How is it going, everybody? Welcome back to Trail Tales. My name is Kyle O'Grady. I'm a

through hiker. I am a backpacker. I'm a peak bagger. I'm just a huge hiking nerd.

And every single week on the show, I chat with other people that are just big old hiking nerds as well.

And this is a very unique episode. Mateo Favaro is on the show. He is the director of marketing at Z-Pax, who I'm sure many of you are very familiar with,

one of the most well-known cottage, ultralight backpacking gear brands.

In this episode, we chat quite a bit about some of his personal hiking experience,

but we also spent probably the bulk of the

episode talking about Z-Pax and tried to try to hold them accountable a little bit

for some of the common complaints and criticisms that they get as a brand now as you're

going to hear me say in the episode I I like Zpex. I like their gear.

I've worked with them before. And I don't know. You just, I don't know how to say this without

like overblowing it, but there's been some controversies around Zpex and some of their gear

over the years. I feel like they get a little bit more crap from people online than a lot of other brands

do.

Is that deserved?

I don't know.

But in this episode, I wanted, I wanted Mateo to just address some of that stuff.

And he was down.

He was willing.

I feel like that takes some balls.

I'm not going to lie.

But he cares about the brand he believes in the

...