By Suzanne
The first pack that I ever bought when I started seriously hiking about five years ago was a Camelbak. I found it locally, liked that it came with a water bladder, and it fit within my poor college student budget. Well, I’ve grown up, but my taste in packs is still with Camelbak, especially with their CamelBak® Fourteener, which they sent me to review. The improvements in the basic overall design of the CamelBak® Fourteener versus my old Camelbak are really noticeable and had definitely resulted in a pack that I’d buy even if it didn’t come with their newly redesigned bladder. I recently took the CamelBak® Fourteener up Pleasant Mountain, a local peak where I got my first winter hike in a couple years ago, with my husband and dog. To hear about my trip with the CamelBak® Fourteener you can click here. To read my report about just the CamelBak® Fourteener, just read on for the outtakes from the full report.
Once all of my gear is pulled together, I load up the CamelBak® Fourteener pack that CamelBak® sent me to review. The Fourteener has recently become my new favorite pack for day hikes thanks, in part, to its 1587 cubic inch cargo space and ingenious design features. It’s designed to handle 10-25 pounds of gear and has an awesome load-bearing belt to help distribute the weight. Combined with the Dynamic Suspension™ harness and the N.V.I.S.™ backpanel to help provide ventilation, CamelBak® definitely got it right with the Fourteener. But that’s not even my favorite part of this hydration pack. It might seem trivial to most people, but they even color coded the zipper pulls so you can easily tell which zipper will get you access to your water bladder and what will get you to your gear.
Color coded zipper pulls on the Camelbak Fourteener
With the two zippers right next to each other, that was been such an awesome design feature to add. To add one last awesome point to the Fourteener, CamelBak has done a total overhaul on their bladder design and now has the CamelBak® Got Your Bak Guarantee™, which backs their bladders and packs with a lifetime guarantee. The bladders themselves now feature a baffle design which helps to prevent them from bulging out too much and causing your pack to do odd things. They also have a quick release tube which is design to make it easy to change it from the neoprene covered winter tubing to a longer tube and then back to the traditional length all without having to hassle with warming up the tubing to slip it on (or off) of the connection.
Camelbak Bladders (Old design on left, New design on right)
Even if you never change the tube, it at least makes it tons easier to clean it, which is definitely a plus. If you have the previous generation of CamelBak® bladders, you might struggle with opening the port to fill it, especially at the end of a long, hard day of activity. CamelBak® changed all that as well with a super easy to open port that only takes a quarter of a turn to open (or close) it. Combine all those improvements with the lifetime guarantee and it’s definitely an awesome pack. I loaded the Fourteener up, chucked it in my vehicle and took off to find the trailhead for the Fire Warden’s Trail, which I had never hiked before.
As I said earlier, the CamelBak® Fourteener totally changed my way of thinking about CamelBak and has definitely made me see them as more of an outdoor equipment company than as someone to go to for the very best in hydration. All of the features they worked in to the CamelBak® Fourteener make it a great pack for everyone from a beginning hiker to someone that has been on the trails for years. It will easily replace my other day pack that I often grabbed.
Stay tuned to hear more about my tests with the CamelBak® Fourteener and to see if it can live up to my expectations.
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