Who writes this

Jean-Benoit Buisson

One person writes every page here and signs it. This one gives the name, sets out how a judgment is arrived at, and — quite as importantly — what he is not.

Where this site starts

This site starts from the emptiest number in the whole trade: a weight printed without saying what it includes. Tent makers publish two — packed weight, which counts the pegs, the guylines and the stuff sack, and trail weight, which counts only what is needed to stand the tent up — and the gap between them runs to several hundred grams. A listing prints one of them, unlabelled, and lining one maker's trail weight up against another's packed weight is the commonest error in the category. Once you notice it, the pattern is everywhere. A hydrostatic head quoted for the flysheet with nothing said about the groundsheet, which is the half a knee on a wet pitch actually loads. A peak lumen figure with no runtime beside it. A peak watt figure that was measured on a bench under standard test conditions. A season name where a comfort rating belongs. Nearly every page you find while looking for an answer has the same shape: a ranked list, a score out of ten, an affiliate button, and not one figure you can check against a specification sheet.

There is a second problem, and it is worse because it is settled before the bag is even opened. This gear is bought on photographs and returned on compatibility. A pole splint built around 8.5 mm (0.33 in) that will not slide over an 11 mm (0.43 in) pole. A repair tape for polyurethane-coated fabric bought for a silicone-coated flysheet, which rejects it. A footprint cut larger than the tent floor, so it collects rain and channels it underneath — the exact opposite of the job. A pot that will not swallow its own burner and canister, and so costs more pack volume than the grams it saved. A rectangular liner inside a mummy bag. None of that is on the front of the packaging, and all of it decides whether the thing works at all.

So this is the page that was missing. This site reads what manufacturers publish, verifies every product reference market by market, writes down the figure that decides — which weight is being quoted, which standard is named beside a temperature, which outer diameter, which micron rating, which runtime at which setting — and says plainly when a figure is not published at all. That last part carries more weight than it sounds: most of the disappointment in this subject comes from a number nobody printed, or from one printed without the condition that makes it mean something.

Behind the site are notes — the honest specification of each family, the place where the manual contradicts the sales page, which peg suits which ground, what a filter cartridge is actually rated to in liters, and the buying mistake each category invites. This site is those notes, put in order, in five languages, because the same question is asked in French, German, Spanish and Italian and gets a far worse answer in four of them.

I am not a mountain guide, an instructor or an equipment engineer, and I do not pretend to be. What I can do is read carefully, compare honestly, report every manufacturer figure with its unit and its source, and tell you which figure the maker left out.

The catalog, as it stands

This list is generated from the catalog itself, entry by entry, each one linking to its own page; when a family or a product is added or dropped, the list follows without anyone retyping it. What it records is what is written about here — not a shelf of kit in my own hallway.

What I care about

Three of them, and they run through every page on this site. The figure that gets printed is rarely the figure that decides — a tent sold on a weight that leaves the pegs out rather than on the hydrostatic head of its groundsheet, a sleeping bag sold on a season name rather than on the comfort rating and the standard beside it, a headlamp sold on peak lumens rather than on the runtime at the setting you will actually walk on, a camp chair sold on packed weight rather than on the seat height that decides whether you can stand up again. A decade of ownership settles the choice more often than the shelf price does — a filter cartridge is a running cost measured in liters, shock cord and ferrules are wear parts, tip baskets are consumables, a flask usually outlives its first gasket, and a sealed battery in a lantern makes the whole lamp disposable when the cells age. And what settles it in the end is usually nowhere on the specification sheet: whether the thing can be dried, repaired and repacked, because a hydration bladder whose opening will not turn back on itself to dry, and a pole whose ferrule size nobody stocks, both get thrown away long before they wear out.

What I am not

I am not a mountain guide, an outdoor instructor, an equipment engineer or a designer. I hold no qualification in any of them, I have never worked for a manufacturer or for a retailer, and nothing here rests on any professional title. This site describes a product — its dimensions, its stated weights, its published specifications — and stops there. In particular, every weight, dimension, hydrostatic head, R-value, temperature rating, micron rating, flow rate, lumen figure, runtime and stated load figure on this site is reported from the manufacturer with its unit written as published and its source named, and never derived by me. Where a maker states a trail weight, an R-value or a comfort rating, I report that the maker states it, with the standard it names beside it — I am not a testing laboratory, and no product here is described as warmer, lighter or tougher than another on the strength of a specification alone.

And this site is emphatically not a field manual. For anything that carries a flame, holds pressure, or is relied on for warmth, light or water, it points at the maker's instructions and at the rules of the site and the country you are in rather than paraphrasing them. It repeats two statements rather than assuming them. A sleeping bag's comfort and limit ratings are laboratory values, obtained under EN 13537 or ISO 23537 where the maker names that standard and measured on a heated mannequin rather than on people; they are an indication and not a promise about any particular night, and no page here gives advice on cold injury or hypothermia. And a water filter is described here by the micron rating, flow rate and cartridge life its maker declares, and is never presented as making water safe to drink: potability is a matter for the manufacturer's instructions and for the local authorities where you fill. If a page here touches a rule, it describes it and points to the authority or the manual that publishes it, and goes no further.

Nothing on these pages expects to be believed because of the name at the top of it. Whatever a judgment rests on is written into the page that carries the judgment, and the longer account of how a verdict here is put together is set out separately.

How I work

Every figure names its source: a manufacturer specification, a manual, a declared rating, a named standard, or the balance of long-term owner reports.
No price, no product reference and no specification is ever made up. Where a maker has published no figure, the field stays empty and the page says that the figure is missing.
Every product reference is confirmed against Amazon, market by market, before a page goes out. Where a model has no offer in that store, the link takes you to a search on your own store rather than to a product page that is not there.
Where the cheap option wins, the page says the cheap option wins — and where the honest answer is repairing, repacking or simply pitching differently the kit you already own rather than buying something, it says that instead.
No page here is written to sell a headline figure. Nothing is arranged around the biggest number printed on a box — the lowest weight, the highest lumen count — and where one generation barely differs from the last, the page says as much.

Why any of this was written

Because this equipment is sold on photographs and on the wrong numbers, to people who will carry the result on their back. A weight is printed where a weight and a list of what it includes belong. A season name is printed where a comfort rating and its standard belong. A peak lumen figure is printed where a runtime belongs. And the parts treated as afterthoughts — the pegs a tent maker supplies as cheaply as it can, the tired shock cord inside an old pole, the backflush syringe, the spare lid gasket a flask outlives — are usually what decides whether the expensive thing is any use at all.

Part of all this has nothing to do with buying at all. If one sentence on the site is worth more than the rest, it is that a declared figure is a description, not a guarantee. Writing it the other way round sells more gear and leaves a reader disappointed by a purchase that did exactly what it promised. Plenty of what improves a night out costs nothing at all: retensioning a silnylon tarp after rain instead of concluding it was badly cut, putting the closed-cell foam mat you already own under the inflatable one, since R-values add up, backflushing a filter cartridge as its maker instructs rather than replacing it, drying a bladder open instead of buying another one, and adding four steel nail pegs for the corners rather than a new tent. Those things are free and almost never written down. That is the subject a page full of new gear is guaranteed to skip. It is not skipped here.

Correcting me

Anything wrong on these pages — say so, and it gets corrected, with the correction dated where it sits. Write to [email protected].

Jean-Benoit Buisson · TrailVerdict · Paris, France