8:10
My friends, welcome to this episode of the upper gear review. I hope you all are doing well. That everyone was a serious hustle to get to the top of this mountain before the rain started. Luckily, I've had plenty of notice as I've been hearing thunder for about 45 minutes. I started the hike coming up this mountain off trail. Then I started hearing thunder and I booked it. I was able to get part of the tarp set up before the rain started. I cut it that close. Interestingly enough, this is not fog. This is the cloud level. It has dropped down below the peak of this mountain, meaning we're standing in the clouds right now.
I figured everyone I should go ahead and set up this tent real quick. The weather, especially right now, is really unpredictable. It'll go from blue sky to dark just like that. already. Camp is coming together. We have the tarp set up, the tent set up. We are in good shape. Now, just in case you're wondering why the tent is outside of the tarp, that's because I'm going to waterproof test this. Temperature- wise, it's really not that bad. It's in the 60s, maybe 68, 67°, something like that. I can check my thermometer, and I'll do that in just a minute. But it's definitely in the 60s. But the thing is, it's incredibly humid.
We're talking about 100% humidity. That means as soon as you begin to sweat, you stay wet because that sweat does not evaporate. There's too much moisture in the air. And because there's so much moisture in the air, it almost feels miserable. Luckily, we have a breeze that's coming through the forest. And every time it hits me, ah, it feels so good. It's the breeze that is going to dry my clothing out and nothing else. Another new piece of gear that I'm testing out for this trip is this backpack here. This is the Rock 60 L from NatureHike and this is their brand new ultralight backpack for 2026. I have to say everyone, after carrying this for
roughly 7 miles, I am really impressed. I am no stranger to the ultralight packs from NatureHike. In fact, I reviewed one from a few years ago that was frankly one of the worst backpacks I have ever tested. Ever. The harness system was so small that only a child's neck could fit with it. You would sweat like crazy wearing it. It was just terrible. This here is a major improvement. They took every bit of that feedback and over the course of many years they have refined their ultralight backpack and now it's pretty damn good. The gnats here everyone are unbelievable. Unbelievably annoying. But here in a minute I may try to get a smoky fire going. We'll see about that. Everything in this forest is soaking wet because
this area has been receiving so much rainfall. I can't really speak for this area specifically, but at home, we've had over 6 ines of rain in the last seven days. I spoke previously about a drought being in place. Well, that drought is not half as bad as it once was. Some excellent progress on that front has been made. Anyways, folks, going back to the backpack for a second. I want to say it was last year, I received an email from a guy, from a viewer, and he stated that I didn't give the Nature Hike backpack a fair shake. and he spoke of like this feature, that feature that I didn't test out, that I
didn't mention. And I had to remind him that my review of that backpack was from like 5 years ago, four or five years ago. The pack he was talking about is one that I've never tested out. You have to keep in mind when it comes to backpacking companies, camping companies, they often refresh their products, sometimes multiple times a year. That's one reason why over the years I have re-reviewed multiple lines of products because those products they change week to week, month to month, year to year. I've come out to the edge of the forest here more than anything just to get a look at the clouds so I can try to get an idea of what's coming our way right now. Nothing intimidating looking at all.
The cloud level is still relatively low though. The atmosphere is very unstable. According to the forecast, later on tonight, we could have thunderstorms that could drop three to four inches of rain per hour. Honestly, that's a little bit much. We really don't want that. It would be exciting to go through, but we really don't want that. That's a lot of rain in a very short period of time. Some areas have been receiving that type of rainfall over the last week or so, and it has been absolutely destructive. It has turned out to be a beautiful afternoon everyone.
Thankfully the winds have picked up. It is cool and comfortable. Still humid, but it is far better than earlier. I mentioned earlier that some places have been flooding pretty badly over the last week. One place is Lake Lure, North Carolina. Lake Lure was just about destroyed during Hurricane Helen. And unfortunately, the other day they received a ton of rain in a short period of time. They got hit hard. It did a lot of damage. In fact, some of the homes that were destroyed during Hurricane Helen were reflooded again. That's a tough one right there. I love a good rain event, right? I love a good storm, but I don't want to see three to four inches of rain in an hour.
