Jason Halladay

I switched to the Eco Ball initially because I liked the idea of having dry hands but not marking up the rock. It's great for that but even better, I found it does a much better job of drying my hands and not caking onto to my fingers like normal loose chalk or a standard chalk ball. I now have a hard time climbing with normal chalk as my hands never feel as dry and clean as they do when I use the Eco Ball. The only downside to the Eco Ball is that it seems to deplete faster than a standard chalk ball. But that's certainly not enough to keep me from buying Eco Ball after Eco Ball.

To be honest, I was skeptical about this pack. The super light weight for a 5000+cu. in. pack seemed too good to be true. Thankfully, I've been pleasantly surprised. I'm 6'5" with a ~21 inch torso and this pack fits me well. I've used it for winter mountaineering/backpacking and a three-week mountaineering trip in India and it both cases it performed flawlessly. I will admit that with loads of more than 45lbs, I did start to feel a bit of discomfort in the shoulders and hips but I'm happy to take that given the light weight of the pack. It's a good trade off. The stretchy ice ax attachment loop at the top work well but can be a bit difficult to undo at first when wearing gloves but after a bit of practice, it's not bad. The top lid is easy to adjust and holds a great deal of stuff. The pocket on the front of the pack is also more voluminous than it first appears. But what I love the most about this pack is the clips on the bottom that allow you to minimize the size of the pack and use it as a day pack. This works very well and when I wore the pack as a day pack it didn't feel like a big, floppy, under-filled backpack. The width of the pack is narrow enough that when climbing or scrambling with it, my elbows don't bump on it and I hardly notice it's there. I would definitely recommend this pack to friends. GoLite has done a great job with it!

I have a good guess at what you're thinking. You want to know what it's like to fall on an 8mm double rope like this one. I own these ropes but can't answer that question because, quite frankly, I'm a bit scared to fall on one of these. I've been climbing with a pair of these for a few months now but have always clipped them both treating them as twin ropes because the thought of my 180lb frame falling on one of these clipped separately makes me wince and I actually don't fear falling normally. What I do really like about them, though, is the weight and the feel. They flow like a hot knife through perlon in my ATC-Guide device in autoblock mode yet autolock just fine if the second weights the rope. However, because of the small size, I think, they do have a tendency to loop on themselves while feeding slack from the flaked stack which does get annoying. Bottomline: If you're planning to get a set to treat as light twin ropes, these are quite nice. But I'm still quite a bit leery of the massive stretch they're sure to produce when fallen-upon while being clipped separately.