Comparing and Reviewing the Best Arborist Bags

Video Caption File/Transcript by Arborist Industry Expert Nick Bonner.

[Music] Hi, I'm Nick B for TreeStuff.com, and today we are talking bags from mild to wild. Quick note before we get started: this video is long. You don't need to watch the whole thing—use the timestamps below, find the bag that you're looking for, skip to that part of the video, learn what you need to learn, and keep on moving. Now, let's get started.

First thing that we're looking at here are some of our simplest rope bags. We do have some simple bags, which I'm going to show you next, but these have got to be my favorites. This is the TreeStuff Simple Rope Bag, and this is the TreeStuff Improved Bull Rope Bag. Both of these bags are made out of a high denier nylon—thousand denier—they're super sturdy with reinforced bottoms, really nice folded webbing handles, and tall full string aprons. The difference between these two is size. They're both about 16-ish liters to the bottom; this one's a little bit bigger, but the apron on this one is much taller. The way to look at this is that this one will hold about 200 feet of climbing line, and this one will hold about 200 feet of rigging line pretty easily.

They also come in these really cool colors. This is the simple size here in what we call our Arbor ID pattern in both green and orange. So these three bags are all the same size; this one is slightly bigger. The Arbor ID pattern is really cool—designed by Kale Royer, our in-house artist and extraordinaire marketing guy. There's over 100 different hand-drawn icons on these—really cool stuff.

Let's do the helmet and spurs test. We've got a Protos here. We can just see—give you an idea of how much stuff fits in here. There it is with the Protos. We just throw a set of spurs in here, so it gives you an idea how big it is. We'll take a look—we'll put these same items into the Bull Rope Bag. You can see right off the bat, a little bit bigger, a little taller. It's able to take our helmet and spurs a little bit easier.

Let's see what's next. All right, thank you. Here we have the CMI Basic Rope Bags. This is a medium and a large. These are really simple nylon bags. We'll drop them at the bottom to let air or water out. Nice simple flat handles, a little thinner of a nylon so it can pack out and take up a little less space. Now, real quick, we can show you—do our little helmet test here, give you an idea of how big this bag is. Something is definitely bigger than the TreeStuff Rope Bag, but it doesn't have an apron, so you might be able to store more stuff in it without expanding the top, but probably less overall. This big one's pretty big—you could hold a 3/4-inch bull rope in here pretty easily. Same construction, same simple drawstring.

All right, next we have the Silver Bull 40L Mesh Bag. This thing is so cool. This is made by our friends over at TreeKit and Honey Brothers. This is a really standard kind of bucket-style, torpedo-shaped bag, but it has these huge mesh panels. And this isn't like mesh—it's like a plastic chain link fence is the best way to describe it. Really simple bag—whether you put your rope away wet or not, it's probably going to come back to you dry. And I love this big grommet here—take this big handle, just jail it right through there. Forty liters of rope is going to fit here. I can tell you right off the bat, I don't think the helmet's going to fit in here well, but I can show you a Silky Zubat. This easily takes the whole Zubat. You can see the top of the Zubat's right about here. You can see it takes the Zubat in there pretty easily.

Next, we're going to look at a line of three different Notch bags. We've got the Approach—oh jeez, we've got the 250, and we've got the 450. So the 250 is your most basic rope bag. This one is kind of like a slightly thicker version of the TreeStuff Improved Bag. It's definitely a little heavier—whether or not you need that, I'll leave that up to you—but this is a pretty simple bag. Again, this is going to be designed to hold about 250 feet of 1/2-inch rope. That's the Notch 250 with a simple drawstring top. We can show you really quick what this one looks like—easily fits our oversized Protos helmet with plenty of room to spare. So that's the Notch 250—takes 250 feet of rope.

The Notch 450—I really like this bag. This is just an oversized rope bag designed for 450 feet of 1/2-inch rope. Just like the 250, really high denier nylon, but you get these nice fixed padded backpack straps—non-removable—and this one has the one-handed drawstring. They say one-handed, which means you can pull it with one hand, and then to open it, you can pull like this, so you don't need two hands on the drawstring. Super nice. Notch 450—this is going to handle 450 feet of rope or really easily. It's going to take our Protos, our Zubat, and both of our Tree Punk Geckos are going to fit in this bag pretty easily without having the apron up. Last on the list is the Notch Approach. This is a really cool bag. This is a square shape, so the Notch team looked at truck bins—places where people are storing these bags—and it was very obvious all those bins are square shapes. This rectangular shape is going to fit into the bin on your truck much better, take up less space, and just be more optimal. You also see this bag stands up better than any bag that we've looked at yet today. I really like that about it.

