The Wampus Cat

Just like my dad, I have a sturdy collection of outdoor gear. I have a few things left that I could pick up (like a SVEA stove and a way fancy 4-season tent, but probably more like a way regular 3.5-season tent), but really, I’ve got it all. There isn’t much point to go to the outfitter any more except to get rope or more little Nalgenes, or find a new place to walk around in the woods.

Some things I have a lot of, like backpacks. I spent my childhood using Dana Design packs. My dad swears by them and he has a small collection at home in Vermont now. I came of age in the lightweight / disposable gear era (where you buy new backpacks every few months because the old ones have separated into their constituent parts, not to point any fingers). I have gone through four backpacks that became either unrepairable or so complicated to repair that I just couldn’t figure it out. The first big pack that I myself owned was an Osprey, shortly after their manufacturing moved to (I believe) Vietnam. The internal frame on that broke after 4 months, I tried to fix it with duct tape but it’s a pernicious problem and that pack doesn’t get much use any more. The Osprey had a single point of failure, these packs seemed to be points of failure themselves. One thing that never ripped was the shoulder straps; everything else was fair game. This type of backpack is pretty cheap, and I guess many people regularly replace this style of pack. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, we’re supposed to be behaving ourselves so that everyone can enjoy the outdoors way into the future, not enjoying it now ourselves fast-and-light and generating a lot of waste throwing something out that is produced quite far away.

So, Dana Designs, pre-K2. Their Bomb Pack is really good looking, durable and heavy. The material holds together so even if you do rip it, someone as unskilled with thread and needle as I am can fix it pretty easily. Dana Designs, of course, is gone now, but Dana Gleason is still making packs under the Mystery Ranch marque, a lot of them made almost completely or completely in the United States, and all nice, like this one.

I opted for packs that remind me a lot of the old Bomb Packs. I wound up with two that will last me the rest of my life, made by hand for me by Randy Rackliff in Jackson, New Hampshire with the Cold Cold World label. We talked it over last summer for a while and I got a big box in the mail one day containing a Chernobyl and an Ozone. The Ozone is my every day pack, I load it up for work, take it to the Dunes, use it as a carry-on and as an overnight pack. It’s made of thick black Cordura, 1000D all around. The only things wrong with it are my fault for not specifying (the top needs to be removable). The Chernobyl is the only backpack I use for hiking any more. It’s amazing. It fits well, is very durable, and is blaze orange. The whole pack. I am never mistaken for a deer any more. For longer trips, it won’t be appropriate, it’s just not big enough, but for anything up to 4 nights, you couldn’t ask for anything more. Both packs are the exact opposite of disposable. I would highly recommend them (other people feel similarly about packs Randy has made them).

And as for the picture above, weird stuff pops up on eBay all the time. That picture is of one of the rarest backpacks I’ve ever seen up for sale, one of Warren Chouinard’s Basically Absurd Technologies rucksacks. Easily 35 years old and it looks to be in great condition. Naturally it’s got a Buy-It-Now price of $350, but for good reason. Someone out there will get a piece of history, the rest of us can just get a look. Be sure to check out the BAT single point hammock the seller has a photo of, as well. Amazing!