Backpacker subscription warning

If you haven’t checked your credit reports lately you might want to. It’s free (weekly) at the moment.

Backpacker magazine has deteriorated significantly over the last year. The equipment reviews have become very superficial and don’t compare like items with like. The Backpacker-branded links on Apple News go to “reviews” that are no more than rewrites of the manufacturers’ brochures (but to be fair, they say they are by “affiliates”, not the actual magazine).

I have a free subscription as a member of the California Wilderness Coalition, but wouldn’t subscribe to it otherwise.

I find Backpacker quality varies significantly from issue to issue.  I don’t know why, maybe there’s lots of staff turnaround.  Some issues I just browse quickly and discard, others have very good articles.

Also, look around, you can find subscriptions much cheaper than that.

Thanks for that heads-up.  I’ve been a subscriber for many years but have recently considered not renewing for the reasons others have mentioned:  less content, less informative content, and shameless promotion of special and delicate places.  Several years ago, one of the magazine covers depicted a tent pitched right beside one of the “cracked eggs” at Bisti Wilderness, not illegal but a disgusting breach of etiquette on their part and not a good way to educate people new to backpacking.

All subscription print media is suffering and will probably go away before too long.  Discouraging to see formerly reputable magazines resort to shady billing practices.

And you know that you don’t have to pay that disputed charge….

Got my money back quickly!

My mother-in-law gets me a subscription for my birthday every year.  Otherwise I wouldn’t touch it.  Backpacker has morphed from a niche publication catering to it’s audience into some sort of commercialized monstrosity.  They might as well just change to format to that of fashion magazines, where it is basically just a publication of advertisements.

I hope this  degradation of Backpacker’s quality doesn’t diminish the value of my collection of Backpacker’s first 4 years.  Maybe it will actually increase the value. I’m depending on it for my retirement fund.

(Yeah, this dates me.)

Eric, good luck!  Some time back I offered the local medical school library a perfect printed collection of  decades of a prominent medical journal. Their collection had missing and trashed volumes.  The library staff laughed at me!  As I walked out, they surely were saying “That was an Old Timer”.

My oldest daughter works for an auction house and tells me that people are constantly amazed that collections of National Geographic (where they have every issue from the past 40 years in pristine condition) aren’t worth anything.

She doesn’t laugh, but I’m sure there are plenty of eye-rolls.