Author’s note: I do not mean to minimize the negative effects that actual cults have had on many people. Please take the following with the levity with which it was penned.

“I don’t know what you mean by “cult,” just because I own 3 Durston tents and am saving for another …”

— Rob Rice, posted on the Durston Gearheads Facebook group

My inadvertent interactions with an outdoor gear “cult” began innocently enough.

For the first time in more than a decade, I was searching for a new backpack. Like many of my trail-tromping contemporaries—especially those experiencing age-related knee and lower-back issues—I opted to explore the ever-expanding list of ultralight options, which eventually led me down a rabbit hole populated by a shocking number of niche and cottage manufacturers—the gear equivalent of craft breweries—most of which did not exist when I last embarked on a pack hunt.

My search eventually led to a third-party Facebook group called Durston Gearheads, which, according to the group itself, is dedicated to “owners and fans of Durston gear products.”

As an ultralight neophyte who rarely shops for new gear, I had never heard of Durston, but as I researched the company, one word kept coming up again and again: cult. From what I read, it seemed like people who loved Durston gear were borderline fanatical.

Even though I own no Durston gear, last April I joined Durston Gearheads and, after sitting on the sidelines observing the group‘s dialogue for a few weeks (during which time the word “cult” appeared many times, mostly in self-deprecating jest), posted this: “I would like to get some ideas from members on this whole cult thing—what it is, how it got started, how it differs from devotees of other gear brands, whatever can be thought of and articulated.”

In very short order, I received 165 answers, many of which were long, heartfelt homages to Durston gear—which consists primarily of a highly regarded line of tents, called X-Mids, and several types of ultralight packs. More than that, though, commenters frequently brought up company founder and owner Dan Durston, who regularly joins the group to answer questions about his products.

There was not so much as a hint of snark, negativity, or pushback within those comments, which, as any user of Facebook knows full well, is refreshingly unusual. Still, the level of fandom on display was, let’s say, jaw-dropping.

“I don’t feel like I’m a cult member, but I woke up one morning and suddenly realized I own not one, not two, but three Durston tents,” wrote member Rolf Gunnar Asphaug.

Another wrote that she’s invited strangers from the group over to her home to check out her Durston tent before they purchased their own: “It’s like if we were luring people into vans with puppies and candy, except once you’re in the van there’s legit puppies and candy inside,” wrote Sara Ivy.

It made me wonder if these people had already emptied their back accounts, broken off relationships with family and friends, and moved into their X-Mids in a fenced compound in western Canada, next to Durston’s humble corporate headquarters.

It is unclear who first referred to Durston fans as a cult and when. Both Dan Durston and Jon Sweet, administrator of Durston Gearheads, vaguely remember—though neither can put their finger on an exact date or circumstance—when a follower of a rival Facebook group wrote something along the lines of “wow, I see Durston referenced so often, it’s almost like they are a cult.”

Sweet said the first in-house reference was in early 2021, when the world was reeling from the pandemic.

“Given the impacts to the supply chain during the pandemic, it was sometimes eight, 12, or 14 months between releases of the next batch of Durston tents,” Sweet said. “That was when the camaraderie of the group really coalesced. Members were creating memes and posting photos of their tents in wild places all over the world. Dan was ever present. That was when the ‘cult’ term really started getting used more. ”

At the center of this dedicated following stands Dan Durston, a 2017 Pacific Crest Trail thru-hiker who was the first person to yo-yo Canada’s 700-mile Great Divide Trail. Durston, a lifelong resident of British Columbia, had spent a lot of pack-toting time thinking not about the usual thru-hiker fantasies—pizza, ice cream, beer, and a hot shower—but, rather, about gear design. (For a cult leader, Durston, who has zilch in the way of formal engineering or design background, comes across as a tad nerd-ish. Fire, brimstone and doomsday prophesies are not his MO.) Instead, as he pounded out the miles, his mind wandered toward what he considered to be the many conceptual shortcomings of the equipment he and his fellow long-distance hikers carried.

