REI Getting Into the Game

We take a few months off, and the whole landscape of lightweight backpacking rucksacking changes. REI has introduced a new line of "UL" products, which, though still a tad on the heavy side by most standards (or at least by ours), are still a huge improvement over traditional gear and will probably start a much larger segement of the public down the path towards rucksacking. We're not exactly sure when they began offering in-house items like the poetically-named REI UL 30L Pack, but we'll leave finding out stuff like that to real journalists who do stuff like, you know, research.