Backpacking Stoves — HikeThrough

An older version of the MSR Pocket Rocket has powered through years in the backcountry without issue. Even at 11,000 ft, the thing cooks like a champion. It is simple, robust, relatively lightweight, and reliable as time itself. Shown below, the MSR features a three-sided wind-screen across the burner surface.

A comparable stove made by GSI Outdoors, the Minimalist, also shown below, is lighter weight, but lacks the burner wind screen. The GSI also seems more prone to damage. The three pot supports are only loosely attached and interfere with each other when going through the 270 degree rotation required to set up or collapse the stove.

The GSI Halulite Minimalist is, however, very lightweight, very reliable, and comes with an entire cook system, which includes the following:

Ultra lightweight titanium cook pot
Cozy for the cook pot
Drink-through lid for pot
Lightweight rubber gripper/hot pad for the pot
Retractable plastic spoon (this will break almost immediately)

Both of the stoves above are the type known as “canister” stoves. In the pictures above, both are using isobutane/propane canisters sold by Jetboil. If you’ve ever known a backpacker with a Jetboil stove, you’ve heard how amazing they are. It is a self-contained, simple-to-use, powerful canister stove that, as the name suggests, boils water very quickly. Having known many backpackers who use a Jetboil, I’ve never heard a complaint. The Jetboil Zip System comes with the following:

Ultra lightweight titanium cook pot
Cozy for the cook pot
Fuel canister stabilizer
Drink-through lid for pot

One other issue on the CDT is elevation. Above 10,000 ft, liquid fuel is a more reliable combustion agent, but stoves like the Pocket Rocket and Jetboil run on a compressed gas isobutane/propane blend. A multi-fuel stove like the MSR XGK EX (pictured) is your best bet for performance in extreme conditions. And since it burns pretty much anything that’s flammable, finding the right fuel type will never be a problem. But this beast of a stove isn’t without drawbacks. At over a pound, it adds substantially to your base weight, it is comparatively complex to use, and, at least for the XGK, it’s fairly expensive.

A somewhat unorthodox option I’ve been using for the last year is a home-made alcohol-burning stove fabricated from empty beer cans. This website has instructions on how to make five different alcohol stoves from aluminum cans. These stoves are insanely small, insanely light, and they’re basically free if you have a couple beers in the fridge already. The liquid fuel these stoves use is somewhat easier to find than the compressed isobutane/propane canisters needed for other stoves, and it burns reliably and efficiently at higher elevations.

There are two main downsides to a beer-can:

They take longer to boil water
There is no way to turn it off.

You have to measure out the right amount of fuel you’ll need for each boil. Too much fuel and you’ve wasted it. Not enough fuel and your water won’t quite get to a boil. More details on beer can stoves can be found below.

Here’s a time lapse video of pouring the fuel in the priming plate, filling the stove, lighting it, and letting the water-filled pot come to a boil.

Finally, here’s the scoring matrix for stoves. Brands and models are listed in the left columns, going across the top are characteristics each stove is scored on. Above each characteristic is a factor that is multiplied by the characteristic score. The best score for each characteristic is highlighted yellow. The final factored score for each stove is listed on the right, and the highest overall score is highlighted in green.

The alcohol-burning Sideburner got the highest score, and having used this stove a number of times in the backcountry, I agree with that conclusion. Of the alcohol stoves, however, this one is probably the trickiest to construct correctly.