A long-time ultralight devotee, Durston had personally made a few pieces of gear—a tent, a backpack and rain pants—using what he calls “first principles design”—which in a nutshell means a willingness to re-envision gear from the ground up rather than making improvements by tweaking existing designs.

In 2018, Massdrop, a San Francisco-based e-commerce company provided Durston with a complimentary set of trekking poles. At the time, Durston says, he was a “minor blogger in the hiking world who was also active on gear forums like backpackinglite.com.”

His posts caught the attention of several employees at Massdrop who had been   tasked with developing unique gear for the company’s online ultralight backpacking community. They asked Durston if had any gear concepts percolating. He pitched what to this day remains Durston’s signature product: the groundbreaking X-Mid tent design.

“It had never occurred to me to make products for other people,” Durston told me in June. “I had an idea for what has become our X-Mid tent. It was something I had been thinking about for years—how to make a trekking-pole tent simpler, lighter, and more user friendly.”

Durston had already decided to make his own version of the tent, but when MassDrop offered to manufacture, market and distribute his design, Durston said “hell yeah,” figuring that, at worst, he would get a free tent that was professionally produced.

The X-Mid, which features an offset trekking pole pitch that requires fewer stakes than most trekking pole shelters, got great responses, according to Durston, creating a buzz in online ultralight forums like r/Ultralight.

When MassDrop (now just named Drop) exited gear-manufacturing to focus solely on electronics, Durston decided to form his own company. He had no idea whatsoever that, within a few years, his eponymous operation would enjoy cultlike popularity, or that he would be its de facto guru.

Though Durston was heartened by the sudden success of the X-Mid, there were early-era issues that were not directly related to the pandemic. First, he had a full time “real” gig, working as a wildlife biologist, who specialized in statistical analysis for fish and water quality.

The other issue—which in a circuitous manner helped establish the Durston mythos—was product availability, or, more accurately, a lack thereof. Durston was having trouble keeping his tents—then his only offering—in stock. Each updated batch of X-Mids sold out basically before hitting the Internet shelves. Part of that stemmed from the fact that he was continuously tweaking his designs pretty much in real time, and part of it was that he was in the process of learning how to set up and run a business—choosing materials, establishing reliable sources, and remembering to put a Durston sticker in every box.

People began to talk online via Reddit and Facebook about the pants-wetting anticipation associated with waiting—sometimes for months on end—for the latest incarnation of the X-Mid to drop. What is most striking is that those people did indeed wait, rather than purchasing products from one of Durston’s many rival companies.

“Because I knew I would be tweaking my designs, I did not ever want to order, say, a two-year supply of tents just so I would not run out,” Durston told me. “So, I’d order a few months’ supply, listen to input from customers, and take that into consideration before I ordered the next batch.”

That willingness to not only listen but to react accordingly did a lot to solidify the loyalty of his fan base. Dan Durston’s reputation as a human being began to match or even exceed the reputation of his products, which were selling well.

Then, in 2020, a case of brand-building fortuity dropped directly into Dan Durston’s lap: Jon Sweet, who, to this day, has no formal affiliation with Durston, the company, or Durston, the man. Sweet is nothing more than a diehard fan of Dan Durston and the gear he makes who, one day asked, via email, if there was anything he could do to help Durston grow and prosper.

Sweet is a Bay-area resident who has worked for more than 20 years as a product manager (currently for a financial services outfit called Empower), a vocation he describes as “overseeing what we’re doing, when and why.”

He first became aware of the X-Mid when it was still being sold via MassDrop.

“I was instantly intrigued,” he said. “The design was revolutionary. I began to investigate the company and Durston himself. I was very impressed by both. Dan came across as a very humble guy who was passionate about his tents.”

Sweet, an avid runner who has completed the John Muir Trail, ordered an X-Mid.

