Gear Review: Mountainsmith Lumbar Pack

I’m a pack freak, and I’m always tempting myself by looking at new backpacks. Mountainsmith almost always ends up in my hands if I walk out of a store with something in my hands. Last week while in the local ACE Hardware store that has a nice outdoor section and some fishing flies that I was after to prep for this past trip to YNP, I sauntered over to the backpack section to tempt myself.

For the past two years, I’ve been wearing a small lumbar pack in conjunction with my Camelback while out fishing for a day. The lumbar pack holds two fly boxes, tippet, “float goop,” clipper, and hemostap. The Camelback holds bigger stuff like a rain jacket, lunch, toilet paper and shovel, camera, a couple more fly boxes, and of course a water bladder. The nice thing is that I can leave the Camelback in place most of the day, and when I need to change flies or add tippet, I just spin the lumbar pack around to the front for easy access to my stuff.

But I wanted more space in the lumbar pack, and the Mountainsmith Kinetic II Lumbar Pack is the sweet spot in size. I can now put my camera and two more fly boxes into the lumbar pack. It’s just nice to have easy access to those things,especially the camera(!).

On another note, the tag says this bag saved eight plastic bottles from the landfill. If that's really true, I guess that's one more reason to buy this bag if you're looking for something like this.

        


For $40, this thing sits nicely on my hips and carries really everything I need constant easy access to. It obviously doesn’t hold everything I need for a day in the backcountry; that’s what the camelback is for.
This lumbar pack, when combined with my Camelback, provides a perfect combination of access to my stuff during the day.