SLOT Canyon 26L Backpack Review
Slot USA is in interesting company. In a time when most companies are aggressively plying their wares on social media, or placing products with influencers and gear websites for review, Slot have stayed nearly completely under the radar. Maybe for good reason, as their raison d'etre must be hard to explain in a reel or tiktok.
Created by two family members that have worked in the industry for the likes of Black Diamond, The North Face, and Yeti (all companies with a big media and social presence), Slot have focused its brand on the most niche of niche activities, canyoneering, and to a lesser extent, climbing.
Canyoneering, you say? From outwardbound.org "Canyoneering is the exploration of a canyon from point A to point B using a range of techniques that include hiking, scrambling, sliding, stemming, chimneying and rappelling. Imagine extreme hiking with a harness, a helmet and appropriate rope systems."
Niche.
I first stumbled across Slot USA (SLOT? Slot USA? Slot Bags? It's unclear) via this Carryology article, which devoted two paragraphs to their bags, and included the following line which grabbed my attention: "Some of the big players in the backpack world could learn a lot from Slot as these are hands down the best designed shoulder straps on any bag I’ve ever used."
Colour me intrigued.
The Canyon 26L in the 2022 colourway caught my attention, and i went to hand over my deniros.
Bup Bowwwwww.
They don't ship internationally.
Oh well, scratch that bag off the list. I proceeded to forget about this brand.
Fast forward several months, and we have some friends coming to visit from they USA. "Is there anything you want to get sent to us and we can bring over for you?" they ask.
Cue my head popping out of the sand like a Meerkat.
A day later a 26L was US Postal Servicing its way to their place, and I now had to wait a few agonising weeks for them to arrive.
When it finally arrived and I busted it out, my friends from the USA were confused. "Why did you want this bag so bad?" They pawed around it, opening everything up. "It doesnt have a proper laptop sleeve? There arent any bottle holders on the outside? This bag is terrible!"
They obviously didnt get it.
First impressions? Wow thats a big empty hole of a bag. There is only one zippered section inside the main compartment. Slot makes no bones about it, this is not an EDC bag with a million compartments to hold every pen, charger, cable, and device that you will need on your daily urban missions. Well guess what Slot, it is now!
I tried it on and was instantly smitten. Those Carryology guys weren't lying, this bag clings to your back like a Koala that is both freezing and really missed you.
I’m not a canyoneer by any stretch of the imagination. I’m a 44 year old father of two boys, that works a desk job in IT. The most adventurous i get to be is on a trail run, or dragging the kids onto a very rare bush walk. But I do my best to embrace the aventurier spirit. I accept at this stage of my life, the adventures don’t have to be to a mountain peak, but just along the local walking trail.
Still, it doesn’t mean you don’t need a bag that couldn’t take you to the top of a mountain (and hopefully back down again).
The Slot Canyon 26L at first glance looks more than capable. Let’s start with the support system.
The straps don’t look particularly fancy, but once on the back, there are zero pressure points or a real consciousness of having a load on your back at all. It distributes that well. That can only be a good thing when it’s on your back for hours on end, or just carrying the whole family's individual water bottles on the local trail. Included with the bag are sternum and waist straps, both coming with the little elasticised loops to keep all the flappy end pieces out of the way.
Included along the straps, and this comes under the ‘they thought of everything’ category, are what look like PALS webbing but much larger (for carabiners), hook and loop material sections to tie down a hydration tube, dedicated sections for the sternum strap to be adjusted higher and lower, and finally two hardened plastic loops, that i can only presume are for threading rope when canyoning or climbing (or maybe they are for carabiners? Again the website doesn't really say, or maybe they are leaving it up to you).
They certainly aren’t the ultra padded strap you would get on something like a Goruck, but it would seem that they just don’t need to be.
The back of the bag has three distinct padded sections, with three distinct channels between them for ‘airflow’. How much air really flows in these channels when the bag is snug up against your clothing, and whether the flow has any benefit in cooling your back at all, remains to be seen. What those breaks in the padding do allow however is the bag to mould to the contour of your back, providing the aforementioned huggy bear feeling. This is not a bag you wear long and low down at your waist, like a third year arts student walking from the train station to university in their crocs and camo cargo pants. It sits high and tight on your back.