“The last time I was that enthusiastic about a new product was when Apple came out with the iPod,” said Sweet, who admits to owning three X-Mids, which I’m certain remain permanently erected in his man cave. “At the time the iPod was released, it was underappreciated how far ahead Apple was compared to the other companies. It was sort of the same when I got my first X-Mid.” So, he contacted Durston.

“We talked a lot about gear and future opportunities and, at the end of the conversation, I offered to help him with some small things like materials procurement,” Sweet said. It was then that Sweet posed the idea of launching the Durston Gearheads Facebook group, which he did in October 2020. Neither he nor Durston expected much. Sweet figured that, if he got a few hundred followers, “that would be great.”

“I got Dan to sign up, so he could add his voice, which was important,” Sweet said. “I would do most of the early posts. I tried to be witty and funny, but also helpful and encouraging. More people started signing up and posting.”

As evidenced by the request I made to its membership last April, Durston Gearheads are engaged. They respond, whether a post is about how to correctly pitch an X-Mid atop a wooden campground platform or nothing more than showing off a set of photos of a Durston tent or pack being deployed in Tasmania or the Scottish Highlands.

The responses are overwhelmingly supportive. I have combed through hundreds of Durston Gearheads posts and have seen nary a syllable that can be interpreted less positively than “Though we might occasionally disagree on proper tent guyline tension, we are all part of this cult thing.”

As of the time of publication, Durston Gearheads has nearly 14,000 subscribers, which, according to Sweet, is probably the most for any third-party group focused on a single craft/cottage outdoor gear company. (I have not been able to independently verify this.)

Sweet said he hunted down two two-month periods when Durston Gearheads had more posts than the Ultralight Backpacking group. Even if that’s a case of statistical cherry-picking, it’s still impressive.

I recently eyeballed the official Facebook group for a company that would surely be considered a direct competitor to Durston. That group has 32,000 followers. Almost all the content comes from the company itself, which makes a few posts per week, most of which are heavy with polish but short on stoke. As far as engagement, the last five posts appearing on that company’s Facebook page had only three comments. The last five posts I observed on the Durston Gearheads page garnered 247 comments, many of which were themselves responses to previous responses. It was like being part of a rambling discourse taking place in a trailside watering hole among people wearing tattered garments and battered footwear.

The dedication of the Durston Gearheads has been institutionalized by two collateral icons: the color “sage” and sometimes-elusive Durston stickers. Both are to Durston’s fans what rubber duckies are to Jeep owners or friendship bracelets are to Swifties.

According to Durston, when his first batch of X-Mids was ready to be produced, the manufacturing company told him his color choices were limited to red, blue, or sage. He thought the first two colors looked awful, so, by default, he chose sage, which has become the official color of the Durston community, with followers making frequent online reference to sage, while posting images of themselves wearing sage-colored clothes or holding sage-colored bric-a-brac.

The second icon is the Durston sticker. In the world of outdoor gear, where company stickers are handed out by the bucketful and crowd vehicles, trailhead bulletin boards, and Nalgene bottles, having a sticker would hardly seem like a cult-worthy factor. But the Durston Gearheads have turned the stickers into their equivalent of gang tattoos. Not everyone qualifies. You must purchase a Durston product. And, even then, hope for the best.

“We’re still a small company with only a couple of employees, mostly family members,” Durston told me. “We sometimes forget to include stickers in our boxes when we ship products. So people started joking about how only a select few of our customers were worthy of the stickers. They became sought-after items. People have jokingly offered them for sale on eBay.”

“One of our Facebook group members posted that, if you buy a sticker, you would get a free tent,” Sweet said. “It really snowballed.”

This is the kind of thing that companies pay good money to consultants to create, usually artificially. It is brand loyalty that can’t be bought.

A common Durston Gearhead post theme centers around what happens when one member of the cult runs into another in the wild, an event that’s becoming more common as the company’s products proliferate across the Pacific Crest and Appalachian trails.

