Backpacking

It’s time for the annual REI Memorial Day Sale! Which means great deals on tons of camping and backpacking gear. Here’s 12 of our favorites in 2025.

Planning a hiking or backpacking trip and want to know if you can bring along your trekking poles? We got you. Because the answer…well…it’s complicated. Keep reading to find out how to pack your trekking poles so they won’t get confiscated by security.

Are you team water bottle or hydration reservoir? Sound off! Well we tested a hydration system that’s truly the best of both worlds: It has the functionality of a bladder with the ease-of-use of a water bottle. It’s the One Bottle Hydration system, essentially a hydration tube for a water bottle, and it may be our new favorite way to stay hydrated on long hikes and backpacking trips. Read on for our full review.

Thinking of swapping your tent for a hammock on your next camping or backpacking trip? Or are you new to this whole camping thing and trying to decide which sleep setup is going to provide the ultimate backcountry experience? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Because choosing between hammock camping and tent camping is…nuanced? They’re just different, OK? And offer very different experiences. Fortunately, in the battle of tent vs hammock, there are distinct pros, cons and insider tips to help you choose the ultimate sleep setup for your next outdoor adventure and we’re gonna break ’em down to help you make the right decision for you.

If you’ve ever wanted to take a NOLS course (National Outdoor Leadership School) to learn new outdoor skills, become a more well-rounded outdoorist, or simply connect with fellow adventurers, now may be your chance! Because NOLS just re-launched their lightweight backpacking courses after a several year hiatus and they’re partnering with Hyperlite Mountain Gear to offer one lucky backpacker a full scholarship to experience a NOLS lightweight backpacking course! But act fast, because the application window for the Hyperlite scholarship closes on April 11, 2025. Need more info? Read on.

Ultralight backpacking gadgets are everywhere these days, constantly vying for your attention and begging you to spend on more innovative new gear that promises to make your time on the trail better! We love perusing pages of these items, dreaming of how we might use them all on our next adventure. But are they actually worth it? Especially for ultralight backpackers whose goal is to carry less? We put 10 ultralight backpacking gadgets we found on Garage Grown Gear, our favorite website for all things ultralight, to the test to see which ones are actually worth the weight, and which ones are a waste of space.

When I joined the outdoor brand Fjällräven for their Classic USA in Colorado last summer, I had no reason to believe I’d get the chance to do it again at any of their other 7 Classic events around the world. But when they announced a brand new 4-day backpacking route in Patagonia in Chile, I was thrilled to do it all again, this time in such a remarkable trekking destination. It was certainly different than the USA Classic, but one thing that remained the same: it’s a great event whether you’ve been backpacking for years or you’ve never been backpacking before ever. Think you might want to check out a Fjällräven Classic yourself? Here’s what I learned from backpacking with 200 of my closest friends. Twice.

One of the best parts of backpacking is arguably the end of the day when you’re done hiking, the ultralight tent or camping hammock is set up, and you’ve got nothing left to do but kick back, make dinner, and shove an unnatural amount of food down your gullet to replace all those calories you burned walking for miles with a heavy pack on your back. So when that time comes, you want the best camping cookware on hand, ready to rehydrate those backpacking meals. What makes a camp cookware set the best? Well, that depends on you and your style of backpacking, who you’re with, and what you plan to eat. So we tested a handful of ultralight cookware options to see which were tops and which are best suited for all different types of backpackers.

Are you a data nerd when it comes to tracking outdoor activities? Always have to know your mileage, elevation gain, heart rate? Searching for a GPS watch that can tell you all that and more that ALSO has a super impressive battery life? Me too, friends, me too. So allow me to introduce you to the Suunto Vertical, our favorite new GPS watch.

We’re all about backpacking here at Terradrift. Specifically ultralight backpacking. So we took a bunch of UL gear out on the Allegheny Trail in West Virginia in late spring conditions to see how light we could get our packs and how the gear performed. Here’s what we carried.