CiloGear National Team Member David Gottlieb climbed Pangbuk Ri in a 50 hour push with his partner Chad Kellogg a few days ago using his W/NW Dyneema 45L WorkSack. After all the Twitter excitement (Outdoor Research was “anxiously awaiting” news from the climbing team), we were stoked to read Chad’s excellent account on the OR Verticulture website.
We’re calling it a PFA, as in Probable First Ascent… 
Have a great weekend!
CiloGear’s new 30:30 WorkSack is perhaps the most amazingly awesome alpine climbing backpack of all time. Well, ok, that’s ridiculous. Especially for a brand new product. With a funny name. Right now, people are having a hard time deciding between the 30:30 on one hand and the 30L and the 45L on the other hand.
So here is one short video to help you decide between them, and one really long video to show off the usage case on the new pack.
What’s the deal with CiloGear’s W/NW WorkSacks? What’s the difference between W/NW and NWD? Well, that’s going to take a few days to get explained in full, what with pictures and stuff, but here’s a brief summary.
First, let’s discuss the NWD materials. CiloGear started making our WorkSacks out of Non Woven Dyneema about five years ago. We were initially attracted to using the Non Woven Dyneema fabric because of its incredible tear strength and very light weight. We use a strand oriented dual axis material. The Dyneema fibers are individually laid down along the -45, 0, 45, and 90 degree axes. This fiber orientation gives the material the characteristic double x that can be seen when the material is held up to the light. Our standard (currently available only in the classic white translucent color) NWD material weighs just under 80 grams per square meter with a tear strength over 100 kg. In comparison, 1000d Cordura weighs 480 g/sm with less than a 30 kg tear strength. This incredible strength allows CiloGear to make extremely light packs that are extremely durable. Sure, we can make a lighter pack out of 70d SilNylon or even 140d SilNylon, but those materials just don’t survive the alpine environment as pack bag material. In our testing, we found that we needed slightly more abrasion resistance in some parts of the pack. For these high abrasion areas, we created a NWD laminate with the same weight and type of Non Woven Dyneema as the liner, but with a scrim of 200d Dacron Oxford cloth as the face fabric. Dacron has excellent abrasion strength but poor tear strength. As we are only interested in the abrasion resistance, this Dacron NWD fabric works very well for us.
On the bottom of both the NWD and the W/NW Dyneema WorkSacks, CiloGear uses a X-Pac Dyneema fabric. To ensure superior load carrying characteristics, we use a very stiff 400d x 600d Dyneema Ripstop. The Dyneema is blended with Polyester, but retains excellent tear and abrasion strength. The X-Pac delivers better load carrying as the hard nature of the fabric and the resilience of the X-Pac keeps loads under control. This X-Pac material is also used in the shoulder straps and hipbelt to better disperse the load.
Now, the W/NW Dyneema WorkSacks. W/NW means Woven / Non Woven Dyneema. It combines our Non Woven Dyneema fabric with Woven Dyneema fabric for the ultimate pack material. Light, incredibly abrasion resistant and ridiculously strong.
CiloGear crafts our W/NW Dyneema WorkSacks from a custom made laminate. We designed the W/NW Dyneema fabric based on five years experience testing these fabrics, making packs out of the craziest materials and then sending the packs on the hardest climbs in the world. In this process, we learned many things about Dyneema fabrics and their strengths and limitations. The face fabric is a 375d fabric woven Dyneema fiber. In our experience, this weight and construction is pretty much ideal for the alpine environment. The face fabric endures abrasion better than Ballistics Corduras, yet weighs 1/5 as much.
In our experience with over 25 different types of Dyneema fabric, we learned that conventional coatings that waterproof fabrics can not match the durability of the fabric made from Dyneema fiber. Furthermore, while conventional coatings add significant amounts of weight, they do not add strength. Our new W/NW fabric bonds our NonWoven Dyneema fabric to this 375d woven fabric. This new material combines the total waterproof nature and incredible tear strength of our NonWoven Dyneema fabric with the incredible abrasion resistance of the woven Dyneema fibers.
While we’ve got some other stuff to post to entertain you this Friday while you’re thinking of getting out of town, I thought we’d start by making a request of you. What do you want us to cover with our short movies? Any ideas? Email us! cilogear at gmail dot com works great, especially with the subject line Make This Movie!
It’s Friday. On the East Coast, folks have eaten lunch. It would be nap time in some places. And on a summer Friday, well, here at CiloGear we might find our minds wandering as well. It should be nap time, or climbing time…yet you have to stay at your desk.
