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Our Mission
"To promote multi-day, backcountry travel in a self-supported ("backpackable"), lightweight style."
What is Backpacking Light?
Backpacking Light hosts the world's most passionate core community of lightweight wilderness travelers. We are a membership-based cooperative that offers:
- ARTICLES: Exclusive access to technical content, test reports, product reviews, research reviews, and state of the market reports.
- COMMUNITY: A civilized, appropriately-moderated, and respectful community of like-minded outdoor enthusiasts in the Internet's most active forums about lightweight backpacking.
- SHOP: A gear shop containing a focused selection of gear for ultralight backcountry travel, including gear and apparel designed and manufactured by our staff specifically for our members.
- WIKI: The Internet's fastest growing community-driven encyclopedia about lightweight backpacking.
- SCHOOL: A wilderness education program that offers in-depth instruction and outdoor adventure for all experience levels.
Backpacking Light takes product testing seriously, and aims to publish the most technically advanced reviews of shelters, stoves, packs, insulation, and other outdoor gear available anywhere.
How is Backpacking Light Different from Other Magazines and Websites?
Investigative, evidence-based reporting. In its most distilled form, the answer to that question is simple: we question everything. From the marketing claims we find on hang tags to the (sometimes outrageous) recommendations we read in other outdoor magazines, we are skeptics at heart. We believe in the intelligence of the consumer - you - and prefer to educate you by delivering sound, judgment-based, and evidence-based information rather than capitalizing on gullibility and feeding you a shallow stream of consciousness that will only satisfy you when you get bored of reading SkyMall on your next flight.
Passionate and respectful community. Everyone is welcome here. Except for people that don't play nice, and don't respect each other. We believe that the real value of the Internet is in fostering community in a way that helps, and not hurts, society. Trolls, spammers, fools, bigots, and idiots are aggressively moderated in our forums so the rest of us can actually learn from each other.
100% Advertising Free. We've dabbled here and there in advertising, and we're over it. We're back to wholly serving you, the customer. No matter how you look at it, advertisers spend money on you with strings attached and conditions implied, and their contracts are wholly dependent on how you serve them. That's a little backwards, don't you think? So, as we return to our roots in 2009, we're pretty excited to say, "Sayonara, ad monkeys!" The bottom line: Backpacking Light remains objective, unbiased, and advertising free.
Would You Like to a Part of Our Community?
We'd love that.
We welcome your experience, your participation in our community, and of course, the opportunity to serve and help you as well.
Please subscribe today and support a voice that is 100% dedicated to consumer education and servant leadership for the outdoor industry.
Godspeed and Go Light,
Ryan Jordan, Publisher
