Latest Side-by-Side Comparison from Sport Fitness Advisor Well today’s the first day of Spring here in North America – so I guess it’s time to get ready to get back outside in the great outdoors; and we all know what that means – Gear Preparation. To get ready for the Hiking and Camping season everyone has their own routine. What we do is take out all our gear, check it over for usability, clean up anything that needs a little tender care and evaluate what we have against the newest gear available to see if our gear has either “aged out” or if there are new products on the market that are significantly better than what we have. This allows us to make sure that the gear we take with us works when we need it in the outback, and keeps us up to date on the latest items on the market. Checking over all of your gear at the beginning of the season doesn’t’ sound like a lot of fun – but trust us – it’s better to find out now that you need a new piece of gear rather than the day before a trip, or even worse, on the trip. To compare our gear against what is currently on the market we always head to our local outdoor stores (to see as many items as possible in person) and to the internet to read the great gear reviews that are online. Of course, many items don’t change that much from year to year (we doubt that we’re ever going to replace our Council Tool Woodcraft 24" Pack Axe, Gerber E-Tool Folding Spade, Buck 110 or Army Survival Knife), but we always like to keep current with what’s out there “just in case”. While we were checking our gear for the 2022 Spring/Summer/Fall season we were contacted by Jillian, an editor from Sport Fitness Advisor about a comprehensive guide that they had just published about the "Best Backpacking Stove".  Since our site focuses on the specific gear selections that work for us, and our specific situation, and provides our evaluation criteria and rationale for selecting our gear, we don’t provide detailed side-by-side comparisons of products. That doesn’t’ mean that we don’t read a lot of the websites that provide side-by-side product comparisons – because we most certainly do – we just find that many of these sites do this better than we would (because of the size of their staff and budget). So our HCS site has direct links to many of the sites that do specialize in detailed gear reviews, just in case you want to see the side-by-side comparisons. Of course, we love it even more when a site that has evaluated the latest gear reaches out to us to let us know about a comparison our readers would be interested in; like Sport Fitness Advisor did. We really liked the "Best Backpacking Stove" article because it was comprehensive in covering what features you need and why you need them. And, as all of our readers know, we think that providing you the most important evaluation criteria is vital since it allows you to assess if your situation equates to the evaluators when you make your gear selection decision. If it does – fine. If it doesn’t - then you can use the detailed information to make a gear selection that better fits your specific situation. Here’s what the Sport Fitness Advisor article covers:
For comparison’s sake our evaluation criteria for compact hiking/camping stoves include:
The 10 stoves that Sport Fitness Advisor covers in their article include:
We don’t want to give away their conclusions, so you should go read the "Best Backpacking Stove" article for yourself; it’s worth a few minutes of your time. In addition to their recent article about the “Best Backpacking Stove” Sport Fitness Advisor has numerous other articles related to Hiking and Camping. You should go take a look. https://www.sport-fitness-advisor.com/?s=hiking https://www.sport-fitness-advisor.com/?s=camping If you would like to see another expert opinion on what the best backpacking stoves currently on the market are - you should check out Clever Hiker’s latest list of “Best Backpacking Stoves”; he’s always got great insight into the gear you need. 
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Bought Some New “Reactive” Training TargetsFrequently we’re at the shooting range either trying to help someone learn to shoot, sighting in a new firearm or optic, or just trying to improve our skills. To help support this we have a variety of targets – with all sorts of shapes, markings and graduations. Every once in a while we’ve run across targets that are marked to help you improve your accuracy – especially with a handgun. Over the years we’ve even purchased a few of these targets to try them out. But we’ve never loved them because they were paper targets that didn’t allow you to easily and clearly see where the rounds you shot hit the target. This week we were browsing around one of our local gun shops and ran across the Birchwood Casey Shoot-N-C Handgun Trainer “Reactive” Targets (BC-34655). We use lots of other Birchwood Casey “reactive” targets all the time, so we picked up a few to try them out.  Like the training targets that we’ve tried before, these 12" X 18" rectangular targets are broken up into a bulls-eye and 9 other areas with labels to identify the action that you need to correct to improve your accuracy (listed in clockwise order starting at 12:00) :
However, like all other Birchwood Casey “reactive” targets, when you hit the target the bullet makes a bright chartreuse ring that is extremely easy to see from 3 to 25 yards away (the distances we usually shoot our handguns from) and relatively easy to see from even 25 to 60 yards away (the distances that we usually shoot our carbines from). This eliminates the need to walk downrange, or use a binocular or monocular, to look at your hits, while also providing firing corrections to help you tighten your groupings. The targets even have adhesive backings so that you can easily mount them and 22 repair pasters so that you can reuse the target. You can read more about these new Birchwood Casey Shoot-N-C Handgun Trainer Targets - 12" X 18" on our Shooting/Targets page. |
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