Those posts depict scenes such as this: One Durston tent owner sees another X-Mid pitched on a far ridge and runs full throttle through a snake-infested bog to exchange a secret handshake with a fellow Durstonite. There are often photos of Durston customers congregating in backcountry settings for no other reason than they all bed down in tents colored sage.

To underscore that observation, here’s a recent quote from the Durston Gearheads Facebook page, made by an avowed cultist named Carmen Hays Brown:

In a recent post there was someone who said we should have a phrase we call out to be able to talk to other X-Mid users, My husband and I came up with this while on trail last night:

“May the Sage bless your hike” 

And the proper response is:

“Long Live the Durston!” 

I am not a member of the Durston cult. I own no Durston gear, which now includes eight varieties of tents, three backpacks, trekking poles, and some ancillary offerings. I have only ever laid eyes on Durston products a handful of times. I personally do not bleed sage.

That said, I am a big fan of the Durston Gearheads Facebook group and eyeball it on a near-daily basis: because it is fun, witty, informative, supportive, passionate, and it takes me to places I otherwise would not go. It’s not just someone trying to sell you a tent or backpack, though that is certainly a big part of it. Sweet said as much when he offered to help Dan Durston grow and prosper. And that’s OK.

Durston Gearheads reminds me, in a social-media world thick with every conceivable manner of vitriol and divisiveness, that while our choices in gear are an important part of the overall hiking experience, they are only a small component of the equation in the end. We are all members of a larger cult, one defined by a shared urge to throw upon our back a pack that is sometimes too heavy and sometimes too light and head as far as our legs will carry us into the backcountry. And whether that pack is made by Durston or someone else, it’s an opportunity for connection, a way for kindred spirits to recognize one another on the trail and say, “You are not alone.”

By the way, I guess I should point out that I have yet to decide on a new ultralight backpack.

John Fayhee has been writing for Backpacker since 1986. His latest book, “A Long Tangent: Musings by an old man & his young dog hiking every day for a year,” was released last September by Mimbres Press. He lives in New Mexico’s Gila Country.

Author’s note: I do not mean to minimize the negative effects that actual cults have had on many people. Please take the following with the levity with which it was penned.

“I don’t know what you mean by “cult,” just because I own 3 Durston tents and am saving for another …”

— Rob Rice, posted on the Durston Gearheads Facebook group

My inadvertent interactions with an outdoor gear “cult” began innocently enough.

For the first time in more than a decade, I was searching for a new backpack. Like many of my trail-tromping contemporaries—especially those experiencing age-related knee and lower-back issues—I opted to explore the ever-expanding list of ultralight options, which eventually led me down a rabbit hole populated by a shocking number of niche and cottage manufacturers—the gear equivalent of craft breweries—most of which did not exist when I last embarked on a pack hunt.

My search eventually led to a third-party Facebook group called Durston Gearheads, which, according to the group itself, is dedicated to “owners and fans of Durston gear products.”

As an ultralight neophyte who rarely shops for new gear, I had never heard of Durston, but as I researched the company, one word kept coming up again and again: cult. From what I read, it seemed like people who loved Durston gear were borderline fanatical.

Even though I own no Durston gear, last April I joined Durston Gearheads and, after sitting on the sidelines observing the group‘s dialogue for a few weeks (during which time the word “cult” appeared many times, mostly in self-deprecating jest), posted this: “I would like to get some ideas from members on this whole cult thing—what it is, how it got started, how it differs from devotees of other gear brands, whatever can be thought of and articulated.”

In very short order, I received 165 answers, many of which were long, heartfelt homages to Durston gear—which consists primarily of a highly regarded line of tents, called X-Mids, and several types of ultralight packs. More than that, though, commenters frequently brought up company founder and owner Dan Durston, who regularly joins the group to answer questions about his products.

There was not so much as a hint of snark, negativity, or pushback within those comments, which, as any user of Facebook knows full well, is refreshingly unusual. Still, the level of fandom on display was, let’s say, jaw-dropping.

