Ryan Stuart, explore's gear editor

Gear guide testing, testing, testing

• Posted on February 3, 2010 at 1:16 PM
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Paul LaPerriere boils a cup of coffee in the roomy vestibule of a new Kelty tent.

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A tent is sitting on my lawn catching the downpour. Ten pairs of trail runners are covered in mud. Catalogues and fact sheets litter my office. And I’m scrambling to gather gear from testers. This time of year is always the same around my house. It’s Gear Guide season.

For the last three months I’ve been testing the latest hiking boots and shoes, packs, sleeping bags, tents and trail runners for explore’s May gear guide. Now its crunch time – I’ve got to collect all the feedback from testers, my own thoughts and marketing speak into coherent and meaningful reviews. It’s a process that I’m getting better and faster at, but it’s time consuming and messy. My gear room is a disaster.

And my friends are sick of my calls. Every time someone says they’re heading out to do some kind of adventure I’m pawning off gear. When they get back I’m quizzing them on tent set up, pack performance and waterproofness of shoes.

That goes for me too. Last week I was teaching an avalanche course/winter camping course for students of Section 8 Snowsport Institute, a Vancouver Island based ski instructor and leader training program. I took the opportunity to test a few packs, sleeping bags and a tent on some of the instructors. Check out the picture of our snowy camp. We had all kinds of conditions – wind, rain, snow and the sun even thought about poking through for a second or two.

The tent in the picture is Kelty's Gunnison Pro 2.1, a solid three-plus season tent with lots of room.

And now I’ve got to get back to writing reviews.