Summit Gear/Whippa Overland 60 Ultralight Pack

Over in the US, largely influenced by its substantial thru-hiking community, the trend to ultralight gear has been going strong for some years now. Australia has been slow to follow suit, in part due to gear conservatism here, and in part due to our spiky, hard vegetation that can rip insubstantial gear to shreds. Tassie, especially, can be brutal, but it’s not alone; there are shrubberies at walking height all over Oz that just love to tear and puncture and generally just give gear a very hard time.

But up in NSW’s Blue Mountains, Summit Gear—which has been constructing packs locally since 1981, yes, the very year Wild first launched—has quietly been going about making ultralight packs designed to deal with Aussie brutality, with the Blueys being a perfect testing ground. But I had a different testing ground in mind once I got my mitts on Summit Gear’s – Whippa Overland 60L pack: An at times brutal three-day, entirely off-track outing in NSW’s New England region, where the pack would be dragged over rocks and through mud, be taken on swims, be prodded and poked, be forced to deal with blackberries and thorned vines, and be pushed through vegetation so dense it sometimes took minutes to move just metres. Spoiler alert: It dealt with the lot with ease.

Given the pack weighs just 942g (as tested), this was quite the feat. But the materials have been well chosen: For the pack’s body—Dyneema Composite Fabric (which is abrasion-, UV- and tear-resistant, with a tensile strength fifteen times that of steel); for its base—Ultra 800X UHMWPE (non-branded Dyneema), which has double the abrasion resistance of 1000D Cordura; and for the pack’s back—UltraGrid, which uses 210D recycled yarn interwoven with Dyneema, making it incredibly tear-resistant. These materials are all either waterproof or have had a waterproof backing applied; thanks to all seams being tape-sealed, the pack is essentially waterproof. Even when I took the pack on a 50m swim, the interior stayed nearly dry.

But just because the Overland is incredibly light, that doesn’t mean it’s flimsy. This isn’t to say you should load it up with 30kg+ for a ten-day outing, but three days’ gear, plus nearly 5kg of camera equipment, was well within its capacity. Speaking of loading up the pack, you can purchase separately a detachable lid (102g) that sits atop the pack and that adds a further 8L capacity. The lid is not the only optional element, either; the pack’s supporting frame sheet (which, unlike the lid, comes standard with the pack) is actually removable if you want to save a further 190g.

A few other elements are worth mentioning: It has two well-sized stretch pouches on the hip belt; two more stretch pouches on the side of the pack, large enough to fit 1L water bottles in; a back pocket suitable for stashing rain gear in; the mouth of the pack has a roll-top closure; and there plenty of lashing/attachment points.

The pack won’t be for everyone, however. If you’re carrying heavy loads on big trips, you’ll want something burlier. It has no zips for easy access (they add weight and compromise strength), nor does it have internal compartments for organisation (weight, or lack thereof, again being the priority). And while the pack is very reasonably-priced given its feature set, not everyone needs this level of quality or lightweightness. But for those that do need these qualities, the pack is a winner. So much so, Summit Gear has actually decided to take the Yanks on at their own game, and is launching the pack in the US—and in fact globally—under its Whippa brand. The tagline? Lighter. Stronger. Better. It’s hard to argue the Overland 60 hasn’t achieved that and then some.