Duffel Love

One of our all time favourite products here at LD is the Base Camp Duffel from North Face. We find ourselves recommending them a lot. Everyone who has ever worked here has got one. We’re pretty sure that extended family and friends of everyone who has ever worked here have all got one. The delivery guy who picks up our parcels every day has got one. You get the picture.

Base Camp Benefits

For outdoor folk like us (and our family and friends and the parcel delivery guy) a North Face Base Camp duffel is often the only bag that we trust to get all of our gear from A to B. Why is that you ask? Two reasons chiefly. First, these bags swallow a lot of gear relative to their size and weight. It makes sense that if you’re going to be carrying lots of heavy stuff then you don’t want the thing that you’re carrying it in to be heavy too. Secondly, the weight to strength ratio of a base camp duffel is exceptional so don’t think that because the bag itself is light it can’t handle a knock or two. Quite the opposite in fact and you will often here mutterings like “indestructible” or “virtually bombproof” when people are talking of these iconic bags. Put it this way, there’s not a lot that could ruffle your duffel (apologies, that was to win a bet).

The Duffel Dilema

One of the questions we always get asked is “which size duffel bag should I get?”. Well, we thought we might try and help out on this by putting together a handy little blog series that will show you how much gear you can cram in each of the sizes in the range from the x-small 25 litre capacity bag right up to the whopping 155 litre x-large.

Bag yourself a Base Camp!

Want to know the best news though? We decided that we should give one of these amazing bags away so at the end of our blog series someone will walk away with biggest Base Camp of them all, the super, giant, massive  Base Camp XL. And all you’ve got to do is……..weight! Guess the weight to be precise. As we stuff the different size duffels with kit to show you how much you can squeeze in we’ll weigh each one when it’s full starting with the x-small and ending with the x-large. If you can guess the weight of the XL then you’re in with a chance to win. You can enter any time by clicking on the competitions link below.

https://www.ldmountaincentre.com/competitions/

We suggest you check in with our blog over the next  week so that you get an ideal of weights as we move up through the 5 sizes of duffel. This should help you with your final guess.

We start with the baby of the bunch.

North Face Base Camp Duffel – extra small

Dimensions when fully packed (approx)

W:28cm

D:28cm

L: 46cm

Capacity in litres:  25

Ideal for:  Gym, Climbing Wall, Go Swimming, Overnight trip, Work bag

The XS duffel, with all the kit you need for an indoor wall session

The  XS Small Duffel is packed with everything for an indoor wall session, shoes, harness, chalk and chalk bag, finger tape, brush, belay device Shorts T shirts,Water Bottle, Scooby Snacks, Shower Kit

The Baby of the bunch at the weigh in

and weighing in at 8lbs/3.6 kg.

Keep your eyes peeled for the next blog in the series tomorrow where we’ll stuff and weigh the Base Camp small.