There’s no better testing grounds for Gregory packs than some of the most remote and extreme places in the world. Getting into these kinds of places is the reason we build many of our products, and the inspiration for our design team.
So it’s a standard part of Gregory’s protocol to send prototypes of our packs to the kinds of places for which we build them. And that means at a certain point turning things over to the pros.
In that vein, Chris Warner and his Shared Summits team, who heads pretty much every year for the highest peaks in the world, will be putting prototypes of some of our new mountaineering series packs for 2011, including the new Makalu (check out that good-lookin’ pack), to the test on that pack’s namesake - 8,485-meter Makalu (27,838 feet) on the Nepal/China border.
Chris, who’s a veteran of 13 expeditions to 8,000-meter peaks and some 160 mountaineering expeditions over the last several decades, and his team are attempting to put up a route on the unclimbed south face (in red below). The expedition departed today. 
Beyond an inspiring adventure, the team will be putting the Makalu through the paces, and providing Gregory some extremely valuable real-world feedback with some of our 2011 mountaineering series prototypes from some of the world’s most demanding conditions. Check back for updates on the team’s progress.