“I don’t feel like I’m a cult member, but I woke up one morning and suddenly realized I own not one, not two, but three Durston tents,” wrote member Rolf Gunnar Asphaug.

Another wrote that she’s invited strangers from the group over to her home to check out her Durston tent before they purchased their own: “It’s like if we were luring people into vans with puppies and candy, except once you’re in the van there’s legit puppies and candy inside,” wrote Sara Ivy.

It made me wonder if these people had already emptied their back accounts, broken off relationships with family and friends, and moved into their X-Mids in a fenced compound in western Canada, next to Durston’s humble corporate headquarters.

It is unclear who first referred to Durston fans as a cult and when. Both Dan Durston and Jon Sweet, administrator of Durston Gearheads, vaguely remember—though neither can put their finger on an exact date or circumstance—when a follower of a rival Facebook group wrote something along the lines of “wow, I see Durston referenced so often, it’s almost like they are a cult.”

Sweet said the first in-house reference was in early 2021, when the world was reeling from the pandemic.

“Given the impacts to the supply chain during the pandemic, it was sometimes eight, 12, or 14 months between releases of the next batch of Durston tents,” Sweet said. “That was when the camaraderie of the group really coalesced. Members were creating memes and posting photos of their tents in wild places all over the world. Dan was ever present. That was when the ‘cult’ term really started getting used more. ”

At the center of this dedicated following stands Dan Durston, a 2017 Pacific Crest Trail thru-hiker who was the first person to yo-yo Canada’s 700-mile Great Divide Trail. Durston, a lifelong resident of British Columbia, had spent a lot of pack-toting time thinking not about the usual thru-hiker fantasies—pizza, ice cream, beer, and a hot shower—but, rather, about gear design. (For a cult leader, Durston, who has zilch in the way of formal engineering or design background, comes across as a tad nerd-ish. Fire, brimstone and doomsday prophesies are not his MO.) Instead, as he pounded out the miles, his mind wandered toward what he considered to be the many conceptual shortcomings of the equipment he and his fellow long-distance hikers carried.

A long-time ultralight devotee, Durston had personally made a few pieces of gear—a tent, a backpack and rain pants—using what he calls “first principles design”—which in a nutshell means a willingness to re-envision gear from the ground up rather than making improvements by tweaking existing designs.

In 2018, Massdrop, a San Francisco-based e-commerce company provided Durston with a complimentary set of trekking poles. At the time, Durston says, he was a “minor blogger in the hiking world who was also active on gear forums like backpackinglite.com.”

His posts caught the attention of several employees at Massdrop who had been   tasked with developing unique gear for the company’s online ultralight backpacking community. They asked Durston if had any gear concepts percolating. He pitched what to this day remains Durston’s signature product: the groundbreaking X-Mid tent design.

“It had never occurred to me to make products for other people,” Durston told me in June. “I had an idea for what has become our X-Mid tent. It was something I had been thinking about for years—how to make a trekking-pole tent simpler, lighter, and more user friendly.”

Durston had already decided to make his own version of the tent, but when MassDrop offered to manufacture, market and distribute his design, Durston said “hell yeah,” figuring that, at worst, he would get a free tent that was professionally produced.

The X-Mid, which features an offset trekking pole pitch that requires fewer stakes than most trekking pole shelters, got great responses, according to Durston, creating a buzz in online ultralight forums like r/Ultralight.

When MassDrop (now just named Drop) exited gear-manufacturing to focus solely on electronics, Durston decided to form his own company. He had no idea whatsoever that, within a few years, his eponymous operation would enjoy cultlike popularity, or that he would be its de facto guru.

Though Durston was heartened by the sudden success of the X-Mid, there were early-era issues that were not directly related to the pandemic. First, he had a full time “real” gig, working as a wildlife biologist, who specialized in statistical analysis for fish and water quality.

