Atlas Packs Athlete vs The North Face Recon Pack - Men's

Important: Choose the Adventure or Athlete hip belt – otherwise you will have literally no padding on your hips. I don’t recommend using the bag without a hipbelt either. The Adventure belt is more comfortable as it provides two layers of foam padding and a wider webbing and buckle – it’s also bigger and bulkier.

The back panel is also generously padded. The sections are broken up by horizontal seams and a central air channel running vertically across. It’s not meshed, but this hasn’t really affected comfort. In our experience, the weather and temperature play a more significant part in making our backs sweaty

Next up is the front compartment, where there’s more granular organization. From front to back, there are two mesh pockets, two liner pockets and a pen pocket, a wide zippered pocket, and a tablet pocket at the very back—a nice variety to have for different tech accessories. The compartment doesn’t extend all the way to the bottom of the bag. This is a good thing because it balances out the usable space between the different compartments, and we don’t have to fish too deeply in case something falls in

There’s a ton of detail to comb through in this backpack, so let’s dive in and do a little recon of our own.