You've got a nice roll-top closure. This is simple and also acts as an apron to give you more storage space, but it's going to keep your goods dry and secure when you roll it shut. On the inside, this is a feature I really like: you have the high visibility or high contrast bright inside color that makes it easy to find stuff when you're looking deep inside the bag. And then you'll also notice some daisy chaining here on the inside.

Looking back at the outside, some more daisy chaining, a quick spot to fit your ID in or some kind of identification, bull rope—you know, the big one, whatever—and then a nice pleated pocket. So when this is empty, it's nice and flat, but it also gives you a nice amount of space to put stuff in. And then a zipper pocket for soles on the front here. So this is a really nice bag. I love that it stands up. It's going to be really easy—you decide you want to put some stuff in. As you can see, it swallows these spurs up very easily. We can definitely fit that helmet in there too.

Let's see what's next. Newus Speedster—this is a product that came from the rock climbing world. You see this is maybe a 300 denier nylon, maybe 500. It's definitely a little more flexible and packable, but a nice loose bag. See this—you wonder, is this an apron or what? It's not an apron, I'll tell you in just a second. But, finish our look at the outside: we have some non-removable, lightly padded straps—nothing fancy—simple grab handle, and then a drawstring up here on the top.

When we open this up, got a snap, nice big zipper here. We open this—it actually has a rope tarp. What this allows you to do is flake your rope onto this tarp, roll the tarp up, and then roll the whole rope right into the Newus Speedster. These are really popular with rock climbers; they like to keep their ropes a little cleaner. But I love flaking a rope, especially throw line or things like that. It's the easiest way—you don't have to worry about a bag standing up, and it generally does get a lot less tangled if you fold the rope up inside the tarp like this. You can also secure the ends at the color-coded loops that are on the inside of the bag.

That's the Newus Speedster. This is easily going to hold about 200 feet of 1/2-inch rope. I don't know that you would use this to carry a helmet or spurs in, though, so we will skip that test for today.

We totally have a Speedster. We're going to look at a couple more really basic rope bags. This is the DMM Transit 45L. So this is actually a pretty big bag. This kind of reminds me of like an oversized beach tote, just some throws a feather the way it sits. But it also has these really lightweight backpack straps. I'll be honest with you, I would not want to carry this by these straps with any amount of weight in it. Not sure these straps make a ton of sense to me, but in terms of a rope bucket, it is nice and wide. It's definitely wider around than some of the other rope buckets that we've looked at in a similar size. Simple drawstring here, able to fold that apron over. See, this bag is a little less stand-up than some of the other bags, but it is going to easily take sub spurs laying down Sideways, just to give you kind of a picture for exactly how much wider this bag is at the footprint. So this is the DMM Transit 45L, a nice lightweight, durable bag from DMM. Exterior daisy chains, nice ID pocket here—pretty simple. This is one of the last simple rope bags that we have.

This is the Husqvarna bag. I would say that this is reminiscent of the Notch 250 but with exterior daisy chains and a high-viz orange. You also see these really reinforced handles, so if you're carrying something super duper heavy around, you'd use something like this. And just to the quality of these bags, you can see this fully reinforced bottom. You can see inside here that really heavy cross-stitching on the inside. This bag is very, very durable, and it's a little packed from being in a box right now, but I think once that memory wears out of it, it's going to stand up pretty well too. So if you're looking for a really sturdy rope bag or simple bucket, this is probably the sturdiest of the ones that we've looked at today.

Petzl makes an entire line of rope buckets in three sizes. Here we have the big one, the medium one, and—you guessed it—the small one. These come in a few different colors, but these are the colors that we're selling. We've got the red bucket 15. This is about as basic of a rope bucket as you get. This is considerably smaller than the TreeStuff improved bags that we showed. You see that by kind of how this bag handles the Protos helmet. So this would be for 120 ft of rope or even maybe some small rigging gear, something like that, but definitely one of the smaller bags that we're looking at, but really high quality, waterproof material—definitely really like these.

So, the feature sets as we look at these kind of add on. So this is the 45 again, very simple, considerably taller. This is the 30, kind of right in the middle. These both feature a roll top—only the two larger sizes. So like the Notch Approach we looked at, you're going to roll this shut here, and then both of these feature lightly padded backpack straps. These are definitely a little cushier than some of the other ones that we looked at, but won't hold up in terms of comfort like you're going to see on some of the more advanced gear bags that we'll look at here in just a little bit. These are fixed; they're not removable. The handles, you'll see, are folded over. There's actually a little bit of padding inside of here so that as you lift this, it's going to be a little more comfortable on your hands. But I really like when the webbing handles are folded over—just makes them a little more durable and a little meatier. Say the jury's out on this padding on the inside, though—that's a little different.

