There are times when I want to get out on the trail really early, perhaps at the crack of dawn--hot days when I want to stop and crawl into the shade by noon, exposed places with regular afternoon thunderstorms, sometimes the last day of a trip when I don't want to be driving home in the dark.

In a search for a louder alarm, I tried a number of different watches and ended up with a men's Casio. No women's watch, and particularly Timex, will do the job. However, no alarm watch will wake you up if it's on your wrist and your wrist is down inside the sleeping bag. I've tried setting the watch out on the tent floor, but if it's a cold night and the sleeping bag hood is snuggled close around my head, that's not much good either. 2 1/2 inches of down absorbs a lot of sound.

I tried putting my watch into my cooking pot--makes it a little louder, but not much. I think the plastic wrist band muffles it. It's not like the large Big Ben alarm I used to put into my metal wastebasket when I was in college, which would get me up even when I had gotten only 1 hour sleep after an all-night study session.

In other words, I'm still looking for a solution!