Section
Boots, packs, headlamps, shells, stoves — tested over a season, written up with specifics.
Gear Tested
Imogen Reece spent two seasons in the Patagonian and Aysén regions with four insulated jackets in rotation. Down won the warmth-to-weight contest. It did not win every contest.
Gear Tested
Tomas Lendvai carried a small folding knife and a fixed-blade bushcraft knife for 300 miles of the southern PCT. One did most of the work. The other paid for its weight on a single afternoon.
Gear Tested
R-value on the package is a lab number. Astrid Pereira tested three popular pads in a Welsh barn at 0C and a North Pennine bothy at minus 4C. The gap between marketing and morning was not always where she expected.
Gear Tested
Wendell Foss spent twelve days in the North Cascades in late May with four stove systems and a kitchen scale. The canister system won fewer rounds than expected.
Gear Tested
Imogen Reece spent a winter on the Olympic Peninsula and the western Cascades in five hardshell jackets. Two of them held. Two of them did not. One surprised her.
Gear Tested
Astrid Pereira took five headlamps into the wet limestone of South Wales and the deeper, drier caves of the Yorkshire Dales. After 200 hours underground, only two were still working as advertised.
Gear Tested
Margaret Holcomb spent the winter wearing both — one against the skin and the other on the line to dry. The verdict is less tidy than the marketing on either side.
Gear Tested
Six months of slate, gneiss, and wet leaf litter across four pairs of low-drop trail shoes in the Berkshires and the Whites. What stuck. What slid. What came apart at the heel cup.