Buyer Advice For Choosing The Best Backpacking Knife

Why you should avoid a micro hiking knife

A boxcutter style hiking knife, or folding backpacking knife with a 1.0- 2.0″ blade sounds good in theory because it only weighs half an ounce. But overtime, we’ve come to prefer slightly larger, light-not-ultralight knives instead. That’s because almost anything you can cut or open with a micro hiking knife can be done nearly as well with hands, teeth, or found-objects nearly as easily; rip off a hunk of cheese, bite off a nob of salami, break off a twig, puncture plastic wrap with a rock, tear off a section of leukotape, etc.

Micro knives have the lowest possible weight, but actually don’t make the cutting experience appreciably better. As such, they offer an inferior functionality-to-weight ratio, offering little benefit to the user other than a checked Ten Essentials box. If you’re really trying to save weight, it’s arguably more efficient not to bring a backpacking knife at all. If you want to make doing those tasks appreciably easier, you have to commit to a functionally sized knife with a 2.5-3″ blade.

Why you should avoid larger knives

A more common mistake than carrying too small of a backpacking knife is carrying too large of a knife. Large knives are very attractive to certain people, but they’re also heavier, bulkier, and more likely to cause self inflicted injuries than to save you in a survival or self defense scenario. Specifically, we’re talking about any hiking knife with a blade larger than four inches, and daggers that are designed to be used as weapons. Relatively lightweight solutions exist for bushcraft application, and you can find our recommendations in this guide.

Why 2.5-3.0″ blade length is the best backpacking knife size

A 2.5-3.0″ blade length is the sweet spot for backcountry cutting efficacy, volume minimization, and storability. It’s small enough to easily fit in your pocket or ditty sack, but long enough to make quick work of dense dried foods. This includes the cured salami and hard cheeses you pack into the backcountry, as well as fresh food you may acquire in town, such as avocado, cucumber, or a crusty baguette. With a 1.5″ knife blade, you will have to cut in slower, shallower, less effective patterns to yield the same result. A longer backpacking knife blade makes food prep easy, while also being sturdy enough to trim branch, and small enough for accurate slicing, such as cutting leukotape or duct tape.

Furthermore, three inches (~8 cm) is a common municipal rule for knife safety around the world. Many cities consider longer knives to be weapons and may disallow them in certain settings and contexts. But a three inch or shorter blade is nearly always approved.

What you get with a more expensive backpacking knife

Not all steel is created equal, and a more expensive backpacking knife usually correlates with higher quality blade steel. That is to say, the edge will stay sharper for longer, thus performing better over the span of a multi-day backpacking trip. Higher quality blade steel is also more corrosion resistant and more durable.

Forging a high quality blade accounts for the lion’s share of a knife’s manufacturing cost, and you do get what you pay for. This is why you will find cheap $20 dollar folding knives that look like premium $200 folding knives. While handle optimizations account for some of the cost, the difference is mostly in the blade steel.

Most reputable manufacturers will transparently list the exact type of steel or steel alloy used in their blades, and more info about this can easily be referenced on websites like Knife Steel Nerds. Examples of specific types of steel used to make the knives in this buyer’s guide include CPM-S30V, VG-10, and D2.

Just like with mystery meat, a cheaper hiking knife is made with lower quality, unspecified materials. If you are shopping for a backpacking knife and cannot find manufacturer provided info about the type of blade steel used, or cannot verify its quality from a reliably neutral third party source, you can presume it to be of low quality.