This is the Petzl rope bag line or rope bucket line: 15, 30, and 45.

Okay, next we're going to take a look at the Arbortech Cobra rope bags. Whoa, wow. Okay, these are the Arbortech Cobra rope bags. These are all what Arbortech calls a dry kit, so these are designed to keep your gear dry and safe, but they're very, very burly—definitely the heaviest bags for their size that we've reviewed so far in this video. This one here, totally round, it's going to be a bucket shape, and it has around the top a circular zipper here. It's an ID pouch as well as a spot if you want to feed your rope right out of the top—you can just run it right through here. On the outside, we've got some carry handles, some large Velcro pleated pockets—these things are very big—a little mesh expandable pocket, daisy chaining, another pleated pocket, and another mesh pocket. You can even see inside of here there are little air vents to let air out of these dry bags, but tons of handles, very big, burly stuff. You can really feel kind of the quality and the stiffness of this bag.

Looking at the inside, you're going to see a standard kind of apron with a regular two-handed drawstring, as well as there's even some little clips, little install stuff on the inside here, and there's an insert that goes in the bottom to keep the bag flat. You see it doesn't stand up super well without that, so easily fits our Protos with plenty of room. You can fit quite a bit of rope in here for sure.

Let's take a look at the next size up, the blue one. So, a lot of similar features—again, round the top, round zipper, drawstring, rope exit hole, ID folder, and then we see the incorporation of these rings. This is a nice touch—very heavy-duty straps, a little lighter weight compared to everything else that you see on here, big rubberized pull handles, large pockets, padded straps. These straps are removable at both ends, so you can take this off and just use it as a bucket bag. Big zippered pockets on the outside here, same type of air vents.

And then looking at the inside, you can see pretty simple on the inside, but there is a small personals pocket here, which I like—a nice place to keep your wallet or your phone, something like that, and it's attached so it's not going to fall out.

Last but not least, the big one—this big's heavy. This is the heaviest one we've looked at today. Starting with the outside, same there on the top: big circular zipper, ID card, little hole for the rope to come through. We see that they brought these straps and rings over—if you like that effect, you're going to get that here as well. Big heavy rubberized pockets—or pull handles, excuse me—mesh pocket on the front but not the back, big side pockets, removable waist belt, removable shoulder straps. These shoulder straps are the most padded of the ones we've looked at, and you do have the chest connection here as well. Looking real quick at the inside, there are a ton of different dividers and stiffeners that come with this bag that can be used to separate it into two sides as well as an internal rope bag for the inside, so you can put rope in this and slot it in either at the top or the bottom and then pull it out. It's sized to fit the inside of this tube. If you're into organization and want something really big, really heavy duty, this is a great choice for Arbortech.

So if you're looking for organization, our next set of packs is really going to tickle your fancy. This is the Courant Cross Pro in the Lemon. This bag—people love this bag—54L. It folds completely flat, so when you open the bag up, you'd be looking at it like this. You have personal item pockets in the top here and in the bottom, and then this is kind of like a MOLLE thing—you can clip things in here. You can also just stick items through here like this, so if you wanted to have your saw in here, for example, you could have it positioned like that, right? You can really store anything you want in there like that.

You also have these pockets here that are Velcroed and then separated by the snaps. This comes with a little set of cards and icons that you can slide into here to identify what's in these, or you can write your own descriptions and put them in. What this bag did well that no one had seen before was it worked as a bucket and a duffel. So with the bottom sealed like this, you could access the bag from the top like this and put stuff in, or like you’ve shown before, you can just open the whole thing up. When it is sealed up like this, it forms a really tall and slender cylinder. This bag looks really nice on your back when you carry it. You can see how well it fits kind of the width of your body, whereas a lot of other bags seem to really be weighing you down and pulling you backwards, just kind of like a big sack on your shoulders. This one is really sleek.

It also comes with this removable helmet storage here. This does not fit the Protos super well, so I'm not going to show you, but it does fit like a Kask helmet or something like that—you can jam that in here and then just clip it on right here. I have this bag; I don't still have this part, if that helps you.

On the outside of this bag, lots of little touches like pockets to get onto the inside, more icons. I really like the way that they incorporated this kind of like khaki, like duck cotton material. It's kind of antithetical to the whole rest of the design—it really gives the bag kind of a vintage feel. Nice padded shoulder straps again, really nice touch with the cotton duck here. Really like that. Overall, a very nice bag.

The next one we're going to look at is the same bag, but it's even bigger. Oh my God, whose idea was it to throw the bags at me? This is the bigger version of the Courant Cross Pro, and it is the same bag in all intents and purposes, but it's larger. On the outside here, you see it comes with a really big padded waist belt that can be installed. Also, you could probably figure out how to use this as a shoulder strap as well if you really loaded it up.

