We were in the market for a new pot this past year, since we’d been using some older heavy pot set that we’d warped in a campfire. Also, the top to our old set didn’t snugly fit the pot, so it would always come loose in my pack and rattle around, which is sometimes annoying when you want a nice peaceful walk in the woods.
Enter the XTS pot. I ordered this on Amazon after reading some reviews and checking it out at a gear shop. The first thing I noticed is how light it is, yet how durable it feels. It doesn’t feel cheaply made, or like it’ll warp with any heat applied. Almost immediately after receiving this, we took it out for an overnight in the adirondacks, doing the Santanoni/Panther/Couchasagra range. The pot has some integrated heat exchange baffles at the bottom of the pot that help disperse the heat evenly and quickly to the liquid inside. I think we went from cool stream water to a boil in less than 5 min. It was fantastic. An the built in, foldable handle was way better than the little clamp handle thingy we were working with previously. Another nice feature is that it has graduations embossed on the inside of the pot for easy measuring of water for rehydrating meals.
If there’s any downsides to this pot, it’s that you have to be careful with whatever camp stove you’re going to be putting it on. The bottom baffles form an open donut-shaped ring on the bottom of the pot, so if your camp stove has a small stand on it, then the pot might not sit evenly on it. We used our friend Monica’s Jetboil
