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I used this pack on a three-day winter backpacking trip to the Lake District and was mightily impressed, Gregory don’t seem to have compromised at all which makes me wonder why all backpacking rucksacks don’t weigh in at 1.2kg or thereabouts. How much does it weigh? The sample pack I used had a medium back length and with all the optional components removed it weighed 1100 grams, but you …

Criterion has two particularly lightweight ranges of sleeping bags of interest to backpackers, they are the Ultralight range and the Quantum range. The former uses 700 Fill Power down and the latter uses 870 Fill Power, therefore the Quantum range has the highest warmth to weight ratio of the two so is of most interest to us. Down Quality At 870 Fill Power Polish Goose down (in a r …

Exped have revamped their sleeping mat ranges and are now using recycled fabrics and are producing the mats to a carbon neutral standard, furthermore they have simplified their naming convention so that the mats now feature the R-Value in the name. This is only a good thing if you understand R-Values and we think the names could have been better. The R3 is a regular sized mat 7cm th …

This was not my first use of these boots, I’d been using them for about a year prior to this trip, I’d bought them as a winter boot for days out in the Lake District where I didn’t see the need for big traditional winter boots. They will take a lightweight micro crampon for traversing ice, they are waterproof and warm enough with mid-weight socks for everything I’d be doing during a Lak …

I was using a Platypus 2.0L Hoser as my daily hydration system so I decided to leave the clean side bladder at home and use the hoser in its place, this brought the weight of the system down to 221g, which is reasonable for piece of mind and ease of use. There are certainly pump action filters that are lighter than this but they take quite a bit of effort to get the same filtered res …

The Big Agnes Platinum series tent use the lightest of materials to get down to astonishingly low weights at 1113grams for a three person, two skin, two door, spacious shelter. My main reason for taking this tent on the Tour of the Matterhorn was to assess its robustness, not so much a long-term durability test but an out-of-the-box assessment of whether the tent was up to the rigours …

With two glacier crossings on the Tour of the Matterhorn crampons came highly recommended, but they would only be used for a few hours on two of the days and both glaciers were at relatively shallow gradients, there was very little steep terrain to cover. Bearing all this in mind we decided on the Petzl Irvis Hybrid crampons which at 536grams for the pair weren’t too onerous beari …

I was lucky enough to get a chance to review a pre-production pair of the new Gram-counter Gear Ultra-Carbon Trekking poles, amazingly light at just 125grams per pole, actually the lightest true trekking pole we have available, and of all the products I tested on the Tour of the Matterhorn these were the most remarkable. Note the pre-production poles I had are identical to the actual …

Sea to Summit have thought about the design of the Alto tents very carefully trying not to recreate what’s already available and fans of the brand will not be disappointed with this tent. We took the Plus version out for a three-day backpacking trip at the beginning of April when the weather was very cold but quite clear. The cold conditions (sub zeroC) required largish sleeping bags an …

When Nigor folded as a company the product designs were taken up by Bach, already a well-known rucksack brand. Bach has taken the designs and added these largely unchanged shelters to its offering. A key USP for Nigor was the use of ‘Nylon 6.6’ as opposed to standard Nylon 6 used by most manufacturers and Bach has continued with this type of nylon. It is significantly better than the …

Using trekking poles splits the load between your legs and arms, it's not an even split, your knees still take the lion's share of the stress of walking and carrying a load, but by transferring at least some of this to the arms your legs get some relief and at the end of a long day they aren't as tired as they would have been.

20 years ago, whether you were a man or a woman you bought a ‘sleeping bag’, these days there are gender specific sleeping bags available so you would buy either a man’s sleeping bag or a woman’s – or would you? We’re not sure, so this article is about the differences, why is a woman’s sleeping bag different, and are those differences important to you? We have female customers who buy m …