2014 Favorite Pieces of Kit!

[ScottR]

Let's hear it, what has been your favorite piece of kit so far this season!

My favorite so far has been the Western Mountaineering Badger MF 15!

 

[RANGER619]

My Hilleberg Akto has been my favorite. It did a great job of holding out all the rain and eventually snow on my Colorado mule deer hunt.
Very impressed.

 

[25contender]

By far was the new BA Q-core insulated sleeping pad. No more sliding off and I had the best sleep in the high country in years!! Love it. Note it is harder to blow up at altitude but worth almost passing out while inflating!!

 

[Retterath]

My sol Ti jet boil, I used it a lot in ak this year and worked great.

 

[tttoadman]

It isn't really exciting, but I bought an old moonstone 800 fill bag. I have cut weight pretty good in the last couple years, but this has cut my volume considerably.

 

[Umpqua Hunter]

Our favorite new piece of gear this year are our Zebralight headlamps. My wife and I got the ZLH52w model. It has a spot beam for trail hiking and uses one (single) AA battery, so I now am carrying the same battery for my GPS and lights. A very well built light piece of equipment. We moved from using Energizer lithium batteries to Eneloop AA rechargeable batteries this year and so far it is going very well and saves some money. It is easy to change the intensity of the beam by simply clicking the single switch.

If you want to about double the high end intensity you can use a 14500 protected Li-ion rechargeable. An AA battery will give you 280 lumens on highest setting. With the 14500 battery you will get 500 lumens peak. This peak will last for one minute, after which time the headlamp will drop down to prevent overheating. That's a nice feature if you need to check the trail out ahead of you. Most of our hiking in the dark was done at the medium intensity setting.

http://www.zebralight.com/H52w-AA-Headlamp-Neutral-White_p_120.html