Granite Gear Air Zip Sack Review

Granite Gear Air Zipsack, xx small to medium L to R.

To carry my food, cooking gear and other "smellable" items on backpacking trips, I use a medium-sized Granite Gear Air Zipsack with a LokSac Opsac zipper bag inside it.  The Air Zipsack is generally water proof and can be easily hung as a bear bag overnight.  The top zipper opening of the bag zipper makes access easy and prevents smaller items from spilling everywhere.  I use the medium size in blue (16 litres).  My food for a weekend backpacking trip plus my cook kit and health items (pretty much anything with an odor) easily fit inside both of these bags with a lot of room to spare.  These are very useful items to the ultralight backpacker, reducing extra bags and weight, increasing organization and providing odor safety so critters won't be chewing through your backpack in search of your goodies.  As a bonus, Granite Gear sells each Air Zipsack inside of a small zippered flat bag.  That flat zippered bag was perfect for my personal health kit and it contains a full-size toothbrush, micro toothpaste tube plus all my other overnight trip health items.

Locsac Opsac

The Loksac zipper bag I use inside the Air Zipsack prevents odors from leaking out of the food and other supplies inside, and they are also water proof.  I plan to add a few smaller sizes of these bags for water proofing individual items inside my backpack top pocket like my cell phone and wallet.

I originally purchased the medium-size Air Zipsack based on easily carrying a 5-6 day supply of food and snacks on longer backpacking trips.  It is a bit too large for the one or two overnight backpacking trips I'm currently taking, so for future trips on I plan on purchasing an extra-extra small sized Air Zipsack (5 litres) to use for carrying food and "smellables" plus my utensils.  My cooking pot is used to only boil water and won't need to be added to the food bag nightly for bear hanging.  My food will still be bear bag friendly and it will reduce my weight a little bit and make packing and unpacking my pack a little easier.  Inside the Air Zipsack I will still use a smaller odor-proof Opsac.  

I have read online about a few horror stories where Opsac bags failed during an outing and food got eaten by critters, so I plan to carry a spare Opsac for redundancy during future backpacking trips.  Critters in Florida include bears, raccoons, squirrels, mice and ants.