The Outdoor Adventure Giving you tips, tricks & recommendations to help make adventuring in the Outdoors fun, safe & exciting for you and your kids.
In my early days of backpacking, I was looking for a backpack that had large capacity and was inexpensive as most of my stuff was bulky and at that point I wasn’t sure if backpacking was going to be a long term sport for me. After looking at the array of backpacks, I ended up settling on the external frame JanSport Carson 80, much due to the fact that it was cheap and it was fairly close to the only pack I had ever used up to that point (a borrowed JanSport external frame).
Four years on and I still use this pack, and I’ve come to appreciate and use a good number of its features. The Pack weighs in at 4 lbs, 13 oz the pack is fairly lightweight given its price (less than $100) and its 80 liter capacity. As an external frame pack, it has an aluminium tube frame that provides the structure needed to carry the weight. Straps, belts, and the pack itself all attach to the frame. The pack has 2 large side pockets, a smaller back pocket and a good size top pocket in the lid. One of the features I’ve come to enjoy is the options for loading the main compartment. You can either load from the top or unzipping a front panel that also gives you access to the sleeping bag compartment (a fabric barrier between the top part of the back and the bottom) I find myself using both in packing but also on the trail when I realize the item that I want NOW is much lower in the pack than I had hoped. I can get into the guts of the main compartment without having too much impact on the rest of my stuff.
There were a couple items that I found frustrating about the pack. The lack of instructions* on how to adjust this pack (or any external frame pack) meant that each trip I’d be trying to figure out new ‘tweaks’ on how to make the pack sit better. It took 1.5 years to get it ‘almost right’ and now I think I’ve finally got it. The sleeping bag compartment is also one of those items that sometimes seem to just ‘get in the way’ rather than perform some useful function.
*Checking the website, it appears they’ve been working on this since I looked years ago, with instructional videos to show how to fit and pack a pack, although it isn’t specific for the Carson 80 or external frame packs.
Check out the video below and leave some comments!
The Bottom Line:
Pros:
– Relatively cheap
– Relatively lightweight (just a little heavier than a similarly priced 55 Liter internal frame pack)
– Easy to strap things to the outside
– Large capacity
Cons:
– Utter lack of instructions on how to adjust the pack
– The bottom bar sits a bit too low
– The sleeping bag divider can get in the way
Overall: It’s a good beginning pack that can let you learn what you like or don’t like about packs (or backpacking, if such a thing can happen). Its lack of instructions can be a bit unnerving and maybe downright annoying, but its features make up for its frustrations. Its large capacity makes it easy to make use of the camping equipment you already have at home before purchasing more backpacking specific gear. If you take your family out, you know you have the space and the the ability to carry what might be a phenomenal load.by Graeme A
The Outdoor Adventure Team
The Outdoor Adventure Team
