The Outdoor Retailer Show is a twice-yearly convention focused on the outdoor store near you - your local outdoor retailer. It's a huge gathering where gear manufacturers pay big bucks to showcase their latest and greatest gear (in this case for spring 2010) to outdoor retailers and hopefully rake in lots of orders. It's also a great opportunity for the media (like yours truly) to prowl around and find out what's in the pipeline.
Outdoor Retailer comes a little earlier starting this summer - July 20-24 to be exact - and Backpacking Light will be there to report on gear of interest to lightweight backpackers. Our coverage will start with Open Air Demo on Monday, July 20, 2009 at Pineview Reservoir near Snowbasin. There will be lots of small booths there, where manufacturers will hawk their newest innovations, in hopes of luring us to their big booths at the main Show. But the biggest draw of Open Air Demo is the opportunity to actually try out the new gear. It's mainly about watercraft, and lots of them... which is why it's located on a reservoir! We get to demo lots of different boats and decide (for example) which Kevlar canoe we like best. Tough job!
ARTICLE OUTLINE
Overview of ORSM planned coverage, 2009.# WORDS: 720
# PHOTOS: 6
Member Exclusive
A Premium or Unlimited Membership* is required to view the rest of this article.
* A Basic Membership is required to view Member Q&A events
Discussion
Become a member to post in the forums.
Companion forum thread to:
Coming Soon – Backpacking Light Coverage of the Summer 2009 Outdoor Retailer Show (Outdoor Retailer Summer Market 2009)
If you have time I would appreciate it if you could check out C.A.M.P. USA's booth.
Photos and lots of them please :)
If someone (as me) can´t wait
Here you can find some (very good) info
http://lighthiker.wordpress.com/
Wow…how is the new Vaude Scutum Ultralight so light? A doublewall, 2 person tent with aluminum poles and a 10,000mm floor for just 37oz??? Unreal….how did they save all that weight.
As usual, the primary ways of dropping weight are to use less fabric and/or user lighter fabric.
In this case they've used 20D fabric instead of 30D fabric, and less of it too. Single door, one vestibule. No doubt the usable space is quite limited inside.
Will be interesting to see some detailed reports from BPL on just how much space there is inside. It's nice to see some more double skin light weight tents.
[EDITED typo… I meant quite limited, not quite a bit!]
I keep seeing comments about the spacious inside of the Scutum, but if I read the floor chart correctly it looks that in the middle (irregular floor shape) is as narrow as the MSR CR2 (40") or even an inch or so narrower. For a double wall shelter 1 kg is very impressive for even a single but it does not look that much like a standard double to me.
Franco
Both the MSR Carbon Reflex 2 and the Scutum use 20D fabrics, have a 10,000mm floor, single door and minimal interior room. I guess the Vaude does only have one vestibule, but the Carbon Reflex uses Carbon Fibre poles, so it's impressive the Scutum comes in so much lighter. It'll be interesting to see if it weighs as little as claimed. The Scutum is almost a pound lighter….
If it is using the same fabric weight, then there are only two places to really save weight. Firstly, use less fabric. This usually means the tent is less roomy (no surprise there). Secondly, use shorter poles. Clearly they're only using one pole here so are saving weight there. But I suspect that only accounts for half a pound at most (compared to the Reflex CF poles). The rest probably comes from less fabric / smaller dimensions.
One other possibility is that the inner fabric is lighter than noseeum mesh, but I doubt it.
While we still waiting for backpackinlight coverage here we can find some advances to 2010 products
Here there is some updates about the European OutDoor trade show including news about petzl (headlamps) scarpa, osprey gregory an podsacs
http://www.outdoorsmagic.com/
And a new update about packs here
http://lighthiker.wordpress.com/
;-)
Become a member to post in the forums.