Nimbus Ozone or Quest

I can only speak to the Nimbus Ozone, which I have and love. I bought it sight unseen 5 years ago for a thru-hike of the JMT and it's still my favorite pack (it even withstood a 4-day climbing trip last summer and didn't get shredded). I'm not a fan of the GoLite packs, but I know others who rave about them. I need more hip and shoulder padding than they provide, and I like a stiffer frame than the GoLite's I've tried on — that being said, I have NOT tried a Quest, so I can't speak to the padding or frame.

The reason I ended up with the Nimbus Ozone was that Granite Gear seemed to be one of the very few manufacturers that were making packs for the "working-on-being-a-lightweight" backpacker. Again, this was 5 years ago and all I could find were the heavy packs or the UL packs that couldn't handle anything above 30lbs and had no padding. Most of my backpacking trips are 7+ days, so I need a pack that can handle 35-40lbs comfortably.

I ordered directly from GG and they put on women-specific shoulder straps and hip belt, which was a huge selling point for me. Most lightweight packs either aren't adjustable or aren't made for women. Though, you don't have to worry about that! ;-)

I had a pretty specific list of features I wanted, so that helped narrow down the list of potential packs. The only thing that took a little getting used to was the absense of the top pocket. I later bought GG's "Lid", but was not impressed by it, so I don't use it. Does one or the other pack have more of the features you want? Beyond that, if you have the $$ and time, you could buy both, see which one fits, and return the other. They're both good companies, so just going on that, my guess is the quality of both would be similar, if not guaranteed.