I wanted to pass on how I have been able to find some good gear on Craigslist. Instead of looking through a particulat area or city, I google "craigslist". The first entry has a search box. There I enter what I am looking for I get results from around the country; some are old, some don't make sense, but I have found good deals on Montbell, Western Mountaineering and others.
Maybe everybody already knows this, but it has helped me.

Edited by Kat_P on 05/19/2010 10:30:32 MDT.

I have been able to do the same thing with geartrade.com. I would use google to search geartrade.com. For some reason the search engine on geartrade really doesn't work too well.

www.craiglook.com searches all of craigs list locations too

How do you get a google search box for Geartrade.com?

google will let you do this for any website I believe, in the search box type (for example):

site:geartrade.com western mountaineering

and you'll get hits for western mountaineering on geartrade (but if you want exact phrase match, use quotes "western mountaineering")

just tried this with geartrade and you get a lot of less-than-useful results. Every page that has a match will pop up, which includes category pages and other hits (where many items are listed and you have to sort through them anyway). It appears though, that if you do the search and then click the "shopping" link that google spits out, you'll only get actual item pages.

the "site:" method has worked well with other websites (like craigslist) though.

^^^ Thank You.