Mountain Hardwear South Col

I bought this South Col pack after a friend recommended it - and I needed something smaller than my full-size expedition packs for the up-coming Liberty Ridge climb.

I stuffed about seventy-three pounds of rope, climbing gear and weights into it for a stair-climbing session. I liked that the suspension strap was on the outside of the main compartment, instead of the inside. I frequently tend to forget about it until I'm closing up the pack, and then I have to dig it out - usually with quite a bit of effort; so, the external suspension strap fixes that inconvenience.

The hip pads are nice, although not quite as thick as those on the Osprey Argon.

The cinch mechanism things on the shoulder straps are otherwise normal, but they're rather small. This means that I can't get much leverage on them when I want to loosen them, which means its impossible to loosen the shoulder straps without adjusting my weight to relax the shoulder strap. On the other hand, I guess this means that it won't be accidentally loosening like the Osprey does from time to time.

And then there's the fact that it weighs something around four pounds vs the eight pounds for the Osprey. But that Osprey is so very comfortable. And quite a bit larger.

On Saturday I'm taking the South Col to Rainier. We'll see how it holds up....