A customer emailed asking how the shoulder straps stow on our haul bags. The answer is that they don't, and the reason why turns into most of what's worth knowing about how these bags are built. So here's all of it.
Nobody drags a haul bag on purpose. They're expensive. If you own one you baby it — you lower it instead of dropping it, you flinch when it scrapes, you sure as hell don't tie it to a car.
We drag ours. Filled with sod, behind a vehicle, down a city street, three thousand feet, flipped partway through so both faces take a turn. We can do that because we're the ones who make them. There's no rep to call and no warranty to void. If we wreck one we go cut another.
That's the reason this post exists. As far as we know we're the only shop building haul bags out of Challenge Ultra 800TX instead of vinyl or urethane — and we also build limited-run vinyl bags. Having both on the bench is the only way to honestly say what each material does. Most of what's written about haul bag construction is written by people who have never cut either fabric.
The straps don't stow. That's on purpose.
Most packs that want to be haul bags hide the shoulder straps in a sleeve behind the back panel. Sounds great in the product photo. Then you use it.
Your bag is packed — actually packed, expedition packed — and you're trying to feed a shoulder strap into a sleeve with seventy pounds of gear pressing against it from the inside. You can't. So you empty the bag to change configuration, then repack it, probably on a ledge, probably in the dark.
Ours come off completely. It's a little finicky with gloves on, we'll own that. But the bag can be stuffed to the collar and it makes no difference — the straps come off or go on either way, and nothing has to come out of the bag to do it.
That decision came from a specific route. The Wallpinist was designed for All Along the Watchtower in the Bugaboos, where you're climbing 5.11 and hauling through some sections, then hitting low-angle terrain where hauling would just grind the bag across rock for no reason and you want it on your back instead. You switch modes over and over, with the bag full each time. A sleeve makes that a fight. Full removal makes it a non-event.
Removable also means swappable
Because the straps aren't sewn to the bag, they're a part for the bag — and parts can be exchanged. Three lengths:
- Short — up to 5'4" / 163 cm
- Medium — 5'4"–5'10" / 163–178 cm
- Long — 5'10"+ / 178 cm+
We ship long by default on haul bags, because we assume an adult in a jacket. If that's wrong for you, send them back and we'll send the right ones. It's not a warranty claim, it's just a different part.
Which is how we ended up building a 45L Collider for Reagan, a kid climber. Same bag anyone else gets — straps built for someone who isn't six feet tall.
Every 45L, the Wallpinist 65L, the Collider 70L, and the Ice Wrangler ship with removable straps. The 30L doesn't, by default — people who use a 30L essentially never take the straps off — but ask and we'll build it that way.
Nothing rigid sticks out
Same principle, different part of the bag. The Wallpinist comes with four removable ice axe straps and four ski carry straps, so tools and skis ride on the outside for the approach. Then you strip all of it off before sustained hauling.
Anything protruding from a haul bag is something the rock can catch. Anything the rock catches, it eventually takes.
Offset haul straps
The haul straps sit off-center on all our haul bags and tagline bags, so the mouth opens while the bag is still hanging and still clipped. You get into it without unclipping it from anything. On the Wallpinist they're also sewn further down the body, which buys you more roll on the roll-top.
Foam that comes out of the bag
The Collider carries a loose foam panel — pull it out and line the bag while you pack, or use it as an insulating layer on a portaledge or whatever rock shelf you're stuck on that night.
The Wallpinist uses back panel removable foam insert. Take it out and the whole bag collapses to nearly nothing, which matters more than it sounds like it does. More on that below.
The details you notice on day forty
- White interior. Ultra 800TX is a four-layer laminate, so the inner liner is a decision, and we chose a white 70D nylon. You can see into the bag. Reach into a black-lined 70L hauler at dusk and get back to us.
- Grommets in the bottom of every bag. Bags take on water eventually. Grommets mean your sleeping bag isn't sitting in it all day.
- Internal clipping points — two in the Collider and the vinyl bags, three in the Wallpinist — for daisy chains and anything you'd rather not watch fall.
- The collar. The Wallpinist's cinch collar is Ultra 200TX from Challenge Sailcloth — same collar fabric as the UL Tag Bag — with abrasion resistance several times that of Cordura. This one's deliberate: on most haul bags the collar or roll-top dies well before the body does, because it's ballistic nylon or packcloth doing the job of the toughest part of the bag.