The other issue—which in a circuitous manner helped establish the Durston mythos—was product availability, or, more accurately, a lack thereof. Durston was having trouble keeping his tents—then his only offering—in stock. Each updated batch of X-Mids sold out basically before hitting the Internet shelves. Part of that stemmed from the fact that he was continuously tweaking his designs pretty much in real time, and part of it was that he was in the process of learning how to set up and run a business—choosing materials, establishing reliable sources, and remembering to put a Durston sticker in every box.

People began to talk online via Reddit and Facebook about the pants-wetting anticipation associated with waiting—sometimes for months on end—for the latest incarnation of the X-Mid to drop. What is most striking is that those people did indeed wait, rather than purchasing products from one of Durston’s many rival companies.

“Because I knew I would be tweaking my designs, I did not ever want to order, say, a two-year supply of tents just so I would not run out,” Durston told me. “So, I’d order a few months’ supply, listen to input from customers, and take that into consideration before I ordered the next batch.”

That willingness to not only listen but to react accordingly did a lot to solidify the loyalty of his fan base. Dan Durston’s reputation as a human being began to match or even exceed the reputation of his products, which were selling well.

Then, in 2020, a case of brand-building fortuity dropped directly into Dan Durston’s lap: Jon Sweet, who, to this day, has no formal affiliation with Durston, the company, or Durston, the man. Sweet is nothing more than a diehard fan of Dan Durston and the gear he makes who, one day asked, via email, if there was anything he could do to help Durston grow and prosper.

Sweet is a Bay-area resident who has worked for more than 20 years as a product manager (currently for a financial services outfit called Empower), a vocation he describes as “overseeing what we’re doing, when and why.”

He first became aware of the X-Mid when it was still being sold via MassDrop.

“I was instantly intrigued,” he said. “The design was revolutionary. I began to investigate the company and Durston himself. I was very impressed by both. Dan came across as a very humble guy who was passionate about his tents.”

Sweet, an avid runner who has completed the John Muir Trail, ordered an X-Mid.

“The last time I was that enthusiastic about a new product was when Apple came out with the iPod,” said Sweet, who admits to owning three X-Mids, which I’m certain remain permanently erected in his man cave. “At the time the iPod was released, it was underappreciated how far ahead Apple was compared to the other companies. It was sort of the same when I got my first X-Mid.” So, he contacted Durston.

“We talked a lot about gear and future opportunities and, at the end of the conversation, I offered to help him with some small things like materials procurement,” Sweet said. It was then that Sweet posed the idea of launching the Durston Gearheads Facebook group, which he did in October 2020. Neither he nor Durston expected much. Sweet figured that, if he got a few hundred followers, “that would be great.”

“I got Dan to sign up, so he could add his voice, which was important,” Sweet said. “I would do most of the early posts. I tried to be witty and funny, but also helpful and encouraging. More people started signing up and posting.”

As evidenced by the request I made to its membership last April, Durston Gearheads are engaged. They respond, whether a post is about how to correctly pitch an X-Mid atop a wooden campground platform or nothing more than showing off a set of photos of a Durston tent or pack being deployed in Tasmania or the Scottish Highlands.

The responses are overwhelmingly supportive. I have combed through hundreds of Durston Gearheads posts and have seen nary a syllable that can be interpreted less positively than “Though we might occasionally disagree on proper tent guyline tension, we are all part of this cult thing.”

As of the time of publication, Durston Gearheads has nearly 14,000 subscribers, which, according to Sweet, is probably the most for any third-party group focused on a single craft/cottage outdoor gear company. (I have not been able to independently verify this.)

Sweet said he hunted down two two-month periods when Durston Gearheads had more posts than the Ultralight Backpacking group. Even if that’s a case of statistical cherry-picking, it’s still impressive.

I recently eyeballed the official Facebook group for a company that would surely be considered a direct competitor to Durston. That group has 32,000 followers. Almost all the content comes from the company itself, which makes a few posts per week, most of which are heavy with polish but short on stoke. As far as engagement, the last five posts appearing on that company’s Facebook page had only three comments. The last five posts I observed on the Durston Gearheads page garnered 247 comments, many of which were themselves responses to previous responses. It was like being part of a rambling discourse taking place in a trailside watering hole among people wearing tattered garments and battered footwear.