When we look at the inside, again, kind of all the same similar stuff. This is pretty cool—this is like for safety glasses here, it's a hard shell case. If you're not in there, you can access it from the outside—pretty nice feature. On the inside, you're going to see the same type of Velcro-closed, button-divided pockets with the icons, again kind of the MOLLE style, elastic as well as some compression straps. Say you wanted to put your spurs in here or something like that—easily strap those down, whatever you need. Again, this works just like the other Courant Cross Pro, except it's 75L instead of 54L. You can close the bottom, use it like a bucket, keep the top open, whatever, and they have the first aid pockets in the top and bottom as well.

The Husqvarna Explorer—just, I would say, the most lifestyle bag that we sell. This has a laptop pouch inside of it. It has the side access here, and this is, you know, more of like a travel book bag. I don't know that I would be using this for all my climbing gear or things like that, but if you're out doing estimates or something like that, or you want somewhere to keep your computer, or you're just going to a trade show and you want a nice Husqvarna-branded bag, this is a great choice for those reasons. I'm struggling to show you the laptop sleeve, but it's in here—you’re going to have to trust me.

Other than that, this bag is pretty straightforward. It comes with this little mini accessory. There's a small first aid pocket on the outside here, like I mentioned. This allows you to get into the side of the bag if you've already sealed up the waterproof closure. Again, this lets you into the back, into the laptop pouch. You could also keep a hydration pouch in here if you wanted, and then some lightweight padded backpack straps—certainly not the heaviest duty padding, but nice if you're just, you know, putzing around town or whatever. Little water bottle holder—nice bag. I have this, actually, I like it.

This is a Weaver rope bag, backpack style. It's humongous. You could probably store, jeez, 350 feet of rope in here easy. Really big bag, a pleated pocket on the front here, so this is about as big as my forearm. Would not be able to fit a Silky saw there, for example, just to give you some scale there. But this bag does have nice mesh side panels and a zipper so that you can get into the side. You can also access this large front pocket through here if you're looking for some organization. So, this is a nice utilitarian bag. I wouldn't say there's a ton of frills—made in America, nice high-quality construction, simple, so nice bag.

We looked at one DMM bag already; we're going to look at this one. This is the Porter. This is a 60L bag—70L, excuse me, it's hard to keep all the liters straight sometimes. This bag has a kind of a more traditional hood that you would see on old-school, like, haul bags, like the old haul bags, and then this comes down and clips to these compression straps. You see, this is a neat little thing—you can actually pull this off here and relocate this, which helps make sure that this compression strap isn't overly long. Pretty thin nylon material, maybe 300 denier or something up here at the top, kind of standard two-handed drawstring, and then look at the inside—there is like a small stiffener in the back. You get these compression straps up here at the top. One thing you'll notice about this bag is it's fairly deep this way—I mean, obviously, it's quite tall this way, but if you get a lot of weight in here, you could see where this might be hanging out kind

of kind of dumpy off your back. Those compression straps are going to help bring that load in towards your shoulders more because this is a pretty thick bag. You can see it very easily swallows this Protos helmet—tons of room, easily also just drop these, they go in, not even notice. So, a pretty big bag, easily handled our spurs, a helmet.

Let's take a look at the Shipper 90 from CAMP. Wow, this—I, you know, when I saw this, I first thought that this was the Spacecraft, but the Spacecraft from CAMP had the hard sides, but it was a really nice rectangle. This one, you see, is kind of what you would think of like an inverted duffel, where the backpack straps are on the top of the bag. A lot of times, duffel bags will have the backpack strap on the back, so you put that down in the dirt and then put it on your back. This is kind of nice because it's inverted.

But you can see this bag's pretty folded up, but it has a really strong rectangular profile, so you're going to get a ton of utilization. Big, burly zippers—I like these. Nice high contrast on the inside, and then just a ton of really utilitarian, usable space. This is a great bag if you're removing high volumes of material. I know that this is what I would use for rope or anything like that, but if you were packing rope for somewhere you needed to move a lot of it at once, this would be a great choice. But for a daily use rope bag, I'm not sure that this is the one that I would choose.

And here you've got the internal drawstring closure, so you can put something that's wet in here, or you flake rope into this even, and then seal it up on the inside to keep it isolated from the rest of your gear. So, this is a pretty simple but functional and well-made duffel bag from CAMP—the Shipper 90, 90L. That's a big bag. The Pro A.I.S. that I showed you was about 70L; this is even bigger.

I think that's it for today. We looked at a lot of bags. We have another video where we reviewed 28 different bags as well in a format similar to this. You can check that video out here in case your bag wasn't viewed or shown in this video.

Thanks for watching.