I took the foretrex back today. The guy at the store was cool and didn’t give me any guff. I spent the next hour looking over their selection of daypacks and other small backpacks. I really want one. Really. The problem is that I currently have, sort of, two packs. One is a really small canvas pack I got six years ago as schwag at a librarian’s convention in chicago. It’s maroon and says “Endeavor Information Systems” on it, and can carry water and food for one person for a day, maybe. It has no support in it at all. My other pack is identified only as “Sojourner” on a label stitched onto the back. The fastener on one of the shoulder straps is broken, and the lower portion of the strap was tied to the upper portion by my brother when he borrowed it for a trip to New Mexico. It’s got a couple of polyethylene stays and a thick backpad and hip belt. It was probably made in China and I picked it up at some random gear store for maybe $50 about 5 years ago.
It’s pretty ugly, with useless straps and ice tool hooks hanging off of it, some of them broken. It’s an old-style clamshell pack, rather than a top-loader, and has small elastic bottle-holders on each side that don’t fit my water bottle. It’s terminally uncool, and I lust after a newer pack, ideally a Marmot Eiger 25 or Gregory G-Pack, which is on sale for $119.
The only problem with all of this is that I’m fairly broke, and although I could, if it were really necessary, lay down $90-$120 for a pack, the fact of the matter is that my hiking pack, while uncool and in many ways inconvenient, is a pretty comfortable pack to carry a lot of crap around in, and I’m hard core enough that the little pack doesn’t bother me at all when I’m carrying only a couple quarts of water, phone, camera, shirt, and food.
So I will not buy a new pack. Right now.
