How it started
None of this was my idea. My dad has been outside his whole life — hiking, backpacking, mountain biking, off-roading, trail running, basically anything that happens on dirt. I got brought along young, complained about it for a couple of years, and then somewhere around the first summit I didn't hate, it stuck.
The hike that really counted was a short ridge loop twenty minutes from the house. I walked it in running sneakers, slid down half the descent on my heels, and got home with two blisters and a very strong opinion about footwear. My dad, who owns boots for four different kinds of ground, found this extremely funny.
That's the other thing I got from him. He can talk about outsole rubber for an hour, and it turns out so can I. Lug depth, how a pack's frame moves weight off your shoulders and onto your hips, why one $70 pack carries better than a $200 one. We like that stuff on its own, whether or not either of us is going anywhere that weekend.
Most weekends we're on trails around the tri-state, and once or twice a year we save everything up for somewhere bigger. The national parks out west are where a pack that actually fits stops being a nice-to-have.
So we started writing it down, and we started using AI to dig into the parts we wanted to understand properly. What held up, what wore through, what cost twice as much for no reason we could find. It was notes for the two of us first. Then friends and family kept asking what to buy, we got tired of retyping the same answers, and the notes became pages. The pages became this.
"I'd rather tell you a $70 pack is enough than talk you into a $250 one."