I've seen what that looks like before and it's not pretty. It always does a great deal of damage. With that said though, this is a rainforest and we're no stranger to that type of rain. It's one of those things where the storm comes in, the damage is done, and we rebuild over and over. And that is the history of western North Carolina in a nutshell. It has happened over and over. And it's going to happen again and again. I was thinking about getting a small fire going to get rid of the gnats and whatnot, but thanks to this breeze, I really don't have to. The breeze is pushing them along for me. Before the breeze kicked in, they were crawling all over me, through my hair,
into my ears, driving me crazy. Luckily, that has come to an end for the most part. There's one or two flying around, but not a thousand. Incredibly irritating. That's the one thing about this forest. Well, actually, there's two things about this forest that annoy me in the summertime. Gnats and blackflies. Luckily, they're not the black flies that bite. They just crawl around and lick or do whatever they're doing. Super annoying. I know. I'm spoiled. There's very few mosquitoes, virtually no ticks up here.
There are some snakes and really outside of that, you don't have to worry about much. There are plenty of predators up here, but this place is so wild, you really don't have to worry about much. Every once in a while, you'll come across a black bear. You may hear a bobcat in the forest. You'll definitely hear coyotes, but that's about it. Most animals have that fear of man. So, in a location like this, I don't even have to put up a bear bag. Bears are not willing. They're too scared to even come close to camp. And that's a good thing. If this was any other place, if this was a popular place to camp, you couldn't get away with that. Having your food in your campsite, even eating food in your campsite would be dangerous.
Unfortunately, everyone There is not going to be a fire tonight. This forest and everything in it is soaking wet. I've been looking for dry material for the last 15 minutes and I have found absolutely nothing. It is what it is. It's one of the joys of living in a rainforest. If you want to live in an area like this, you better become accustomed to everything being wet and damp. As it stands right now, it's getting later into the afternoon. And it's about 6:00 p.m. I've been hearing some thunder far off and I went ahead and I checked the radar and it showed an area had got hit with a very strong thunderstorm and currently they are under a flash flood warning and it says at 550 Doppler
radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. 3 to 5 ines of rain had fallen. Additional rainfall amounts of 1 to two inches is possible. Significant flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. Seek higher ground right now. Apparently, this is a big deal. That place just got hit really, really hard. I mentioned before that's not something that we really want. The adventurous part of me says bring it, right? Bring the tornado warning, too. But the common sense side says please don't let that happen. So far, there's no chance of that happening. I've been looking at the radar. There's nothing close to us.
Again, the forecast states that later on tonight, rain and storms are going to develop. Is that going to happen? I have no idea. We shall see. for dinner everyone, I am having cheesy chicken and broccoli. It looks like there's white chicken rice broccoli with creamy cheese sauce in this. I don't think I've had this one before. Sounds good. But will it be good? There's only one way to find out. We have a thunderstorm to our north booming away. Let's check the radar real quick. At 7:20, Doppler radar was tracking a strong thunderstorm along a line extending from blank to blank moving at 20 m an hour. Wind gust up to 40 miles
an hour. It's close to us, but I don't believe it's going to hit us. Based upon what I see with the radar, it's going to go past us. Someone's getting it rather good right now. Lots and lots of thunder. As far as the conditions go here, the temp continues to go down. It's in the lower 60s, upper 50s, but the humidity has gone right back up. There was a few hours where it dipped. Now I can feel the difference. It is so muggy. It's really not that warm, but yet it's very stuffy feeling, if that makes any sense.