CiloGear would like to provide you with some interesting things to do or think about for the rest of today.
First off, if you like reading books, CiloGear strongly recommends the travelogues of Patrick Leigh Fermor. He died recently, and you can read his obituary in the Economist to get a sense of the guy. He wasn’t a climber, but he had climber spirit. You can tell he wasn’t a climber because he wrote better than we do.
Speaking of well written, we rarely see any well written blogs from guides. There are a couple of guide services that maintain active blogs that are interesting and worth checking out including those of the American Alpine Institute, Mountain Trip and NorthWest Mountain School. However, the best guide service blog I know of is definitely that of Eli Helmuth’s climbinglife.com. The whole site is worth checking out, and there is some fun stuff on it — that Eli highly recommends the 45L WorkSack calling it “very comfortable” and “an excellent value” has nothing to do with our thoughts on his website. Guides tend to be educated folks, and they tend to be literate, but I think they don’t bother blogging because they don’t think anybody pays any attention to their stuff or cares about their thoughts.
So today, check out Kurt Hicks’ blog and comment on his stuff. Kurt is a long time CiloGear user who trashes packs after using them for a few hundred days in a row, allegedly hauling them, and then complaining that after 450 days or something of constant abuse there seems to be a hole in it. We were talking recently about CiloGear Propaganda Films and our new “Hey You! What’s in Your Pack” series. So Kurt wrote up what he uses for one type of climbing that he does calling it “A Guide’s Pack: Alpine Ice”
Remember: Kurt wasn’t too confident that anybody would actually read his blog post about this. So if you want him to do it again, if you found it useful, COMMENT ON HIS BLOG!
Besides, what would you be doing otherwise? Working? On a Friday afternoon?
One of the continual tasks here at CiloGear is to figure out how to explain the versatility of the WorkSacks. Sure, you folks who own one know that it slices, it dices, it carries huge loads, but how to I explain it to a new customer or potential customer. I think they’re very easy to use. And I’m continually learning new ways to use the packs from customers who report their novel usage tactics. At first, I tried to create a huge big exhaustive manual. I never had the time to update it or to get it just right, and customers often did major work on it. I arrived at the conclusion that the best thing to do is to get somebody to actually play with it and see what they come up with that works for their usage, body and plans.
The article of the week speaks on this issue of getting folks to play and discover things. Now You Know, printed in this week’s Economist, talks about some interesting results with toddlers.
“The researchers’ conclusion was that, in the context of strange toys of unknown function, prior explanation does, indeed, inhibit exploration and discovery. Generalising from that would be ambitious.”
Well, I’m nothing if not ambitious! I know it’s too frustrating for many people to come up with a whole system of how to use a backpack. They see the bag as an end rather than as part of the process that makes the adventure worth it. So I have to give some guidance. On the other hand, CiloGear simply does not have the time or the ability to exhaustively document every worthwhile adaptation of a WorkSack. I feel that we need to give an good introduction to your new toy, but not so much that I slow your experimentation and development of your own processes.
How much is too much? How much is too little? I’m trying to develop an answer to those questions with the 5 Minute Movies. I’ll keep making more of the 5 Minute Movies and we’re always on the lookout for new topics in which folks express interest or curiosity.
Folks have asked if CiloGear makes stuff for military users. The answer is both not really and yes.
Since the answer is not really, I’m loath to say we do something that we don’t. Then again, since the answer is yes, I’ve got to say that we make some stuff for some military kind of customers.
Like whomever it is in the first picture on the summit ridge of Denali about a week and a half ago. That’s a pretty familiar looking pack. It kinda looks like a CiloGear 75L WorkSack, doesn’t it? Funny color though…
Well, since the cat is out of the bag, here’s one we just finished on the right hand side…Out of the box, these packs are noisy and loud and bright and tear proof and light and comfortable. After a week of use, the thing will be quiet. It will be matte. It will have a very nice signature, or so I’m told…
We’re doing a new series of short films called Hey you! What’s in Your Pack? Basically, we’re going to ask folks to describe what they put in their pack for a particular climb or activity and how they set it up.
Here’s the first one since it became a series:
Hey Kyle Dempster, What’s in your Pack? from CiloGear on Vimeo.
Kyle Dempster. Alpine Silverback. Funny Guy. CiloGear National Team Member…
Watch him discuss what ‘goes into’ his CiloGear NWD packs and why he loves them…
Kyle Dempster talks about the CiloGear NWD WorkSacks from CiloGear on Vimeo.
