1974 – 2004 Backpacker Magazine on Google Books

A plethora of interesting and informative articles to pass the time.

If anyone finds any interesting or funny articles please post them here.

Mt. Katahdin, 1973 Autumn addition, pg 40

Nice find. Thanks for posting. I remember many of those covers from the 90's.

Points for "plethora"...

From a 1979 issue, an REI ad shows a stove & fuel bottle. Guess that's where the Sig water bottles got their look from.

BlackBuffalo said:

From a 1979 issue, an REI ad shows a stove & fuel bottle. Guess that's where the Sig water bottles got their look from.

Click to expand...

Back in the 70s, Sigg sold the same bottles for both fuel and drinking water use*. You could get them without or with a coating on the inside so acid drinks wouldn't dissolve the aluminium. Colors were natural aluminum or red.

The bottles disappeared from the US market in the late 70s or early 80s (?) and have recently reappeared.

There was a risk in using them with MSR stoves (also fairly new at the time)--a seam near the neck could fail if the pressure was pumped too high.

* It is dangerous to use the same bottles for fuel and water--IIRC there were some incidents where someone drank fuel...

Doug

Interesting. Thanks Doug!

It's always very interesting looking at those old ads.
The gear available at the time reminded me when I was young, I'd wear cotton all the time. There was nothing else. Everything was heavy, from canteens to my ill fitting work boots (which I thought were intended for hiking).

I am struck by the length of the articles in the early issues compared to what I see today they are much more detailed. One that caught my eye was this


http://books.google.com/books?id=_9...e=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Anne Labastille's article about doing the NPT. I noticed changes in the trail from the 90's when I first did it and this year when I did it again. So I am interested to see what it was like in 1976.