Put a weather station in your hand

Years ago, my dad gave me a cool little instrument that gives me a buch of weather information, and it’s small enough to take wherever I go. I just got a new one, and I’m itching to give it a test-drive.

My dad gave me a Brunton ADC Summit a few years ago. The ADC is a handheld weather station. ADC stands for Atmospheric Data Center. You can strap it to your backpack or wear it around your neck, and with a glance it’ll tell you the speed of the wind, the temperature, the barometric pressure, and a bunch of other weather-related information.

I loaned it to a friend who was preparing to hike 100 miles in the middle of the winter a year and a half ago, and even though my friend eventually made it home, my ADC did not. John was highly apologetic for not being able to give it back to me, so he sent me a new one.

He gave that ADC a much more aggressive test than anything I’d ever done with it. When I had it, I used it to find the temperature and the current speed of waters I was fishing, wind speeds up in the high country, and to find out if the weather was about to change for the worse while I was camping, hunting or hiking. Even though I used it a bunch on photo shoots in the winter up in North Dakota, I was usually back in a warm house before nightfall. John took it with him on a 100 mile hike through the snow, and he said the highest temperature he ever saw on it was 20 degrees. He has no idea where it went – he had it with him when he made it out of the woods on the far end of his 100-mile hike, but that was the last he ever saw of it.

So he sent me the ADC Pro version, and it just arrived. This one’s the next step up from the one I loaned John, and it has a few more features. I look forward to using it to monitor the weather, check my elevation, and check the wind chill while I’m out in the wilds. I just won’t let John borrow this one for his next trip.