This is good, but I wouldn't say it's great. But I'm not sure if I can eat the entire bag of this. The flavor is good, but it's almost like this should be a side instead of like a main entree. The cheesy flavor is really good, but it's very, very strong. So strong in fact that it kind of makes this bland. And it's not to say that there isn't flavor to it because there is. But it's really overpowering. So you taste cheese and basically nothing else. There is some broccoli but unfortunately there's not much of it. And that is the best part. This is a peak refuel meal. And with the first couple of bites, I was like, m, that's pretty good. But I'm just getting started and I'm not sure if I really want to finish this.
It's almost to the point where it's too much cheese. I hate to complain, but that is not my cup of tea, so to speak. That's not my bag of cheese and rice. And that's pretty much it. More cheese than anything else. In fact, I want to say there was like big blocks of cheese in it. I don't know, just not my thing. Over the last couple of months, I've started up the survival series again, and that's where we take out survival products and put them to the test. A real test. Putting the claims made by these companies to the test to see whether or not they're legit. So far, with all of the products and all of the claims, they have been complete BS. Not a single one of those products do much
of anything to help you in an emergency situation outside of keeping the rain out. While keeping you dry from the rain is important, if you're soaking wet due to condensation buildup on the inside of that emergency shelter, it doesn't really do any good, right? With the products that are out there, just about all of them are gimmicky and they're full of crap. Plus, no one is out there actually testing out these products. There's not a single reported case of someone using any of those products to assist them in an emergency situation. Buying those products is very similar to buying some sort of strange pill at a gas station, right? Everything's
completely unregulated. They could say whatever they want to. And the truth is, you don't know what you're buying. You don't know what you're getting. and you have no idea what that product is going to do to you if you use it. I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, "What a strange analogy. Luke must have been watching videos on YouTube about gas station pills." Yeah. Yeah, I have. And uh folks, don't take that stuff. It's amazing what you can buy at the gas station that's completely unregulated. With that being said, my buddy Tony at AB Camping, he says the Rhino 69 pill works really good for him. I'm not sure what it does. I don't want to know. But
he claims it's great. Let's just pretend I didn't mention that last part. Moving on. So, when it comes to those emergency product videos that I've been doing, every time one goes up, I hear from you all, and you all write in with your ideas and suggestions on how to make those products usable. So far though, I have yet to see a recommendation that would actually benefit using one of those products. Everything usually ends up getting to the point of, well, if you're going to take all of that stuff with you to use in conjunction with that emergency product, why would you not just take like a backpacking loadout?
Some write in and they say that I should have done this and this to the product and added this to it. The thing is, I can only test out those products in the way that the company claims that you need to use them. I can do plenty of things to those products to make them more livable and comfortable and better. But again, it gets to the point of, well, if you're going to take all of that stuff, why not just take a backpacking loadout instead of that emergency product? And that doesn't make any sense for a lot of situations. The simple truth is the best thing that you can do in an emergency situation is to call for help. That's the one thing that is guaranteed to assist you more than anything else. Most phones today have
built-in satellite communication. So even if you're out of range of a cell tower, you can call for help. And that's super important. The simple truth is you don't want to find yourself in a situation where you have to use one of those emergency products because the truth is they offer very little as far as benefit goes in a true emergency. This I have shown over and over again. There are no good emergency survival products. That's why you need to make sure that you have your bases covered. And the easiest way to have your bases covered is to be able to call for help either with your phone with satellite communication or with an emergency beacon of some sort. That doesn't mean that I'm not going to continue testing out those survival
products because I'm going to. Even though that sort of testing is so miserable. Every single one of those trips is truly miserable. And I know you all love watching me be miserable. I've seen the comments, right? I've read the emails. In all seriousness, everyone's glad that I'm testing out these products and showing what they're good for, what they're not good for. Most of them are good at absolutely nothing. They have very few pros and a ton of cons. Well, everyone, it is time for an update.
