Nemo gear reviews

A backpacker overlooking the Colorado River on the Tonto Trail east of Bass Canyon, along the Gems Route in the Grand Canyon.

The Best Backpacking Gear of 2024

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By Michael Lanza

Utah’s High Uintas Wilderness, Montana’s Beartooths, and Colorado’s Weminuche. Glacier National Park and the Tetons. The Grand Canyon (repeatedly). The Canadian Rockies. Southern Utah’s Owl and Fish canyons. The Wind River Range. The John Muir Trail and Wonderland Trail. Iceland’s Laugavegur and Fimmvörðuháls trails. These are just some of the places where I’ve recently tested the backpacking gear and apparel that I’ve reviewed at The Big Outside—so that I can give you honest and thorough, field-tested opinions that help you find the best gear for your adventures.

And that’s exactly how I came up with the following picks for today’s best backpacking gear.

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Backpackers camped in the backcountry of Wyoming's Wind River Range.

The 10 Best Backpacking Tents of 2024

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By Michael Lanza

A good backpacking tent not only makes your trips more comfortable by keeping you warm and dry in foul weather—it’s critical safety gear and one of the heaviest and most expensive items you’ll carry. Those facts alone are motivation enough to find the right tent for your style of backpacking. But how do you choose from the many models out there, which come in a huge range of designs, weights, and prices? Whether you’re shopping for your first backpacking shelter or looking to replace an old one, this review will help make that choice easy for you.

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The Nemo Hornet Elite Osmo 1p ultralight tent in the Grand Canyon.

Review: Nemo Hornet Elite Osmo 1p Ultralight Tent

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Ultralight Solo Backpacking Tent
Nemo Hornet Elite Osmo 1p
$550, 1 lb. 7 oz./657g
backcountry.com

From the Grand Canyon’s Gems Route to Montana’s Beartooth Mountains, Nemo’s top-of-the-line Hornet Elite Osmo 1p solo ultralight tent withstood winds gusting to around 30 mph/48 kph and shrugged off light rain, while providing comfortable living space, excellent ventilation, and a tiny footprint that enables pitching it on the most improbably small patches of flat ground—all in a surprisingly compact package that weighs less than the low-cut hiking shoes I wore in the Beartooths.

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A backpacker at Evolution Lake on the John Muir Trail in Evolution Basin, Kings Canyon National Park.

The Best Backpacking Gear for the John Muir Trail

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By Michael Lanza

So you’re planning to thru-hike the John Muir Trail and making all of the necessary preparations, and now you’re wondering: What’s the best gear for a JMT hike? Having thru-hiked the JMT as well as taken numerous other backpacking trips all over the High Sierra—mostly between late August and late September, which I consider that the best time to walk the Sierra, to avoid snow and the voracious mosquitoes and blazing hot afternoons of mid-summer—I offer the following picks for the best ultralight and lightweight backpacking gear and apparel for a JMT thru-hike.

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Nemo Riff 30 Endless Promise sleeping bag.

Review: Nemo Riff 30 Endless Promise Sleeping Bag

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Sleeping Bag
Nemo Riff 30 Endless Promise
$360, 1 lb. 15 oz./879g (men’s regular)
Sizes: men’s and women’s regular and long
nemoequipment.com

Nemo’s Riff down sleeping bags have long carved out a unique space among high-end backpacking bags with their spoon shape and comfortable dimensions, as well as the zippered “thermo gills” on the chest area for adjusting the bag’s degree of warmth to vent on mild nights or batten down the hatches on chilly nights. Spending eight nights in the 2024 update, the Riff 30 Endless Promise, in Glacier National Park in September and in southern Utah in early October, I found that Nemo maintained or improved on the Riff’s exclusive features—while making the bags fully recyclable.

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