A Complete Assessment of the REI Traverse 32 Backpack

• Gender: Men’s (Women’s also available)
• Weigh 2 lbs 9 oz
• Access: top, side
• Frame: Internal, 360-degree wire frame
• Pockets: 7
• Floating top lid: Yes
• Load lifters: Yes
• Hip belt pockets: Yes
• Hydration Compatibility: Yes
• Rain Cover: Yes
• Materials: 300-denier recycled ripstop nylon
• Pros: Easy-to-reach water bottle pockets, side zipper access, pack mods(moveable compression straps)
• Cons: The sternum strap pops off and can be tricky to reseat quickly.

Backpack Storage and Organization

The Traverse 32 is a top-loading backpack with seven pockets: a stretch front pocket, two water bottle pockets, two hipbelt pockets, and two pockets in the floating lid, giving you lots of open and closed storage to organize your gear.

• The front stretch pocket is mainly made of solid fabric for increased durability. It has stretch side panels to enable expansion while still providing drainage, and a top webbing strap secures its contents.
• The side water bottle pockets are reachable because they’re positioned much lower and more forward behind the hipbelt instead of up along the sides of the pack bag. This is a signature feature on many of REI’s packs, and I can’t understand why other manufacturers haven’t copied it. It’s that good!
• The hip belt pockets are large, have beefy YKK zippers, and are covered with solid fabric for durability. They can easily hold a smartphone.
• The top lid has two pockets: one on top with a key fob and one underneath for a rain cover. The top lid is floating, meaning that it can be raised or lowered with four webbing straps. This allows you to secure gear to the pack underneath it, which is a great overload capability for carrying bulky items like rope, a foam pad, or a bear canister.

The main pack back also has a side zipper down the left side, making it very easy to extract gear buried deeply in the pack without taking everything out through the top. Side zippers like this are often found on winter packs and higher-volume backpacks, including hunting packs, and they’re a great convenience.

Backpack Frame and Suspension

The Traverse 32 is an internal frame backpack with a 360-degree perimeter wire frame that gives the pack a lively yet supportive feel. The hipbelt is permanently attached and anchored directly to the frame, so you get a very responsive carry with excellent load transfer to the hips and lumbar region of the pack.

The pack’s load lifters are anchored at the top of the frame so you can pull the pack closer to you and align it better with your hips, while the pack’s sternum straps slide down a front rail, making adjusting very easy. Unfortunately, that sternum strap makes it very difficult to attach accessory pockets to the shoulder straps because there are no attachment points (vertical or horizontal) below the hose keeper loops higher up.

In addition, and this is a showstopper, the sternum strap sliders tend to pop off their rails when torqued, rendering the sternum strap useless. You can reseat them with a little practice, but it’s super annoying, and there’s no real workaround short of sewing on a replacement strap with your industrial sewing machine. It’s hard to believe that 1) this pack made it out of production with such a significant usability flaw and 2) that it continues to be sold without modification. This problem is also unique to this backpack – other manufacturers successfully use the same sternum strap adjustment.

External Attachments and Compression

The Traverse 32 has daisy chains and webbing loops sewn into the side seams of the pack, allowing you to move its side compression straps up or down along the length of the pack. This makes it very easy to reconfigure the side straps to carry bulky gear, like snowshoes or a foam pad, and lash them to the sides of the pack. REI calls these movable compression straps “pack mods”, and offers them on several of their other backpacks, although it’s a feature you can often implement using cords and some cordage on many backpacks.

Assessment (Not a recommendation)

The REI Traverse 32 is a well-designed backpack if you want one for higher-mileage hikes or winter hiking and snowshoeing. Its bottle pockets are exceptionally easy to use, and the side zipper access removes a lot of frustration when using a top-loading backpack with a top lid pocket or a roll top, where you have to unpack to find anything inside completely. However, as I noted above, the sternum strap is prone to popping off, difficult to reseat, making the backpack fatally flawed, in my opinion. There are two similar backpacks that I recommend instead: the Deuter Speedlite 30 and the Gregory Zulu 30, which have similar features and can also be used year-round.

View at REI

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