I use it to measure height ?

The basics are dead simple, if accuracy isn’t a matter of life or death or you are just interested in the relative change in altitude (relative change is the difference between A & B, not the actual height of point A or B), then you just read your height or change of height, straight from the watch face - nothing to it. Zero it (or set it to the nearest contour on your map) at the bottom and read off your climb at the top, dead easy and with these great watches, accurate to a metre or two. Even if you don’t zero it, the altitude reading will be approximately right for any particular place (say within 10m) and the height gain will be accurate to within a metre or two.

But the spec says it measures height accurate to within one metre ?

Well, what they mean is that it will measure the change in height to within one meter, to measure the absolute height to this accuracy you have to callibrate the meter and because the weather affects the air pressure, to maintain accuracy you’ll have to re-callibrate whenever you can throughout the day. This sounds like a chore but it isn’t. All you do is, every time you reach a point where you know the height, say at the top of a mountain, a lakeside or any other point where you can read the height off a map, you reset the actual height into the watch. This take a couple of button presses and a few seconds. Even when you need the utmost accuracy, say when going into the cloud at 2,000ft on the Cairngorm Plateau, you only need to do this every few hours at most. I’ve set mine at the sea’s edge and been meter perfect on on the top of Ben More Assynt 4 hours later !

And the weather?

Well, set the watch to barometer mode and check the air pressure right now. If its high, 1020Mbar and above it’ll likely be dry. 980Mbar and below and it’ll probably be grey and wet. I say probably, because it isn’t foolproof, but it’s a pretty good rough guide. If you watch the weather over time, say overnight you’ll get to see the trend (shown on the little greaph on the watch), this shows whether the pressure is rising falling or maybe just staying the same. Generally, if the pressure is falling, it’s getting worse, if it’s on the up, the sky will probably be clearing soon. It takes a while to get the knack, but pretty soon you’ll have a good idea of what’s going on around you. When you see that baro at 980 and plummetting, well maybe you’ll put the bike back in the shed and meet your mates down the pub to talk about how good it was last week. If you’re a canoeist - maybe this weekends going to have some big water !!!

Yeah, but you said the altitude affects the air pressure and the weather affects the air pressure - how do I know which one’s affecting the readings ?

Well now, an advanced user!!! You’re right, they do affect each other, and the altitude has much more effect than the weather, so if you’re going up and down a bit the weather becomes quite hard filter out, but you can do it. The main thing is to keep calibrating it, if the weather or height is important - keep calibrating. Generally you’ll calibrate the watch from a map height, this will ensure the altitude is always accurate. But when you calibrate, stop and think a minute, is the watch reading low, or high. If it’s reading low, it’s good news, since you last calibrated the air pressure has risen - remember - higher pressure means lower altitude - so the watch reads low. If the altitude is reading high, the opposite applies, the pressure has dropped - it could be bad weather ahead. The amount you have to change the watch by also tells you something - a metre or two means the weather is really pretty stable, 10 metres and you’d better keep an eye out. For a rough guide the pressure changes about 1 mbar for every 8m of height, thus at if you are at 800m and the air pressure is 900mbar, at sea level it is 900+800/8=1000mbar. If you’re a real weather nut, you can use the table below to estimate the air pressure at sea level from the altitude and barometer readings from your location. Remember:- this is an estimate, many factors affect the actual air pressure - keep calibrating and keep your eyes open!!! (If you really want to know more check the net, there’s some really good geeky weather sites out there).

m mbar ft mbar
0 0 0 0
100 11 200 7
200 22 400 13
300 33 600 20
400 43 800 27
500 54 1000 33
600 65 1200 40

700 76 1400 46
800 87 1600 53
900 98 1800 60
1000 109 2000 66
1100 120 2200 73
1200 130 2400 80
1300 141 2600 86
1400 152 2800 93
1500 163 3000 99

And this ones got a compass too!!!

Some of them do, they’re not the best military marching compasses, but they do the job. The pointers tend to be small, but with the backlit display you can see enough to check your course and since it’s on your wrist it’s always instantly available and never gets in they way of your ice axe. Keep your marching compass handy for real navigational decisions, but check your watch often to stay on track you’ve set.

The Final Picture

At the end of the day, alti-watches are just another tool, they can be just fun, a serious training aid, or really get your ass out of the deep stuff. If you are going to use it seriously you need to practice using it and keep checking it against all the other inputs you have around you. Always keep it visible, in good weather on your wrist, in bad weather put it on over your jacket - it’s waterproof! A good navigator uses all his tools together and thus will spot it if one of them is misleading him. Personally my alti-watches (I’m on my second!) have saved me some serious grief and kept me off bad ground more than once, I wear it every day and watch the weather so I know whether to take the bike to work or not!

I can’t say you have to get one, but if you spend time outdoors I think you’ll use it, and at todays prices why not just give it a try.

Have fun, but keep safe out there!

The Author R Brammer is an avid walker climber snowboard and founder of the Tech equipment retailer http://www.sporttek.co.uk. I share with the readers my knowledge of the products I use to get the most out of your adventure sport.

[tags]altimeter, altimeter watch, digital altimeter[/tags]