North Face Surge Review

Likes
The North Face Surge is a large, durable, and pocket-crazed hybrid between a technical hiking backpack and a school bag. Its thirty-liter capacity makes it plenty capable of carrying everything you could possibly use in a day. The shoulder straps and back panel are both well padded and comfortable even when the pack is fully loaded and heavy. The Surge also had our favorite sternum strap, which slides up and down on two rails. The bag is divided into three large main compartments guarded with wonderfully strong and durable zippers. The rear compartment holds a fifteen-inch laptop, the middle compartment is the largest, and the front is filled with pockets of every size and shape imaginable. The very front of the bag has yet another compartment, or large pocket thing, which has two zippers that angle up and towards each other, and a plastic clip that’s attached to two webbing loops. The bottom of the bag has two adjustable straps best used for a yoga mat (one of our testers couldn’t fit a collapsible camp chair through the straps, so don’t expect to carry much).

Dislikes
The Surge has far too many pockets, gizmos, and gadgets for the average user. In the words of one tester: “This backpack would be perfect for that one guy in the office who carries fifteen pens in his pocket because he likely carries just as many other items with him everywhere else. This pack has too many pockets! It's a nuisance to pack this bag and even more of an annoyance to try and find something in it.”

Only one of out eight testers- an environmental engineer who spends all day, everyday in the field- found the plethora of pockets to be useful. Almost everyone else lost something in the bag, and one tester had to ask someone to call his phone because he lost it in the bag. The single feature that best exemplifies the overpockecting is the front compartment/ pocket. Two zippers and a buckle strap make it laborious to access, so most testers ignored the feature entirely. The stretchy side pockets are similarly futile: they’re too small to hold an average sized Nalgene.

The Surge’s laptop padding was also disappointing. The padding between your back and the computer is good, but the area between the computer and central compartment is inadequate. Instead of a solid piece of foam, the bag has two squishy foam ribs with nothing but a thin nylon divider in between. This protects your laptop from nothing more than a large textbook or documents- thing that the bag need not protect. Thicker, solid foam would be better.

Overall, the Surge is an overly and poorly featured cross between and laptop/school and technical hiking backpack (there’s an ice tool loop on the front). If you’re looking for a bag with capacity and more logical storage consider the Cilo Gear City Pack.

Value
The price is good but the bag is not. The Timbuk2 Swig is a much better bag for fewer dollars.

Note that the woman in the below video incorrectly states that the middle compartment is for a laptop.