Year: 2021

During a recent sale, I grabbed the Mystery Ranch Scree 32 bag to use as my emergency bag I keep in my house. I’ve been looking for something in the 30L range, that would be comfortable to wear, not very tactical looking, and was inexpensive to buy. This checked all those boxes, and while I have not used it a ton (emergency bag after all) I thought it was interesting enough to touch base on quickly.

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There’s nothing about this light, on the surface of it, that is compelling. It’s big and kind of ugly looking. But, then you take a closer look and realize that for about $40 you get a light, with a battery and a built in charger.

Oh, and actually it’s three lights in one.

It’s still kind of silly, but the value proposition is getting better and better. The WK30 is a UV/Deep Red/White light all in one package, and it’s actually not that tricky to use it. For the price, this is one hell of a gateway into the flashlight world for a lot of people.

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I like to keep flashlights in handy spots, it’s makes them, handy. But the times you need a flashlight tend to be when things are already very dark, which can present issues finding the flashlight. There’s various methods you can take to avoid this: auxiliary LEDs on a light for a low-drain option to find it; glow in the dark materials to help locate; or something like tritium.

Tritium, is awesome for this use, and I snagged a Glow Rhino Tritium Fob (which they are still selling even given the Tritium shortages right now), and have been keeping it on my emergency-by-the-door-light. I love it.

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When I started to settle on wanting to take the Mystery Ranch ASAP to the office everyday, I also started looking at laptop sleeves I could use to house my iPad Pros safely inside the bag. The Aer Tech Folio was one I kept looking at, but passing on because of the price and what I perceived as redundant nature of the storage didn’t seem like a good fit.

But I picked one up from the buy/sell/trade of my Member Discord and have quickly taken to this folio. It’s really smartly put together, and although it can be quite bulky, it does its job very well.

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When you start carrying more than just a knife on a daily basis, you find that you will need some method for organizing — so adding a pen and flashlight to my daily carry meant that things were becoming overloaded in my pocket. I need an organizer because this is Houston and there’s not many days of ‘jacket weather’ here where I can easily add pockets to my wardrobe.

I already talked about the Ripcord and Ripcord Mini — both of which are excellent, so today I want to talk about Yellow Birch Outfitter’s PocKit Modern Carry (shown in black on this article) and PocKit PICO Custom (shown below in coyote).

These are both very well made carry organizers, but their bulk works against them for me.

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I thought I cracked it — finally a fantastic everyday bag for the office. Something that blended in, organized well, carried what I needed, didn’t feel too bulky on my body, and most importantly was comfortable to wear. These bars are not high, as I park in a parking garage and simply take two elevators up to my office, but as it turns out — the little things always blow up many of the bags I tested.

That’s the story here: so very close to good, but at the end of the day the DSPTCH Daypack failed itself.

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The Micro Soft Shell is the second smallest of the wallets Slimfold offers, with the Nano being the smallest. If this wallet sounds familiar, I reviewed the original Tyvek version here where I ended up switching away. Recently some members of the Discord got this wallet and it looked good in the soft shell material so I figured I’d give it a go.

I’m a big fan of it, and despite my worries about the added bulk from the soft shell material, I actually find it to be really nice overall and much better than the Tyvek variant.

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Before getting this sling, I felt pretty confident that my sling setup was really comfortable and maybe even ‘set’. But this sling changed that, after what was an instant buy. The Forager line is not new for Mystery Ranch, but they previously were Asian-market-only, and you could find these slings on eBay and places like that for about $130 or so. Not cheap, not worth it. (The US market got the Forager pocket, which attaches to a hip belt and while nice looking, not that cool for those of us who loathe a hip belt.)

Now Mystery Ranch sells them to the US market for $32. What a deal!

And it is stellar, my favorite sling yet.

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Hyperlite Mountain Gear’s Versa is one of those sling bags you don’t expect to be any good, and you question because it seems much cheaper than you would expect for a bag made of Dyneema. At $70, it always seemed like a head scratcher: must not be good type of pricing.

I bought mine second hand for a heck of a deal and after using it for some time now, it has proven that it is a value even at the $70 full retail price tag. It is very light, and yet, incredibly versatile.

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I have now spent a lot of time testing out various models of Mystery Ranch backpacks (mostly the tri-zip models) and so I thought I would do a quick comparison of how you might think about which is right for you. Here you go, hope it helps someone:

UA21, ASAP, 2 Day Assault, 3 Day Assault CL

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Over on WIRED, Matt Jancer has an article titled: “The Best Hiking Gear (2021): Backpacks, Boxer Briefs, and More”. This article is not good. There’s so much advice for buying gear in here without any consideration given to what would actually be helpful for people who are looking at this type of guide.

I love hiking and being outdoors and I think everyone benefits from doing it. I also love gear and telling you what is the best, but I also think we need to caveat that. We need to focus on who the target audience is.

Don’t take my word for it, here’s how Jancer starts his article:

If you’ve never done it before, figuring out what to bring might seem like a daunting task, but it’s easier than you might think to stay dry, warm, hydrated, and safe. We have everything you need here.

His target: people who have ‘never done it before’. Ok then: the basics. Not a list for advanced people (which is good, because it’s shit for them too). This is everything you need, and just before that he talked about how it’s not expensive to get going with hiking, good stuff!

His list comes out to $1,024 — so cheap and easy to get started with!

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I’ve talked about the Mystery Ranch Urban Assault 21 before (a couple of times) — I love the bag. But there’s two other offerings of this bag: the Urban Assault 24 (which I don’t like the look and design of so I won’t try) and the Urban Assault 18. The 18 is the same as the 21, cut down in size to fit a smaller frame.

Mystery Ranch achieves this by only slightly trimming the width and depth of the bag, and wisely trimming the height from 20.25” in the Urban Assault 21, to 18.5” in the Urban Assault 18. The end result is a bag which has almost the same capacity and dimensions of the 21L, but is shorter to help fit shorter frames. I bought two of these, one for each of my daughters. They love them, even if they are still a little large on them.

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How do you keep a flashlight and knife in your pocket without everything lumping at the bottom of your pocket and scratching everything? You get a pocket organizer, and specifically you get these pocket organizers from ArcCompanyUSA on Etsy.

I love them, I have two Ripcords as they are perfection for my gear and have made carrying all this stuff simple and easy. What I love about both is that they are a single layer of finished Cordura on each side with good stitching to boot. I suspect this is 1000D Cordura but they come in many colors so I can’t comment on every color. You don’t need to read this review, you just need to buy one of each size: standard and mini.

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