Outside 2022 Summer Gear Guide

New Beginnings This is a gear guide unlike any other. It is a partnership between five magazines—Outside, Backpacker, Beta, VeloNews, and Climbing, all siblings under Outside Interactive Inc. These pages represent the collective efforts of ten gear editors, 40 category managers, and nearly 150 testers. It is the biggest, most comprehensive, and most exhaustive gear guide any of us have produced. That’s saying a lot, seeing as the editors who worked on it have more than five decades of combined experience. How did this work? Team members from each magazine spent weeks planning as a group, then divided and conquered. Outside and VeloNews worked together on road and gravel biking. The Beta crew handled mountain biking, including vital data from their week-long bike test in British Columbia (see Mountain Bikes, page 70).…

Ultralight-curious? Want to make the leap without making sacrifices? Meet your gateway drug. The Deuter Aircontact Ultra ($240) impressed us with a smart balance of weight, features, and durability. Plenty of sub-three-pound packs skimp on capacity and comfort. The Aircontact Ultra doesn’t. We stuffed the main pack bag with 45 pounds, including several bottles of champagne for a surprise marriage proposal in the Alaskan backcountry. Credit the load carry to a unique frame shape: a spring steel wire runs down the center and around the perimeter of the back panel. Because this geometry traces both the vertical curvature of the spine and the lateral curve of the hips, it transfers 70 percent of the load to the hipbelt while still permitting enough torsional flexibility for the pack to move with…

BEST FOR COMFORT Arc’teryx Bora 60 / Bora 65 $320 The route ahead may be long and challenging, but the Bora will carry you (and tons of gear) through it all comfortably. Testers heaped praise on the pack’s swiveling hipbelt, which attaches to the back panel via a single point that glides up and down within a 1.2-inch-long notch. This system allows the belt to pivot with your hips and adjust vertically as your back stretches and contracts on technical terrain. Together with a rigid, load-transferring framesheet made of Tegris (a woven plastic composite) and two aluminum stays, the hipbelt kept one tester stable under a 45-pound load in Olympic National Park. We appreciated the waterproof pouch in the roomy top lid for keeping electronics safe in Pacific Northwest showers, and the…

A small joy on the trail—actually, no, make it a large one—is finding an item exactly where you thought it would be in your pack, tent, or stuffsack. (And yes, I am fun to hike with. Why do you ask?) On the flip side, going into a trip disorganized can ruin your sojourn in the woods. Staying organized on the trail has always involved varying degrees of gear Tetris, which requires lots of finagling and usually leaves dead space; the Hillsound PackStack changes that. The PackStack is a zippered, half moon-shaped nylon pouch that expands to fit layers, accessories, or whatever else you choose to store in it. Using one PackStack even begets using another: one nests neatly on top of the first, so you can maximize every inch of…

BEST FOR WEIGHT SAVINGS The North Face Chrysalis 20 $375 If pack space is limited and distance is the goal, the Chrysalis is a trustworthy companion. It weighs just under two pounds and packs down to the size of a bread loaf, courtesy of 900-fill down. For this reason, one tester brought it along for 50 miles and two 22-degree nights in Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument. “After beating up my body all day, the anticipation of crawling into this soft cocoon was the motivation I needed to finish the hike back to camp,” our tester said, crediting the 64-inch shoulder, 59-inch hip, and extra-roomy 47.5-inch footbox girths. On another trip, into Wyoming’s Wind River Range, our tester packed the Chrysalis among climbing equipment. Its abrasion-resistant ripstop nylon compression sack emerged unscathed,…

BEST PROTECTION Kuiu Mountain Star 2P $479 We’re not saying we love camping in the rain, but the Mountain Star makes it a heck of a lot more enjoyable. This double-walled tent is reinforced against wind via two nine-millimeter-thick aluminum poles (you can get carbon for $20 more) that run the length of the tent. Both of them slot through pole sleeves, granting additional stability. The Mountain Star’s 15-denier nylon fly and mesh canopy come pre-attached, offering the possibility of a dry setup. “It drizzled during our first night out, and my tent partner and I were happy not to start the trip with a wet tent floor, thanks to the all-in-one pitch,” our gear editor said after a rainy start to the Panama Editors’ Choice trip. Bathtub floors ensure the 29.5-square-foot…