The dedication of the Durston Gearheads has been institutionalized by two collateral icons: the color “sage” and sometimes-elusive Durston stickers. Both are to Durston’s fans what rubber duckies are to Jeep owners or friendship bracelets are to Swifties.

According to Durston, when his first batch of X-Mids was ready to be produced, the manufacturing company told him his color choices were limited to red, blue, or sage. He thought the first two colors looked awful, so, by default, he chose sage, which has become the official color of the Durston community, with followers making frequent online reference to sage, while posting images of themselves wearing sage-colored clothes or holding sage-colored bric-a-brac.

The second icon is the Durston sticker. In the world of outdoor gear, where company stickers are handed out by the bucketful and crowd vehicles, trailhead bulletin boards, and Nalgene bottles, having a sticker would hardly seem like a cult-worthy factor. But the Durston Gearheads have turned the stickers into their equivalent of gang tattoos. Not everyone qualifies. You must purchase a Durston product. And, even then, hope for the best.

“We’re still a small company with only a couple of employees, mostly family members,” Durston told me. “We sometimes forget to include stickers in our boxes when we ship products. So people started joking about how only a select few of our customers were worthy of the stickers. They became sought-after items. People have jokingly offered them for sale on eBay.”

“One of our Facebook group members posted that, if you buy a sticker, you would get a free tent,” Sweet said. “It really snowballed.”

This is the kind of thing that companies pay good money to consultants to create, usually artificially. It is brand loyalty that can’t be bought.

A common Durston Gearhead post theme centers around what happens when one member of the cult runs into another in the wild, an event that’s becoming more common as the company’s products proliferate across the Pacific Crest and Appalachian trails.

Those posts depict scenes such as this: One Durston tent owner sees another X-Mid pitched on a far ridge and runs full throttle through a snake-infested bog to exchange a secret handshake with a fellow Durstonite. There are often photos of Durston customers congregating in backcountry settings for no other reason than they all bed down in tents colored sage.

To underscore that observation, here’s a recent quote from the Durston Gearheads Facebook page, made by an avowed cultist named Carmen Hays Brown:

In a recent post there was someone who said we should have a phrase we call out to be able to talk to other X-Mid users, My husband and I came up with this while on trail last night:

“May the Sage bless your hike” 

And the proper response is:

“Long Live the Durston!” 

I am not a member of the Durston cult. I own no Durston gear, which now includes eight varieties of tents, three backpacks, trekking poles, and some ancillary offerings. I have only ever laid eyes on Durston products a handful of times. I personally do not bleed sage.

That said, I am a big fan of the Durston Gearheads Facebook group and eyeball it on a near-daily basis: because it is fun, witty, informative, supportive, passionate, and it takes me to places I otherwise would not go. It’s not just someone trying to sell you a tent or backpack, though that is certainly a big part of it. Sweet said as much when he offered to help Dan Durston grow and prosper. And that’s OK.

Durston Gearheads reminds me, in a social-media world thick with every conceivable manner of vitriol and divisiveness, that while our choices in gear are an important part of the overall hiking experience, they are only a small component of the equation in the end. We are all members of a larger cult, one defined by a shared urge to throw upon our back a pack that is sometimes too heavy and sometimes too light and head as far as our legs will carry us into the backcountry. And whether that pack is made by Durston or someone else, it’s an opportunity for connection, a way for kindred spirits to recognize one another on the trail and say, “You are not alone.”

By the way, I guess I should point out that I have yet to decide on a new ultralight backpack.

John Fayhee has been writing for Backpacker since 1986. His latest book, “A Long Tangent: Musings by an old man & his young dog hiking every day for a year,” was released last September by Mimbres Press. He lives in New Mexico’s Gila Country.