Proper first impressions of MHW's new, very expensive and very sophisticated backpack complete with carbon fibre, Scandium and self-healing siliconised Cordura fabric no less...
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Mountain Hardwear Harrier Pack -
First Look
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Price:
£220.00
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Weight: 2360 grammes (medium)
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Features 60-litre
pack with Motive frame and Fit-Lock harness and waist belt,
100D Cordura body fabric with 630D Ballistics Cordura base,
silicone coated, self-healing fabric, lowe pack area can
contract or expand, hydration sleeve, double ice axe pole
toggle, removable side water bottle pocket. Detachable lid
with pockets.
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Phenomenal detailing and complexity, top quality
materials.
Scary complicated and expensive.
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The Concept With all due forelock tugging to Marks and Sparks,
this isn't just any pack, this is a Mountain Hardwear pack. No,
seriously, when MHW decided to get into the pack market, it was
crucial for them as a company renowned for innovation, that their
packs stood out from the crowd, were't just another 'me too'
product.
Which is why their new Exodus pack range took five years to
design, test and release and why they are the most scary complicated
packs we've ever seen. Rarely have so many features appeared on a
single product.
The idea behind all the complexity and space-age materials like
self-healing, siliconised Cordura parachute fabric, carbon fibre
frame plates and rods and Scandium tubes is to create a pack system
that can be fitted to your body, distributes weight evenly across the
pack's contact areas and, says designer Charles Mosley, compromises
activities like skiing, hiking and mountaineering as little as
possible. The Harrier, by the way, is a 60-litre odd, not particularly lightweight pack with a claimed weight anywhere of 2360 grammes.
Features Like we said, we've rarely come across such an
incredibly complicated pack. Its quite unlike anything else we've
used in that the shoulder harness is actually a stiff yoke that
stands out from the frame, as does the hip-belt.
The shoulder harness is linked to the main pack frame by a U-Bar
rod that's adjustable for length and tension on either side and
lightweight Scandium - a light aluminium alloy used frequently for
top-end cycle frames - rods feed loads down directly into the
hip-belt.
The heart of the frame itself is a carbon fibre plate bolted, in
weird and wonderful Meccano fashion, to the Scandium rods and looking
pleasingly space age. A puley system lets you adjust back length on
the fly as well, more about that below. The hip-belt, by the way, is
free to slide on the end of the Scandium rods, pivots as well and
can, if you choose, simply be pulled off and changed for a
different-sized item.
By comparison the rest of the pack is relatively conventional
though the materials used are top kwoll including siliconised,
self-healing Cordura body fabric and tough as old boot Hypalon-type
anchoring points.
In Action The downloadable MHW pack manual has 64 pages, to be
fair, most of them aren't in English, but even the 20 English pages
set an OM record for a pack manual and that arguably tells you
something.
First time out we busked it and tried setting the Harrier up by
trial and error. There are so many different adjustments and buckles
that it's actually quite intimidating and changing one adjustment
seems to have a knock-on effect on all the others. After two hours of
fiddling with the various adjusters, we finally reached a state of
tolerable fit.
MHW say that fitting the back system is about distribution of
weight rather than tension, but that makes it quite difficult to get
everything evened out and if you do reach that zen-like state, we'd
advise you not to touch those buckles and pulls ever again...
Just to put our comments on fit into perspective, the fitting
process involves first fitting the yoke and belt to your body, then
using approximately ten seperate adjusters to get the final fit
right.
The rub is that even when it's well adjusted - something we
confirmed by going throught the approved manual procedure later -
it's not astonishingly £260-comfy. If we hadn't used a Berghaus
Bioflex - available for half the price - we'd have been impressed
with the Harrier's sliding back system that allows you to bend over
and touch your toes and the lateral mobility that allows, well,
lateral mobility, but we have and the Berghaus is also far easier to
set up.
Likewise support and load-carrying is decent, but not as good as
with Osprey's load-luggers. In fact the Harrier feels slightly 'hard'
against the body, though not uncomfortable.
What we can't fault, at first acquaintance, is the quality of the
materials used though the bolted-together back system isn't
confidence-inspiring if you're looking at travelling in developing
areas and pondering repair feasibility.
The reservoir pocket is standard issue, which means the contents
will be squashed by the pack load and hard to replenish without a
faff - surely big packs should have side-positioned bladders for ease
of access? There are handy big stretch stuff pockets which are great
for stowing wet shells and the like and we like the neat shock-corded
axe holders, which feature alloy toggles that apparently double as
bottle openers.
The lid reminded us of a GoLite one, lolling limply halfway down
the back of the pack unless it was full to the brim, though to be
fair, you can simply remove it and put it inside if that annoys you.
Just changing the anchor straps' position would sort that one.
Finally, the proud-standing semi-rigid yoke and hip-belt would be
a nightmare to fly with. We think you'd have to partially disassemble
the pack and stow it in a duffle or risk damaging it in transit.
Patagonia's Yvon Chouinard once pointed out that what matters
most to good design is not what you add, but what you leave out.
Mountain Hardwear haven't really left out much at all and while the
Harrier is impressive in a new-fangled car sort of way, all that
innovation doesn't, in our experience so far, seem to add up to a significantly
better pack.
It's fiddly and faffy to adjust and even when you've got it about
right, it still isn't as spectacularly good as it ought to be at this
price. Yes, it does give reasonable mobility and lateral flex
compared to a more conventional pack, yet it still isn't as good as a
Berghaus Bioflex which costs considerably less and offers the same
benefits in a far simpler package.
The basic materials are excellent and a lot of thought's clearly
gone into the design of the back system and it does work reasonably
well, but it needs some serious rationalisation to make it a viable
real world product, at the moment it's a bit like one of those
concept cars that get churned out for motor shows - impressive to
look at, but not really of this world... It should be nice once it's
finished.
Know more or want to?
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product check out our user review system and post your opinions to
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