(Photo: Courtesy Mystery Ranch)
The Editors’ Choice-winning Mystery Ranch Radix punches above its weight. At just 3.8 pounds, it’s about a pound lighter than other fully-featured backpacks in its category. But you wouldn’t know that from how it carries: After taking the Radix 57 on a soggy, brushy three-day jaunt along North Carolina’s Art Loeb Trail, our testers reported the pack could handle loads of up to 50 pounds without leaving them sore the next day. To get there, the Radix’s designers upgraded its materials instead of downgrading the suspension: An aerospace-grade aluminum frame shaved grams without compromising the pack’s support, while the body—100-denier Robic nylon, reinforced with UHMWPE and treated with a DWR coating—both kept down weight and kept out most precip. The black-on-black color scheme doesn’t look bad, either.