Ruffwear  Palisades Pack

There are plenty of things Macaroni and I love about his Palisades! However, there is also quite a bit of room for improvement. THE GOOD: • Pack straps in place pretty well (but one loop came unstitched); • Removable pack makes it so he can run around camp or go on day hikes without carrying weight, or if I need to carry the pack for him; • Handle is great for helping him climb over obstacles too high or slippery for him to do solo; • Handle came in handy (pun intended) when he decided to step off the edge of the trail and slide down a 20' tall rock at a 70º angle, requiring me to haul him all the way back up (after easily removing the pack to carry that too); • Excellent pockets! It's very easy to balance weight and I love being able to cinch them down; • Limited excess straps flapping around because you can tuck them into the padding on the belly; • Daisy chain is great for clipping on his water bowl (I try to avoid putting wet things in packs). THE BAD: • Chest strap is *way* too long! I had to rip out the stitching and remove at least 1.5" to make it short enough to fit; • Stitching already came undone on the padded belly strap holding the cord loop, so the pack flopped around for the rest of our trip; • A spot to attach the leash at the chest would be so helpful for dogs that pull (like mine does when going downhill); • Water bottles are impossible to dry because they automatically collapse. I use a flexible strap brush to prop them open, but I'm worried I'll end up puncturing them with the tip one of these days; • Leash knocks lights off the light loop when clipped onto the back attachment point. THE (wish it were) UGLY: • Bright red color helps keep him visible, though I would love if it came in blaze orange for hiking in hunting season. (This isn't affecting my rating, because it's just a personal preference.) Overall, I recommend this pack if you have the time and know-how to do alterations and repairs, but it certainly could be quite a bit better.

Everything about this worked great. It was easy to organize my dogs gear inside and secure it with the flopper stoppers. On warmer hikes I could detach the the harness, soak it, and re-attach the pack. Keeping my best girl cool and her stuff dry. The handle on the back made it so much easier to keep her out of poison oak.

I really like this pack. It has six pockets, three on each side, and comes with two water bladders. There is plenty of space for water, treats, food, and waste bags. My dog had no issues wearing it and seemed happy with it on. The quality is very good and the pack appears as if it will last a long time. My only complaint is the sizing. I must have measured my dog incorrectly, because the pack was too small for him. The middle strap could not be fastened because his belly was too big, and so I never was able to test this on a trail. I wish the straps were more adjustable to allow for more sizing variations. I do recommend this product, but make sure your measurements are spot on. Too big is better than too small.

This vest is well made and designed. A medium fit my 55 lb Australian Shepard perfectly. There is room for a jacket, water bottle and other things in the pack. It’s made so the weight is balanced on his back and would be comfortable. The fabric is unlikely to snag on brush or pick up lots of dirt.

This pack is well designed and the ability to remove the bags is a game changer for longer trips/flexibility for longer mileage days. I have a pit mix with a larger chest and the harness straps never quite fit her right. I had adjusted her strap lengths last minute, after test hikes, and the plastic strap length adjustment rubbed her raw under her armpit on day 1 (~7 miles) of a multi-day trip. Had to bring her back off trail the next day because she could not do the mileage we had planned. Not necessarily a pack design flaw but does not work for the shape of my dog.

Backpack fits my dog very well and goes on and off easily.

This is my second Palisades pack. I've had the older model for several years and while that pack has been good, the upgrades in this model have been fantastic! I love that the pack comes apart into it's own harness. It also has enough expansion in the straps to be worth the investment for a 9 month old lab with a bit of growing left to do. The only thing I would change is that it would be nice to add a D-ring to the front of the harness to help with pulling from the excited puppy

The overall quality and fit of the pack are great. The Achilles heal is that our dog has managed to break loose the pack from the harness by rolling or rubbing up against a tree. The last time... we never did find the pack once ditched. Unfortunately, it had all his food in it & it was a multiday backpacking trip. So, I would not recommend when depending on preserving its contents.

My primary purpose for this pack was to allow my dog to carry her own sleep system. The sleep system is the Highlands Dog Pad and the Highlands Dog Sleeping Bag both also by Ruffwear. These products are advertised as being compatible with each other and indeed the medium pad and the medium sleeping bag will fit in the medium Palisades pack, however this creates a nightmare in terms of balancing the weight on each side. This pack requires each side to be balanced with extreme precision, but the pad and the sleeping bag have vastly different weights. You can try to use the water bladders as ballast by putting more water in the pad side than in the sleeping bag side, but I was never able to do this accurately enough to keep the pack balanced and even if this is successful good luck keeping the weights correctly distributed if you actually use the water. The only way to integrate these three products is if you are hiking with two dogs so that one dog can carry both pads and the other dog can carry both sleeping bags.

I returned this pack immediately because it was unnecessarily bulky, heavy and awkward. Too many buckles, straps and pouches make it heavy, awkward, and floppy. More "features" don't make a backpack better, they just make it over-built for the purpose. I wanted to like the ability to remove the saddlebags from the harness, but in practice its much easier to just remove the whole thing from the dog.