Jake Reyes
Jake spent his twenties guiding raft trips and rock climbing in the Eastern Sierra and now leads our gear-testing program. If a piece has been on a Pack Your Tent gear list, odds are Jake has carried it for 50+ miles or chopped wood with it in 20-degree sleet.
4 published articles · most recent April 26, 2026
Jake spent his twenties guiding raft trips and rock climbing in the Eastern Sierra and now leads our gear-testing program. If a piece has been on a Pack Your Tent gear list, odds are Jake has carried it for 50+ miles or chopped wood with it in 20-degree sleet.
His specialty is the brutal honesty that gear marketing never gets near — what fails in the third season, what blisters when you carry it 18 miles, what you actually grab from the gear closet at 4am for a permit hike.
Articles by Jake Reyes
- The Three Water Rules That Keep Us Alive in the DesertAfter ten Mojave winters and one bad scare in Anza-Borrego, here are the only three water rules our team enforces in the desert.
- Which Colorado Fourteener Should Be Your First?Bierstadt is the obvious answer. Here's why we still recommend it, and three trickier ones that build better skills.
- How to Pick a Backpacking Tent (Without Falling for Marketing)Five tent specs that actually matter, and the four marketing terms we've learned to ignore. Pulled from ten seasons of Sierra guiding.
- Angels Landing in November: What Permit Day Was Actually LikeWe drew an Angels Landing permit for a quiet November morning. Here's what worked, what didn't, and what we'd do differently.
