It was a beautiful day in the Los Angeles area yesterday, so I decided to go on a hike. I journeyed up Angeles Crest Highway to the Waterman Mountain area.

The day was clear and the views were stupendous.


Of course, I took a few stoves along. :) Indeed, one of my main objectives for this hike was to test the new MSR MicroRocket stove at a relatively high elevation (8038'/2450m).

So, won't you please join me for The New MSR MicroRocket -- Trail Report #2?

HJ
Adventures in Stoving

UPDATE I've added a technical appendix at the end of my blog post. I list the weights of seven different gas stoves as well as the length of their pot supports.

HJ
Adventures in Stoving

Hi Jim
You are right to place good emphasis on the importance of the pot stability on top of the stove. I once had a pot of near boiling water slide off a stove and was lucky not to scald my hand.
Altho' some stoves are better than others, the main cause of the problem is the smooth bottom of the pot. MSR used to make pots with grooves on the base of the pot, unfortunately they were discontinued before I could get a set.
My current solution has been to make a rim around the edge of the base of a AGG pot. This has never slid off, even when the stove is not level at all.

Hi, Stuart,

A rim around the edge of the pot is brilliant. I've had pots of water fall off my cooking set up on three occasions. I no longer use beer can pots for that reason although I know there are some set ups that are fine.

The old Camping Gaz GT106 stoves had an upturn on the end of the pot supports, which was also brilliant but did limit the size of the pot that one could use.

Pot stability is generally pretty subjective. That said, I found that the number of supports mattered. In general, stoves with four supports had better pot stability with larger pots than those with three. The GS-100 has the shortest pot supports of any of the small gas stoves I tried, but I found that it had excellent pot stability.

HJ
Adventures In Stoving