With the stove love being shown here lately, I thought I'd share my new stove setup: a Snow Peak GigaPower stove coupled with a GSI Pinnacle Soloist.



First some background, this is my first backpacking stove. Stoves I've owned and used in the past, at least in my adult life, have been those geared towards car & family camping. I'm just getting into backpacking this year, but I also wanted something to use for camping with my son's Scout group (not nesessarily backpacking, but having all my gear in one bag is an advantage).

I was originally going to go for a white gas stove for a few reasons including cold temperature performance, past experience and the ability to refill the fuel bottle.

But in the end due to both price and compactness I ended up with this LPG stove; the cost for both the stove and cook set was $83 - a little less than just the white gas stove I was considering (MSR Simmerlite) and this combination also offered a much more compact set up than I could accomplish with the other stove. I also decided the performance of the LPG down to -10 C should be good enough for the situations I was currently planning for (the GigaPower Gold fuel I'm using is a 15% propane / 85% iso-butane mix).

I used this setup for the first time a few weeks back during a campout with my son's Scout group and I found it worked well for what I need and performed pretty much how I expected. The temperatures ranged from about -13 to +6 C over the course of the weekend and I really didn't experience any problems; though the coldest morning was the first so I was starting with a fresh canister and, just to ensure it worked okay, I had it sitting in a shallow dish of water.

It did get really windy at one point, but I just made a small wall out of firewood to block the wind while I was using the stove.

For packing and storage, the whole setup nests inside the 1.1 litre pot:



Here is a look at everything when the pot is unpacked:



The complete list of contents is:

• 1.1 litre pot
• 590ml insulated polypropylene cup
• lid with an integrated strainer which doubles as a sip-it lid for the mug (it snaps on); I found the sip-it hole also works well for pouring hot water
• telescoping foon
• stuff sack (which is waterproof, doubling as a small wash basin)
• Snow Peaks Gigapower stove & stove bag (the bag came with the cookset, the plastic box the stove came with was a bit too big to fit)
• 220g fuel canister

The telescoping foon actually worked pretty good for eating most of the food I made (mostly dehydrated meals), with the exception for the campfire steak we had one night.

For packing, the canister fits in the bottom of the pot and the stove & foon fit in the cup which is placed upside down on the fuel canister. The lid then tops everything off.



So far, this combination has performed well for me and I am very happy with the purchase.