Stove - Cambrian Way kit

There were a few items of gear that really stood out on our recent trip, the footwear, the Road Angel, the mattresses and my stove - the Caldera Cone.

The stove, made by Trail Designs and sold through AGG in the US and Winwood here in the UK, is a pop can burner with a simple aluminium cone that supports the pot of your choice.

I use a Vargo 1.3 litre non-stick ti' pot and purchased mine direct from AGG as Winwood did not stock the cone for my particular choice of pot. They make lots of versions for different pots and kettles.

I won't go into a long review, there are plenty of sites that do that sort of thing far better.

The burner and cone weighed in at 16g and 44g, plus another 2g for a medicine measuring cup and 152g for the Vargo pot. The beauty of a meths system is that if you plan your meals carefully, you can take exactly the amount of fuel you'll need and no more.

For example, a litre of water - enough for one of my FBC meals and a cuppa, came to the boil with 35ml of fuel. Breakfast needed 800ml of boiling water, 30 ml of fuel and another 15ml for a 400ml cup of hot chocolate meant that I needed 80ml a day. Exactly! When boiling a litre, the fuel would be used up about 15 seconds after coming to the boil. It was very consistent.

Boil times were fast too as the cone concentrates every joule onto the base of the pan. At litre was taking just a few minutes.

When the weather was bad, I just lit the stove outside the tent, even if the wind was blowing, left it to boil and got on with other things. It was every bit as good as a Trangia in windy conditions - but at a fraction of the weight.

The system is simple, ultralight, well made and extremely efficient. I rolled the cone into a cut off pop bottle (22g), dropped the burner into the bottle too and there was enough room for the measuring cup and a 0.5 litre Playpus full of meths. All this went into a Granite Gear Airsack (12g).

I love my Whitebox stove for brews on day hikes, but for a foul weather backpacking cooking system, this is unbeatable.