Backpacks & Day Packs

Basic Anatomy of a Backpack

Despite the abundance of backpacking-specific terms and jargon, a backpack is a fairly utilitarian piece of gear—it’s designed to carry everything you need for a day, night, or even weeks in the woods. If you’re getting tripped up by complicated product descriptions and ever-evolving features, realize almost all backpacks share the same foundational parts. With this in mind, here’s the basic anatomy of a backpack.

How to Pack a Backpack

Backpacks come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and configurations—after all, the needs of a weekend warrior heading out for a quick overnight are different from a thru-hiker hitting the trail for a few months. Despite…

How to Choose a Backpacking Pack

Backpacking packs generally have larger capacities and more robust suspensions in comparison to daypacks. These bigger packs are designed to carry the larger amounts of gear (40+ liters) required for overnights or multiple-day adventures. They also…

How to Choose a Travel Pack

Blending the comfort of a hiking backpack with the travel-friendly features of traditional luggage, travel packs provide everything today’s globetrotters and adventurers need for relaxed, easy, and organized travel, no matter if it’s a weekend away…

How to Choose a Hydration Pack

Hydration packs are designed to keep you well-supplied with fluids while hiking, biking, running, or wandering. Hydration packs are available with a wide variety of features. For our purposes, we’ll organize them into three categories. hydration…

What Size Backpack Do You Need?

When choosing a backpack, whether it’s for day hikes, extended trips or somewhere in between, it can be difficult to know what size you need. To make matters more confusing, different backpack manufacturers use differing methods…

How to Choose a Daypack

The daypack is tasked with carrying all of the essential gear for a day outside, making it a smaller cousin to the classic backpacking pack. Whether you’re heading out for a quick hike, an all-day epic,…