"[color:"blue"]Brian, I never used my 1-oz. aluminum stake/potty trowel as a stake, but I defy anyone to come up with a 1-oz. metal trowel. I've found plastic trowels to be pretty useless, especially in the Pacific NW dry season when it doesn't rain for weeks and the trekking pole/stick/heel combination doesn't work either in dry, hard ground. Since I have to bury the dog's poop as well as my own, the "potty trowel stake" gets lots of use. I haven't had trouble with its bending--maybe mine is heavier? I don't know what kind it is nor when I got it--it's like a half-tube of thick aluminum and must be 20-30 years old.[/color]"

Mine is also a half-tube of thick aluminum, though it's only a year or so old. Most of the time it worked fine, but it seems that all too often one is playing "rock and root roulette", i.e., each day offers a new and creative pattern of obstacles to being able to dig a good sized cathole. The aluminum stake bent for me in trying to pry out a rock. Maybe the orange plastic type would have just snapped, or maybe I wouldn't have levered the plastic one so hard, dunno.

What I have is sold as an "SMC Perforated Snow/Sand Stake", and it weighs about 1.1 oz. The traditional orange plastic stake is about 1.6 oz. Montbell sells a "Handy Scoop" made with "1 mm thick stainless steel construction" that's 1.4 oz. But it strikes me that 1 mm is pretty thin ...

There are really two knocks on the snow/sand stake approach, for me at least. One is that it's narrow and less efficient in moving a lot of dirt quickly. The other is that, per previous, I've bent them once or twice, and once you do that, they're never going to be as strong again after being bent back into shape.

But on reflection, there's no clearly better option. A trade-off on the narrowness is that it's easier with a narrow trowel to get in and among obstacles (rocks, roots) and those IMO are ultimately more of a problem than simply moving earth. Very very few times along the PCT this year did I encounter soft earth that was easy to just shovel out of the way --- almost never.

And the tradeoff in bending the stake is that to have something beefy enough to be really bullet-proof in that regard, it would inevitably be heavier than I want to carry. I'm not attracted to a 1 mm thick scoop. In an ideal case I would just "be more careful" and not bend one in future. In practice, a person gets impatient in trying to move impacted rocks, and the length of the snow/sand stake allows quite a bit of leverage to be applied to the tip.

Sorry, thread drift here I guess. It ultimately does still relate to the credibility of multi-using this item. In more soft earth or snow I would have used it as a stake more often. I didn't bring a tent for the first 700 miles of the PCT, just cowboy camped, and it's possible that I would have found occasional use for it as a backup soft-earth stake if I had been tenting along those miles. Similarly, I never had to actually camp on top of snow on the PCT this year, but if I had, needle-stakes wouldn't have cut it.


Brian Lewis
http://postholer.com/brianle