Blog post -
Media Coverage from Outside: The Gear That Backpacker’s Editors Loved in March 2024
A backpacking stove made for gourmet meals, a pair of perfect spring layers, and a trail toy to share with your best friend: Here's the gear that elevated our outdoor experience this month.
Spring looks different depending on where you live. Where we live, this year’s has been defined by the snow so far. In Vermont, Colorado, and California, we’ve been hiking and skiing it; on an early-spring trip to Florida, we escaped it. The best gear for spring can handle those swings in temperature and precip no, shedding slush and helping you vent heat during hard efforts. These are the five pieces of gear we coveted this month as we navigated the snow-yo.
Primus Essential Stove Set 1.3L—$120
When our guides handed me the Primus Essential at the Swedish Fjällräven Classic last summer, I was puzzled. This was the stove they expected me to carry? It was huge: The nearly 8-inch-wide burner nestled into a pot of the same size, with an anodized aluminum frying pan serving as the lid. But after using it for a few days, I saw the appeal. Yes, at more than a pound and a half, it’s a lot weightier than a Pocket Rocket. (Pro tip: Ditch one of the two pots unless you’re planning a feast.) But it was also incredibly stable and easy to use even when my fingers were wet or cold, with the pot sitting firmly on the wide base. While it boiled a liter of water in a respectable four-and-a-half minutes, its best use case is for trips where you know you’ll be doing more than just rehydrating: It was more than up to the challenge of frying up chickpea pancakes with tomato-and-eggplant sauce on the last day of our trip, which is tricky to do when you’re balancing a pan on top of a compact canister stove’s supports. The downside? The Essential Stove isn’t easy to get in the U.S., I finally managed this month to find one on Amazon. You can also opt for the similar PrimeTech Stove Set ($200), which swaps the frying pan for a plastic strainer lid and the natural finish on the pots for anodized aluminum. —AR
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