crackers

I've bought several thousand us dollars of stuff from T-P over the years (think avy gear for 15 people: probes, poles, pieps, shovel; literally.) and never had a problem with them.

Really? What is the story then? Did he come back after his first attempt? Were you there? My friend did freerider and then they worked on another route and then they left. The polish guy could have come back. Honestly, I wasn't there and I don't know. I've just seen the pictures my friends (two americans and a swede) took and talked to other people who were on the wall at the time. Please do tell. It's not my ego, I'm just curious.

This polish guy was below my friend cody who did freerider this fall. Apparently he onsighted almost all of the route, real smooth and powerful in like a day. He then got totally and completely shut down by the offwidth. Apparently, blood, screams and tears over many days. I heard that he just gave up after losing a pint of blood in the thing and swore he was never going back to yosemite. Cody has some funny ass pictures of the guy.

i do it at home about half the time. I basically do tabata that or one of the other workouts without real weights. I've been doing it for a couple of months now. I can't say what results from just doing it at home would be, but for the past month and a half, i've been crossfitting all by myself since our group is homeless right now. It works. Its definitely better with a bunch of folks with psyche, but doing tabata that is miserable enough that i'm sort of happy not to have anybody around...

If its for a course and its part of the 'recommended equipment', i'd look into the following: university rec clubs you might be able to rent from, buying a second hand pack, or finding something on super saver deal. As many here know, I make packs. I personally use a bozeman vintage astralplane ok for one of my big bags, the other is my prototype for my company in that size. The astralplane weighs about 9 pounds. The thing about packs that size is that you have to use stronger fabric, frame materials and then the weight balloons--especially for tall people. If you were going to use the pack a lot, I think the $600 you'd pay for a McHale would be well worth it in comparison to the $350 - 400 that you'll spend buying one off the rack, from gregory, osprey or whomever. The real thing is going to be how it fits you and how it feels when you sweat. YMMV, good luck.

5500+? That's huge. Are you going to use it alot? If you are, honestly, I'd recommend giving McHale a call and getting a custom pack made. It won't cost that much more than buying something off the rack, and you'll be much much happier I'm willing to bet. I have been thinking about making such a pack, but they're so damn big, i'm not sure how many people would be interested in buying them.

Thanks for the positive feedback. According to my model (turns to mirror: 'model? what model?'), I should be able to keep these prices going when i have more than just part time employees here in the states. Most of the cost is in the sewing for sure. It's crazy whenever I think about how we made them. For the first production run i think it took 15 or 16 days to make 200 bags, and my production manager has been making packs and gore tex jackets and anything else for over 15 years. In the same factory, with the same crew, we made 300 technical fleece 6 pocket jackets in 4 days.

Qualified? Shoot. I doubt I'm qualified to use them these days. Since I decided to make them, I got engaged, gained 23 pounds mostly of fat, and can't climb for crap. Now, I'm not saying I want to be north face, but i am definitely not going to be running a qualification camp to get to use these packs. But that would be funny, wouldn't it? What kind of test first? ?

I'd bet that Gabriel either works for schoeller or manufacturers stuff with it in close association with schoeller. I've been buying schoeller fabrics for about four years and that's by far the best explanation I've seen written down about the different fabrics. The only place I've gotten the CFM ratings for the different fabrics is directly from my rep in switzerland. Dynamic comes in Extreme (ie with Cordura) as well, and can be poly-cotton instead of just poly. I'd bet that your mammut WB400 jacket would be windproof up to the 50 mph range where you really want a hard shell.

tabata that. after lying in bed for three days, its all i can manage. ...or at least i'll get the rest of it puked out!

Yeah. I have a few hundred. Ok, so that's not that funny, but, hey, I'm still recovering from new years eve. My name is graham williams. I own cilogear and make those packs. In response to your questions, as far as I can: 1) Who has them? Well, for the past year, not many people; we're a new company. There are about 20 of them living in Montana, Wyoming and Colorado. There are another twenty or so around Salt Lake City. There are a handful in California and a bunch in the North East. People like Kelly Cordes and his ilk have been using them and if you know Kelly, I'm sure he'd be happy to tell you why he thinks they're great bags. 2) "Unapoletic technical design". Hmm. That's a bit harder. Here's a go: I looked at all the packs for climbers on the market and I wasn't too cycked on what I saw. I always ended up cutting off straps that were extraneous to my usage and wondering why the damn things were so heavy. I wanted total compression of the sides without zippers or velcro. I thought that different parts of a pack are exposed to different levels of abrasion and different loads, and should therefore have different strengths of material. Our goal in designing these packs wasn't to make something easy to manufacture, but to make something perfect to use. Or at least as close as possible. For example, the large worksack has 146 structural bar tacks. We use three different strengths of thread. I have told other folks in this industry this kind of detail and they want to puke: the average 60 liter pack has less than 20 bar tacks. Whenever I've talked to another company about their product, we get to the point where they're like, well, we had to make this change so we could make them or we had to make this change so we could market them to the whatever community. I haven't had to make those apologies yet. (and when i do, i'll change that tag line.) Does that make any sense? 3) Unfortunately, it is more or less true that we built these packs from available fabric. Each of the packs uses 7 different materials: a Schoeller Dynamic for the places where loads touch your body, two weights of spectra/hi tenacity nylon (210 in the side panels, 500 in the high abrasion points), a nylon ripstop for the extension and the liner, and three different weights of Dimension-Polyant's VX series cloth (VX51 on bottom, VX42 on the crampon pouch, and VX21 on the side wings). Beyond the obvious business sense of keeping low inventories, I honestly can't afford to order over 5,000 yards of material every time I want to make some bags. The minimum dye lot for the pack cloths--the spectra and the VX stuff--is 800 yards. Please keep in mind that a pack uses at most .27 yards of those particular fabric, and often much less. So i buy from the fabric manufacturer's stock programs, which are generally kinda slow and a bit unreliable. They much prefer to make 15,000 yards for Mr. Big than deal with my 1,500 yard order. Any other questions? I'm happy to answer them either on this forum or via email... cilogear at gmail.com is the best for email. BTW, if there is a Mr(s). Reviewer over here on CC, I'd be happy to supply a pack for them to test.