I just got off a 70 mile river trip that my BK2 tagged along on. Unfotunately, the weather service was VERY VERY off and I was hit by the rain storms that destroyed Colorado. The river I was on flash flooded bad and we paddled for over 20 miles looking for a place to pull our boat over - unforunately due to the flash flooding the banks had all washed away. All that was left were sheer 8-15 ft tall walls of dirt where the banks used to be......at the top of the banks were thick walls of 10-20ft tall tamarisks - all 3+ inches thick at the base and spaced only inches apart from eachother. They tams were so thick that you couldn't even push them aside to walk through them.
I knew that as the light was going away and the rain continued to pour that I would have only one option...use my paddles to cut the bank back into steps and then use my BK2 to try and chop my way through the tams so we could get our gear through and set up our tent and pull our boat up to saftey. Within about 5 minutes of coming to this sinking realization, I rounded a corner, and a party from earlier had done exactly what I feared i would have to do...they had chopped steps up the washed away bank and cut a path through the tams with some sort of knife (judging by chop marks vs. clean cut trees).
This incident made me realize that while the BK2 is a great camp knife for the mountains and even described by many as a survival knife, it would have been extremely exhausting work, if not impossible to get through those trees to saftey (trees were 15-50 yards deep) with it. I just can't see the BK2 having worked in any reasonable amount of time for what I needed it to do.
So the incident made me wonder...would a BK9 have saved my butt if I hadn't run into the previous party's work, or would I have needed something even bigger like a machette? WWBHD? (what would becker heads do?). I'm feeling like the BK2 would have left me up crap creek on this one.
To give you an idea of what I was dealing with, here is a snapshot of some tams on the river (now imagine this picture where the tams are at the top of a sheer 8+ft bank):
I knew that as the light was going away and the rain continued to pour that I would have only one option...use my paddles to cut the bank back into steps and then use my BK2 to try and chop my way through the tams so we could get our gear through and set up our tent and pull our boat up to saftey. Within about 5 minutes of coming to this sinking realization, I rounded a corner, and a party from earlier had done exactly what I feared i would have to do...they had chopped steps up the washed away bank and cut a path through the tams with some sort of knife (judging by chop marks vs. clean cut trees).
This incident made me realize that while the BK2 is a great camp knife for the mountains and even described by many as a survival knife, it would have been extremely exhausting work, if not impossible to get through those trees to saftey (trees were 15-50 yards deep) with it. I just can't see the BK2 having worked in any reasonable amount of time for what I needed it to do.
So the incident made me wonder...would a BK9 have saved my butt if I hadn't run into the previous party's work, or would I have needed something even bigger like a machette? WWBHD? (what would becker heads do?). I'm feeling like the BK2 would have left me up crap creek on this one.
To give you an idea of what I was dealing with, here is a snapshot of some tams on the river (now imagine this picture where the tams are at the top of a sheer 8+ft bank):
What about the BK6-Patrol Machete?