The channels between the padding also mean the back isn’t one solid piece. While the bag will stand on its own, when the main zipper is open, the top section of the bag folds back over that channel, like a drunk man’s head lolling back when he falls asleep on his feet. It’s a look.
There is a grab handle at the top of the bag, but again they have trodden their own path with its execution. It is constructed out of bright red nylon strapping that is connected to the bag at the main strap joints. It is then shrink wrapped in high density plastic, stiffening the entire piece into a hard loop that sits proud of the bag. It makes it much easier to grab the bag on the fly, and makes for a much firmer hold than just a squashable piece of fabric. This is seriously the nicest grab handle you have ever picked up a backpack with. The downside is that when wearing the bag, it can flop over and rest against your upper back/neck.
That is the longest paragraph anyone has ever written about the grab handle on a backpack.
There is a waist strap connected at the bottom junctions of the main strap, but it’s honestly just two pieces of strapping with a plastic buckle. It took me a week to discover that it is totally removable, which i promptly did.
Moving over to the main exterior. What separates their pack design is the overall slickness. Most hiking or climbing bags you will see from the likes of North Face or Patagonia have straps and loops and doodads hanging all over the main body. Now imagine trying to scrape through a thin rock crevasse with all those flappy bits trying their best to hang you up like Frodo trying to escape Shelob’s scary ass spiderweb.
Slot eschews most of those accoutrements, and lets the function take over. They do have loops and attachement points on their bags, but they are mainly on the straps in reach when wearing the bag, and are only there to serve the main purpose: canyoneering and climbing.
The main face of the bag is made of heavy duty coated truck tarpaulin material, totally waterproof, while the main body is either polyester or nylon. There are zero zippers or storage on the front of the bag, just a zipped sunglasses space on the top, which is just big enough to hold sunglasses, keys, AirPods. Its an extremely solid construction, and the bag retains its shape regardless of whether its full or empty, unlike some bags (ahem, Goruck) that look like a melted candle on your back when they are only half full.
Despite babying the hell out of this bag for the first two weeks, i still managed to get marks all over the white tarpaulin. It’s white, what do you expect. But, i discovered that a magic eraser removes all marks perfectly. Huzzah! The stylised S at the top has already started to scratch off, while curiously the branding at the bottom, which rests on the ground, is still pristine.
Water resistance: Slot have provided drainage holes on this bag, which is not something you would normally see. The reasoning being that you will be canyoning under waterfalls, in streams, or through rockpools, and you want your bag to drain quickly. They make no claims on the water proofness of the bag, however this nylon/tarpaulin mix is seen fairly commonly in the bag world, and will be water resistant enough for most of your daily needs. If you were hiking with this bag though, i would recommend either getting a rain cover for it, or dry-bagging your precious items.
Several months on, and the Slot Backpack is still working perfectly. The white tarpaulin gets dirty, then mostly cleans itself back up as it comes into contact with stuff like my car seats (presumably that means my car seats are getting slowly dirtier from the bag). It still carries like it is filled with helium, and in general, is just a lightweight bag.
Is it perfect? Unsurprisingly, no. Its really not a laptop bag, and the hydration slot is just a super thin piece of nylon separating the rest of the bag. I feel like this will be the first thing to tear from me jamming my ipad into an already stuffed bag.
The chunky PALS on the shoulder straps doesnt extend far enough down. It stops and a teeny tiny lightweight tabbing starts after that, which is used to hold and adjust chest strap (that i never use). I have a Peak Design Capture clip for my camera, and it only fits on the chunky molle, and as such has to sit very high on the shoulder strap. This makes it quite difficult to snap my camera into the clip, and when its there, i could nearly lean my head over and rest it on the back of the camera.
Still, this is my trying to adapt a backpack to my use case, when the designers claimed from the outset that this was a singularly focussed bag.
In that, i feel they have easily succeeded.
I did contact Slot directly through their webpage, and enquired again to see if they would ship out to Australia. I got zero reply from them, which is too bad. They have made great bags, but the website hasnt been updated in months, and it seems like a bit of a dead or dying company. All of their stock has been on sale for several months now, so i would recommend you get some of their packs while you can (especially if you live in the USA).
Coming soon: I attempt to put the Slot Canyon 26L through its paces, with an all day hike to Kosciusko, Australia's tallest (not very tall) peak.