During 2025 Australian Geographic ADVENTURE tested a wide range of outdoor gear, ranging from daypacks, hiking boots, sleeping gear, cameras and glasses, through to GPS smartwatches, hybrid vehicles, camp equipment and bike components. Here are eight of our favourite products of this year.
Mountain Designs Gecko Daypack
The Mountain Designs Gecko shows how, with its overtly robust construction, commonsense design, and excellent harness system, a product can stand out in an incredibly crowded market. In this case, the ubiquitous daypack segment. We’ve had the Gecko on review for nearly a year now and it’s never not been the first pack grabbed by staffers; it simply does the job, every time. For those looking for a daypack that has all you’ll need in terms of meeting its design remit – with a big dose of burly construction on top – look no further than the Gecko.
The North Face Offtrail Hike Mid GORE-TEX® boots
The North Face has dabbled in footwear for a long time, but it is a brand that offers products across nearly all outdoor gear market segments, so it could seem that the brand is just ‘covering its bases’ with the Offtrail Hike Mid GORE-TEX® boots. That assumption is incorrect. These boots proved excellent during testing. The combination of tough Cordura ripstop fabric in the uppers, reinforced heel cup, the brand’s super-sticky SURFACE CTRL rubber on the outsole (combined with SKYCORE rockguard) plus beefy lugs for optimum traction, made them (and their wearer) unstoppable on the tracks.
Sea to Summit four-season sleep system
This iconic Aussie outdoor brand has been in the business of producing top-notch gear for decades, with its sleep systems always a standout. This new four-season system is light in weight, tough in construction, and combines a comfy (and thick) mat, down-fill sleeping bag and pillow to offer comfort and warmth down to some pretty chilly conditions. Our test team liked it so much we still haven’t handed it back!
Julbo Rush
Choosing the right cycling eyewear is not easy, especially when you’d prefer a set of glasses that cover more than just that one activity, i.e., you can wear them post-ride. Julbo has been in the outdoor vision market for many years, with its snow sport eyewear, in particular, garnering an excellent reputation. We tested the Julbo Rush glasses for nine months and can confirm they follow suit, combining robust construction with the latest tech. In this case, it’s the anti-fog photochromic lens – dubbed the REACTIV High Contrast lens by Julbo – which adapts to the changing levels of external light to ensure optimum vision. They work, and they work bloody well, with the highlight for testers not just the lens clarity, but the excellent anti-fogging, too.
Garmin fēnix® 8 AMOLED
Recording your outdoor activities on a watch is not new to the point where you wonder if it can be improved. Well, as it turned out, it can, as Garmin has proved with this wrist-attached tech tour de force, the eighth incarnation of its highly regarded fēnix® GPS smartwatch. Standouts are many, and include even more fitness data on tap, better navigation, awesome battery life and that amazingly bright display, all proving that Garmin still leads the field (excuse the sporting pun) when it comes to wearable fitness and outdoor tech.
Amflow PL Carbon Pro
Amflow shook up the burgeoning e-mountain bike market when it released its first-ever model. The PL Carbon Pro is a veritable two-wheeled powerhouse, with its physically small, but overtly powerful Avinox motor providing full-power output (delivering 397 Watts per kilogram) while tipping the scales at just 2.53kg. Combine this output with an overall bike weight of between 19 and 20kg – usually reserved for the SL (Super Light) e-MTB classification – and it’s not hard to understand why the PL Carbon Pro has been so popular. We had the bike for four or so months and were very reluctant to give it back. For those looking for the best pedal-assist mountain biking for your bucks, look no further.
Nemo Moonlight Elite Reclining Backpacking Chair
When the Moonlite lobbed at our test headquarters we thought it was a small joke. After all, how could something packed down so compact do the job it was designed for? Well, it did, and it did it exceptionally well, to the point that a lot of the serious car-campers in our test team who love their bulky, “tough” camp chairs, became fervent converts to this lightweight, comfortable, easy to set up, piece of outdoor furniture. It’s the perfect snub to that old adage of size counts.
Reserve FrySauce wheelset
The name of this Reserve MTB wheelset? It references mixing tomato sauce and mayo together to pour over hot chips. However, don’t let that light-hearted tone take away (see what we did there) from how seriously impressive these wheels are. The FrySauce wheelset mixes a Reserve 30SL front wheel with a 30HD rear wheel. The idea is to provide more compliant ride/impact management up front (courtesy of the SL) while allowing for your bike’s rear having to deal with harder impacts (say, when you mistime that jump and land flat on your rear wheel). Our Editor put this wheelset to the ultimate test at this year’s BC Bike Race in Canada, and it performed with aplomb across seriously tough terrain for seven days.
