Despite the convenience of making packaged soup and/or coffee, there are several distinct drawbacks of the traditional backpacking stove. The first is the need for fuel canisters if your stove requires them. They’re terrible for the environment. And if you don’t need a canister, then you need white gas to continually feed the beast, which doubles down on the use of fossil fuels. Either way, the impact is real.
Patagonia recently released an answer to this backpack-stove problem. A gas-less version that runs on wood or pellets and retails for $99. It’s a three-piece, stainless steel design that allows backcountry enthusiasts to power the stove off twigs and bark. The design isn’t perfect of course: the flames will most likely darken your pots with black soot unless you get the coals dialed and it doesn’t sound as if they’re extremely fast (boiling a liter of water in 16 minutes). Plus they could be a fire hazard if inattentive campers happened to look away (be sure to set it up on stone). But it is an answer to the fossil-fuel sucking traditional stoves.
Find out more, here.
