Ultralight backpacking skills, gear analysis, and education for hikers who want to pack less and experience more.
"Backpacking Light has become the de facto organ of [the ultralight backpacking] subculture." - The Sierra Club
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New to backpacking? See our Beginner's Guide to Backpacking
Deep skills, field-tested gear analysis, and practical backcountry knowledge for hikers, backpackers, and other backcountry users.
Warm sunshine at camp made a high pass route inviting. A forecast of rain, wind, and snow changed our plan. Follow the decision with a route map, field observations, and a practical exercise for assessing alternatives on your own trips.
Explore the 2026 Cottage Gear Innovation Award winners with Backpacking Light and Garage Grown Gear. Six innovative products demonstrate practical advances in backpacking equipment, from shelter stakes to bear canisters. Learn why each earned recognition and celebrate one maker's lasting contributions to ultralight gear with this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
This is Part 1 (of 4) in a new series called Principles of Outdoor Gear Design and focuses on the topic of outdoor gear durability. Ryan Jordan examines durability through the relationship between product, use case, and user behavior. Backpack examples connect materials, manufacturing, and engineering to wear, damage, repair, and continued function. Learn how to interpret durability claims and evaluate the weight, cost, and maintenance tradeoffs involved in choosing gear. (This series is made possible by support from Vaer Watches as part of the Built by Vaer initiative, a partnership collaboration between Backpacking Light and Vaer to bring in-depth educational resources about product design to the Backpacking Light community.)
A technical comparison of modern fabrics used in backpacks, shelters, and storage systems, including DCF, Ultra, X-Pac, ECOPAK, silnylon, silpoly, and ALUULA. The tables compare weight, tear strength, abrasion resistance, waterproofness, dimensional stability, construction, and key tradeoffs using current manufacturer data.
After a recent strenuous approach to an alpine area, headache, nausea, fatigue, and dizziness produced a Lake Louise AMS score consistent with moderate acute mountain sickness. Garmin data and a detailed reconstruction of food, fluid, workload, and sleep revealed a more complex event. This case study examines how altitude exposure interacted with carbohydrate depletion, dehydration, and accumulated fatigue - and why backcountry illness is often better understood as a convergence of physiological stressors.
Load lifters do more than pull the top of a backpack closer to your body. Backpack engineer Nenta Wako explains how they affect lumbar torque, shoulder and pelvic loading, pack stability, and carrying comfort - and how frame rigidity, attachment geometry, and proper adjustment determine whether they work.
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