Wilderness Equipment Review is all about good gear and good practice for the wilderness tripper.
Around the net there are many people sharing opinions that are not based on any experience. They are, in some cases, complete charlatans.
Many review sites and channels – even when well-intentioned – produce reviews based purely on how a piece of gear looks, rather than how it performs. Unboxing a piece of kit and exclaiming “this looks like an awesome piece of kit”, is of no use to any serious user. Any serious user doesn’t care what some influencer sitting in their living room thinks of how a piece of gear looks.
Very few reviews are about how gear performs over the long term. Most manufacturers lose interest when you say to them “sure I’ll review our shiny new product, as long as you let me use it for a year or two and only then will I honestly state to the world how it performed.” . Marketing people do not have this level of patience. Nor, oftentimes, do they have the integrity.
Many social media channels, particularly on sites such as Instagram, contain paid promotion or are run by people whose primary motivation is to seek out free gear, for which they happily return a positive “review”. They don’t care if the end user is influenced to buy something unsuitable, as long as they get their freebie, as well as their likes, subscribes and so on. Some are even paid to make positive reviews regardless of what they think. Such is a the world of influencer marketing.
We should balance these statements, though, with the more positive assertion to the average end-user… frankly, if you are going out for a night or two of comfy car camping, can escape if it starts to rain, and feel happy with your choices and style of gear, then everything is probably good, even if it is cheap and unproven, promoted by “influencers”.
But if you are seeking more than average, if you need to rely on your gear and want to hear the opinion of people who actually have substantial experience of operating in wilderness for extended periods of time, this information is harder to find. There’s a lot of chaff to sift through before you find the wheat.
On this site we post information, videos and links to further information which originates from people who know what they are doing and know what they are talking about. We have no fixed publishing schedule.
We don’t need to post stuff for the sake of it. We are not trying to meet any quotas or KPIs. We are certainly not in the business of trying to keep gear marketeers happy. This being said, there are some great products out there, some made by large companies, with established brands, some made by small specialists or artisans. If something is considered good by people who are actually qualified to say so, then we’ll try to highlight it.
We simply share good stuff as and when we see it, in the hope it will be useful to those who see it. By maintaining this small corner if the interwebs, we also want to shine a light on experienced wilderness trippers who endeavour to help their fellow outdoorspeople with the benefit of their experience. By providing solid, evidence-based advice, often hard-won, grounded in real-world wilderness experience, they are maintaining a level of truth and integrity often lacking elsewhere.