Classic Gear: Rohan Bags

Bags page in the 1987 Rohan Catalogue with pictures of me on the Continental Divide Trail

Third in the Classic Gear series that appeared in The Great Outdoors last year. This time, some revolutionary trousers.

Lightweight, windproof, fast drying, and comfortable walking trousers have been standard wear for many years. It wasn’t always so though. Back in the 1970s, when I started hillwalking and backpacking, walking legwear was quite heavy and made of wool or cotton so it was slow drying and uncomfortable when damp. It was bulky when packed too – you didn’t want to carry a pair in a rucksack. I remember getting cold legs in wet cotton corduroy trousers in summer and sore itchy legs from harsh wet wool rubbing against them in winter.

Thankfully this all changed at the end of the decade when a new innovative company called Rohan introduced trousers in a thin windproof and fast drying tightly woven polyester/cotton fabric they called Airlight. Where did the fabric come from? Knowing that the properties wanted weren’t available in standard clothing fabrics Rohan founders Paul and Sarah Howcroft looked elsewhere and discovered what they wanted in duvet covers! This imaginative look beyond the outdoor and clothing industries would change what we wear in the hills forever.

Bags page in the 1983 Rohan catalogue

The first trousers, called Trotters, quickly evolved into Bags, launched in 1979, with the distinctive design that has stayed the same ever since with its double-front pockets and tough zips. Bags were originally designed as travel and approach walk trousers for mountaineers and so needed to be lightweight, quick-drying and easy care whilst still being functional and hard-wearing. Of course this meant they were also excellent for hillwalking and backpacking. 

Wearing Bags on the Continental Divide Trail

Bags did take a while to become really accepted. Many found it hard to believe such thin trousers could perform well and stand up to outdoor use. I was quickly convinced – an early adopter in today’s parlance. When I first saw them I was delighted with the low weight (284 grams) and the tiny pack size. I’d never seen any outdoor trousers anywhere near that light or that tiny when packed and I realised that they’d be ideal for my upcoming 2,700 mile Pacific Crest Trail through-hike. They proved excellent on that 1982 walk so I used them again on the even longer Continental Divide Trail three years later. There was no way I was going back to heavy, itchy, slow-drying wool and cotton trousers.

Rohan ad in The Great Outdoors, February, 1987 showing how small Bags pack

Rohan started a trend with Bags and since then many alternatives have appeared from many companies and lightweight trousers with the same properties are now the norm. The original design is still available, along with insulated Winter Bags for cold weather and softshell Stretch Bags for those who like close-fitting trousers. All three share that same design from 1979. It’s just as practical now as it was then. That Bags are still in production after thirty nine years and still popular is testimony to the pioneering designs and fabric research of Rohan all those years ago. 

Classic Gear: The Primus Stove

Second in the Classic Gear series that appeared in The Great Outdoors last year. This time, a revolutionary stove.

When explorers started venturing high into the mountains and far onto the polar ice in the second half of the nineteenth century they had a problem. How to stay hydrated. Melting snow required fuel and stoves and took time. Before then polar travellers were ship-based and terrestrial explorers stayed below the treeline most of the time and so had wood to burn. Various alcohol burning stoves were developed but these were slow, inefficient and required large amounts of fuel, which meant heavier loads to carry and a limit on how far explorers could go. The first paraffin (kerosene) stoves were only a little better and gave off soot and fumes.

An original Primus stove

 

This all changed in 1892 when Swedish inventor Frans W. Lindqvist developed the first sootless paraffin pressure stove. This stove had a burner mounted over a fuel tank. To pressurise the fuel there was a pump on the side of the tank. A valve on the burner released the pressurised fuel which rose up vaporising tubes to shoot out of a jet as a gas. Once this gas was lit it spread out round a metal plate in a ring of flames. This design makes very efficient use of the fuel and is the basis for every liquid petroleum stove ever since. It really was a revolutionary design. Lindqvist set up a company to market his invention and named the stove Primus – the Latin for first.

Primus factory in 1907

Explorers quickly recognised the value of the Primus stove, particularly the great Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen. He knew the disadvantages of alcohol stoves from his crossing of Greenland, the first time this had been achieved, when he said he had suffered from ‘arctic thirst’. For his ‘furthest north’ expedition in 1883 he took Primus stoves, which were far more fuel efficient and burnt much hotter for melting snow. Later, in 1911, his protégé Roald Amundsen took Primus stoves to the South Pole. 

Primus stoves quickly became the standard for expeditions and remained so into the 1970s, being used by the successful 1953 Everest Expedition amongst many others. They became standard stoves for hiking and cycle touring too with different sizes being manufactured such as the popular 00 (1 pint) and 96 (half pint) models. In the early 1980s when I led backpacking trips for Outward Bound Loch Eil we used 00 Primus stoves that didn’t look that different from the original design of nearly 100 years earlier.

OmniLite Ti

 

At first glance today’s Primus stoves don’t seem much like the first ones or even the 00 or 96. The big change has been the move of the fuel tank from under the burner to off to the side with a hose linking the two. Modern stoves can burn several different fuels too and are made from materials such as titanium that weren’t available earlier. The basic principles are the same though, as can be seen by looking at Primus’s top of the line OmniLite Ti. There’s still a pump to pressurise the liquid fuel, a valve to release it, and a jet out of which vapour shoots upwards before hitting a metal plate and spreading out. This design has stood the test of 125 years of use. It looks like it’ll go on for many more.