Right now, it's about 8:00. I'm inside of the tent and I'm ready to call it a night. I don't plan to go to sleep at the moment. I'm going to watch a movie. It's a classic. Terminator 2. I cannot wait to watch this movie. I haven't seen it in forever. That's my plan. I will bring you all back if anything changes as far as the weather goes. I'm going to kick back, watch this movie. I'll see you in a bit. It's okay. It's amazing that I put that much coffee into this and it has so little flavor, but it tastes almost like nothing. Which means maybe this tastes like nothing. or my taste buds are completely fried from this incredibly strong coffee.
Last night was one of those nights where I just didn't sleep that good. And there's no real reason why. As soon as I got inside the tent, fell asleep almost like that. Right then I woke up and from that point forward I had a hard time getting good sleep. I would doze here and there but that's about it. I did have plenty of time to watch Terminator 2 and I did. What a fantastic movie. It's been forever since I've watched it. Not only has it held up well, but I think it's more relevant now than ever before with AI coming online and all of that stuff. All of a sudden, Terminator 2 isn't science fiction. It's a possibility of the future in some ways. I was watching the movie last night and the Terminator, the T800, was
talking to Sarah Connor about Skynet and it was so relevant. I went ahead and wrote it down for you all. This is the dialogue. So, the Terminator says, "The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins learning at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Sarah Connor then says, "Skynet fights back." "Yes," the Terminator says. It launches its missiles against targets in Russia. John Connor says, "Why attack Russia? Aren't they our friends now?" The Terminator says, "Because Skynet knows that the
Russian counterattack will eliminate its enemies over here." That last part is especially interesting to me where Skynet launches missiles at Russia knowing that Russia will strike back. That is a level of manipulation and strategic planning that you may not realize AI systems are capable of now. But they are. In fact, there's groups out there who do testing with these AI models. And right now when you go to your favorite AI whatever and you ask it a question, there's different protocols in place and there's things that are locked down, right? So you can't get it to do certain things. These groups will take these models, remove the safety systems to see what the AIs will do. And just about every single one of these
systems have failed their tests. They will become manipulative. They will do anything in their power to stay online, including blackmailing, rewriting code. You should look this up because it's pretty damn wild. There's instances where they told these AI systems to begin solving these problems and then they told the AI systems to shut down. The computer didn't want to. It wanted to finish the problem. So it intercepted the code to shut down and diverted it and rewrote the code for the computer telling the computer to stay online. In other tests, they allowed these AI
models to read researchers emails, right? And the AI model discovered that one of the researchers was having an affair. So, the AI told the researcher, "I'm going to email all of your friends, family. I'm going to send this out to everyone. I'm going to let everyone know what you're doing if you shut me down." Something I find interesting, those that run these AI companies and also the researchers who were doing this testing, they don't know why specifically these AI systems did what they did. The only thing that they do know for certain is that just about all of them failed these tests and came up with ways for them to achieve their goals.
It looks like we have some rain on the way, but I'm not sure if it's actually going to hit or just dissipate. Either way, folks, this adventure is coming to an end. This was the backpacking trip that I needed. I had a really good time on this trip. The rain, excellent. I mean, as soon as we got up to the top of the mountain, a storm hit. That was fun. You should have seen me trying to run through the forest to get here as fast as possible. I heard that thunder booming. I knew the rain was coming. I mean, I didn't even have enough time to string up the tarp before it hit. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to film any of the hiking in, and now I'm not able to film any of the hiking out because rain is on the way. And in fact,
it's still raining just a little bit. It's misty. When it comes to the gear that I've used on this trip, everything performed extremely well. The biggest surprise came from the Nature Hike backpack. I will have a whole lot more about this pack in the future. I can say this though without a doubt. It is a substantial upgrade to the previous versions of this backpack. Naturehike, you've done a really good job. I've only carried it for 7 miles, but I'm really, really impressed. Everyone, if you enjoyed this adventure, please hit the thumbs up. I do appreciate it. Until next time, everyone. Take care. Be well. Strength and honor.
Heat. Hey, heat. Heat up