What we build, and what's in each one
| Wallpinist 45 / 65L | Collider 30 / 45 / 70L | Limited vinyl (e.g. ZURPLE) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shell | Ultra 800TX laminate | Ultra 800TX laminate | Soft medical-grade vinyl |
| Webbing | UHMWPE (Dyneema) — custom-made for us, also used in our aid ladders | Nylon | Nylon |
| Collar | Ultra 200TX | Pack Cloth 400D | 300D ripstop cinch collar |
| Foam | Full-circumference removable insert | Loose panel, removable | — |
| Removable straps | Yes | 45L & 70L yes; 30L on request | On request |
| Ski / axe carry | 4 ski straps, 4 axe straps, all removable | — | — |
| Sewn like | A backpack — you climb in it | A haul bag — inside out, stands up on its own | A haul bag — inside out, stands up on its own |
| Built for | Fast, light, extreme — hauling and carrying | Big walls and long free routes, at lower cost | Cragging and day abuse |
Why Ultra instead of vinyl or urethane
We make vinyl bags too, so this isn't a hit piece. Vinyl is genuinely good at some things — it's soft, it drapes, it wipes clean, and it's cheap enough to do wild limited runs in. That's exactly what the ZURPLE is: a soft bag for cragging and daily abuse, made from the same material as the exam table at your doctor's office. Great crag bag. Wrong material for something you're dragging up twenty pitches.
Here's what goes wrong with stiff fabric when you actually haul it.
The flower petal problem
A vinyl or urethane haul bag has a stiff top and four strap points. Cinch it down into the torpedo shape you want and the stiff material can't fold flat — it blooms outward into four petals. Those petals are the first thing to touch rock, so those petals are the first thing to go. They're not a manufacturing flaw. They're what happens when you cinch a rigid tube.
Same story at the bottom. A flat, stiff bottom creates a hard edge all the way around, and on anything less than vertical that edge is exactly what's in contact with the wall. The Wallpinist gets a rounded bottom instead. If we had to name the best shape for a haul bag, that'd be it.
Soft fabric moves out of the way
Ultra 800TX is a softer material, which sounds like a downside and isn't. When the bag drags over a protrusion, the fabric deforms around it and keeps going. A stiff bag catches on it.
That difference shows up in more than wear. Bolting the first few pitches of a new route by myself with the Wallpinist, nothing came off — the bag pushed around the features and kept moving. On a later trip with two other people I was below a large stiff vinyl haul bag when it hung up on a block, pulled the block off, and the block hit me. Soft bags snag less. That's the mechanism.
Ultra also doesn't propagate. Put a cut or a puncture in it and you have a cut or a puncture — not a tear that runs across the panel.
Weight and pack size
Most vinyl and urethane haul bags are built from 30 oz fabric. Ultra 800TX is significantly lighter — we're not going to quote weights on other people's bags because they're all different, but you feel it before the bag is even loaded.
Packability is the one people underestimate. Pull the foam out of a Wallpinist and the empty bag takes up maybe five liters. A 70L urethane bag doesn't really pack — it holds its shape, and folded down it's about the size of a briefcase. If you're flying to an objective, that's the difference between the haul bag going inside another bag and the haul bag being its own piece of luggage. The Wallpinist was designed around this: two of them, and the second climber's bag packs inside the first while you're climbing.
The drag test
Here's what we actually did, because "durable" is a word anyone can type.
We filled a 45L Wallpinist with sod. We filled a roughly 40L Metolius urethane haul bag with sod. Both got towed behind a vehicle on city streets for about three thousand feet each, flipped over partway through so the shoulder-strap side and the back both spent time on the pavement.
Worth saying plainly: asphalt is not granite. This isn't a wall. But it's the same abrasion failure mode running maybe fifty times faster, and it puts both bags through identical conditions, which is the part that matters.
What happened
Both bags wore. Neither exploded. The interesting part is where.
The Wallpinist wore on its flat contact areas — whatever happened to be against the ground. Which is a slightly absurd result, because we were deliberately wearing it on pavement; on rock, that surface has far less to grab. Everywhere else, the fabric did what soft fabric does and moved out of the way.
The urethane bag wore hardest at its hard points: the petals up top and the bottom edge. Those points aren't bad luck, they're structural. They exist because the bag is built from stiff material, and they'll be there on every one of those bags, on every route, whether or not anyone ever ties it to a car.
So the honest summary isn't "ours is indestructible and theirs isn't." It's that you get comparable durability with a different, more predictable failure map — and you get it while carrying multiple pounds less of empty bag, and while being able to pack the thing into another bag.
Why we can run this test and a shop that resells can't
Because we make them, in Tacoma, and we can afford to destroy our own inventory to learn something. A reseller can't tow their stock down the street. A brand that manufactures overseas gets a container and a spec sheet, not a bag they can cut open on a Tuesday to see how the seam held.
We test because on a wall, your bags are your safe space. Everything you need to eat, sleep, and stay warm is in them. If a haul bag blows out or takes a hole four pitches up, the trip is over. That's a good enough reason to spend an afternoon wrecking one on purpose.
Next up, we're dragging a ZURPLE — soft medical-grade vinyl, ten made, never again — to see what the other material does under exactly the same test. Footage soon.
Every haul bag we make is cut and sewn in Tacoma, Washington. Questions about fit, straps, or which bag is right for your objective — just ask. It comes straight to us.