Sixteen Days on a Yak!

By Jay Reilly (August 2006)

When I tore away the packaging from Mont's delivery in early February this year, and saw the new Cargo Duffel bags, I thought 'Hmmm – nice, but…' OK, so I’m a sceptic, when it comes to outdoor equipment…

The fabric looked too lightweight to be a serious expedition duffel. But how wrong I was!

Let me explain my scepticism. When it comes to climbing in the Khumbu Valley of Nepal, the most commonly used method of transporting equipment and such, is the use of yaks. With yaks come yak drivers, who are also the people responsible for loading and unloading of the animals.

Yaks are not friendly, in fact they are downright nasty, and they carry loads with an extremely begrudging acceptance that this is their duty on earth. They hate being loaded and unloaded, and will fight the driver vigorously in an attempt to be left alone.

During this display, duffel bags get dragged, thrown, stomped on by both yak and driver, gored, and dropped. Airline baggage handlers have nothing on a yak and it's driver going through a loading/unloading procedure! And this gets done every day for the multiple days it takes to make the approach trek to Basecamp.

The drivers are not particularly equipment friendly either. Just when you thought you'd packed your bag and tightened all the straps, etc, they then "double check" your packing. Two of them will get on a strap and pull it until they're red in the face, then they'll usually get rope and truss the bag end to end as tight as possible until you can almost hear the bag whimpering in pain.

Now you start to understand my doubts.

In addition to the rough handling during loading and unloading, there are also the rigours of the trail. Yaks are big and powerful and on more than one occasion, I've followed behind one to see it snag it's load on a rock wall. The yak hardly feels it and keeps walking, however the bag… Well let's just say I was picking up underwear and crampons for the next little while…

Since 2002, I have personally gone through 5 duffel bags. Good quality European and American brands have all succumbed to the enormous abuse of yak transport. And I must say, the MONT Cargo 150 is the first duffel to survive multiple expeditions with very little damage other than a couple of tiny holes, a little fading, some dust, a fair bit of hair and a few smears of yak dung. I'll bet the airport dogs have a field day when my bag comes through!

The fabric is the same as MONT use on their travel packs. It is very strong high denier nylon with a PU coating for water repellence. The straps are of very good quality nylon webbing, and the plastic buckles are very tough. Zips are coarse tooth YKK with kiss sliders for added security.

But a duffel is only half what it's made from. If it's hard to pack then it's no good, but MONT have made this duffel exceptionally easy to pack – and big! It fits everything I need as a Mountain Guide just nicely. The zip is a U shape, which opens the top flap of the bag, rather than along it's length. I managed to pack in under 20 mins! That's a feat which normally takes at least 40 with a "normal" zip format – half of which it seems is spent trying to close the darn thing!

So far the Cargo 150 has survived a grand total of 16 days on a yak. That's a lot when you consider a duffel bag can be easily destroyed in less than 5 minutes! Let's see how long we can keep this one alive for!!