Outdoor Retailer: The Cutting Edge

The Outdoor Retailer Trade show is always a bit of a “Gear-valanche.” And the Backpacker editors have the pleasure of getting metaphorically buried under piles of new gear—which we sort and sift through while we’re here, so we can take it in the field and test it.

Top of my list for today was in the “Why Didn’t I Think of That” category: a reconfiguring of the standard stuff sack by Granite Gear.  How many times have you carefully compressed your sleeping bag, clothing and other sundries into boulder-like blocks, that when stuffed into your pack leave lots of unused airspace around them. Granite Gear designers realized that if stuff sacks were shaped like bricks not boulders when they were compressed that they’d fit together better and hikers would be able to fit more stuff into their packs without having to tray and pack little items into the corners after the compression stuff sacks were in. So now all of Granite Gear’s stuff sacks are block shaped. They’ve also trimmed weight off all their sacks by swapping webbing for cord, even in their eVent waterproof breathable stuff sacks, that come in at about half the weight of other similar sacks on the market.

Around the corner at Tool Logic, the Survival Card credit card knife grabbed my attention for its trail smarts. It’s a different kind of multitool—about 1/8” thick, and so small, you’ll want to always have it in your pack. It’s got an LED flashlight/emergency signal or a compass and lens (there are two models), and a tiny knife that is ridged on the back as a grip point for your thumb pad when you’re holding the knife. It’s also the spot that you use to strike the flint if you need to start a fire, which telescopes out of the credit card holder on demand.

Stay tuned for gear galore as we work our way through the rest of the aisles!— Berne Broudy, Green Editor