SMD packing pods review by Jim Sutherland

 Organizing the cooking kit in a packing pod

What is this post about:

This post is to showcase our SMD packing pods, what they are designed to be used for, and how I have used them over the last few years.

Designed to help organize your backpack, SMD packing pods have a large zippered entry to keep your clothing, food, or gear laid out nicely where you can see everything inside. No need to pull everything out to get something or dig around to the bottom of the bag. Fully taped seams add water resistance to keep your things dry.’ - SixMoonDesigns website

In any one week I can switch items of gear from one pack to another depending upon what kind of riding I am doing, eg.  local trail riding for an hour or so on my mountain bike, longer rides away from Grantown on Spey on my adventure bike or a multi-day bikepacking trip.  This winter I also used my packing pods when ski touring or mountaineering in the mountains.

As everyone knows, switching gear from one location to another is often a recipe for forgetting, or even worse, losing an important piece such as a multitool or spare food.  So I started to use my Ambassador pack of SMD packing pods to organize items for storage in a tray in our utility room before transferring to whatever pack or piece of bike luggage I was using next.  I use one set of green multi-sized SMD packing pods and three or four Backpacking SMD packing pods.

I have chosen to let my photographs of these amazing packing pods do the talking with hopefully the captions filling in the gaps for folks.

I color code...blue jacket in a blue packing pod for example.

Keep zips near the top to give quick access without removing the packing pod from the main pack.

My smallest pod works brilliantly in a bikepacking cockpit bag.

The packing pods are great for storing and swapping ingredients around when cooking.

The pods are great to organize in a bikepacking frame bag as they squish up nicely.

Quickly accessing packing pod contents as temperatures cool.

SMD packing pods on the mountain bike trails.

Using packing pods to make a compartmentalized arrangement.