Areas For Improvement

We begin this section with a reminder that the Outdoor Vitals Shadowlight is an overall great ultralight backpack at an extremely reasonable price point, has good backcountry-performance, and lots of great features.  That’s the most important part. However, we simply do not love how they’ve built the external mesh pockets bisected by a vertical zipper.

For starters, dividing the mesh pocket in two limits the storage capacity in a number of ways. By having two long and narrow pockets instead of one large pocket, users will struggle to store large and/or bulky items like fleece jackets, or a full-up dry bag. What’s more, because the pockets are narrow, you cannot reach past the top item to get to gear lower in the pocket. Lastly, we’ve never loved stretch mesh as it is prone to tearing or snagging. Though to its credit, we haven’t seen this happen yet with the mesh OV uses. And all of that said, these pockets do still offer substantial volume and our tester was able to put lots of gear inside.

Perhaps our biggest pet peeve is with the vertical center zipper bisecting the pockets discussed above. Hypothetically, this feature gives access to the interior of the pack without having to open the roll-top. However, in practice, our tester never once in eight consecutive days of backpacking used it. That’s because you should never need access to the center or bottom interior of your backpack until you get to camp (because all that’s in that section are items like a tent, sleeping bag, pad, etc), by which point the roll top will have already been opened, thus invalidating the need for zippered access in the first place. That being the case, the zipper adds additional weight, an additional potential failure point, additional manufacturing costs, and divides the mesh pocket in two. But for the most part, you can just ignore it and move on with life enjoying the Shadowlight for what it is, an overall excellent ultralight pack.