I destroyed the worlds most expensive camping mattress

Now there's a hole that would be a challenge to patch. Welcome to El Capitan, where we are going to do a G7 Portaledge gear review, where I'm going to set it up, tear it down, and connect it to Andrea's G7 Portaledge, show you tips and tricks, and I am so stoked because I'm done shitting in a bag. You know what's better than shitting in a bag? Being done shitting in a bag. This is basically an inflatable air mattress, a glorified air mattress, with six pieces of webbing going up to a master point, and you can adjust it whether it's low angle, vertical, or overhanging to make sure the ledge is level. You can also connect this ledge to another ledge. Now this is seven or eight hundred bucks, and that is not unreasonable for a portaledge, except if you want to have it doubled. Well, the price doubles, but it also only weighs three and a half pounds, and if you don't have to bring an air mattress, which you don't want to sleep on a portaledge by itself, because there's a lot of air under all of you, I've always brought an air mattress that goes on top of my portaledge, and then it feels kind of slidey, and it's nice that I only have to just stick a sleeping bag on this, and it's really damn comfortable, honestly. This bag it comes in is what you use to inflate it, and it's inside out. It's already attached to the, wait for it, the bag. Watch this. It's also nice that it's three and a half pounds, because when I'm moving it around and stuff, it's super light. And an air mattress, by the way, if that weighs a pound, you're only bringing an extra two and a half pounds to have a ledge. Even if you're going to sleep on a ledge, sometimes this is nice, because you can fly it and set it up at every hanging belay and just chill, depending how fast you're moving. The other thing is, if you're on a super crowded route, if I even went to, let's say, Dinner Ledge on Washington's Column, which probably has eight places to sleep, I might bring one of these just in case there's too many people, which apparently is a thing now on big walls. So this is a Sea to Summit valve, which is a really nice type of valve. And when you open it up this way, it basically lets the air out super fast. And if you open up this valve, it's a one-way valve. So you put that on there like this. You don't want a carabiner on this to weigh it down. You want it to stay super fluffy. And as soon as you blow in it, you put it down a little, and then the bag gets as big as possible. And now I have that much air that I can squeeze in like this until I get to the end, and then I roll it. Okay, so 23 bag fills. Filled this up, and now I'm going to do one more. And what I do is I roll it. Now, I don't want to get too tight. If I was going to bed and this was the evening, I would do one or two more rolls. But because the sun's going to come over here and heat this up, it's going to get actually a lot tighter. Temperature has a lot to do with how much it is inflated. If you fill this up, if you're one of the unicorns that set up a portal edge before the sun goes down, right before you go to bed, you're going to probably want to put one more bag of air in this. So as the temperature gets colder, it doesn't get soft. We did that to Andrea's last night, and she had it stiff all night. I didn't do that to mine, and mine was pretty soft by the time I woke up, even though it was still super good enough. Right before you go to bed, you want to really crank it down, and we're going to maybe brake test that at the lab. Don't want to do that up here. By the way, if you ever are going to set up a portal edge, it's nice to have the tail of one of your ropes hang down. This is probably 10 or 15 feet of rope, and I'm on my gree-gree with a stopper knot on the end. So I am super bomber if I were to screw up something, and that's why I can only be on this guy, and I'm not attached to anything right now, because I'm on that gree-gree, on a dynamic rope. And I just use my one personal anchor to kind of get around this. What's really cool about this is this rock is not even. It's actually one of the worst case scenarios for a framed portal edge, because if you sleep on it, it wants to bow in the middle, and there's no support in the middle here, but I can get away with that on this ledge. Another note about this, if you have this set up during the day, and it's windy, which is always windy in the middle of the day, and this thing's blowing around, don't have a carabiner loosely attached to this. Knock your teeth out, because it's got enough momentum to be flipping around, and it'll hit you in the face. Either clip something really heavy to it, or clip nothing to it at all. Andrea has her jacket in here, and that makes for a great pillow. I actually really like the fact I'm not worried about my pillow falling off at night, and it's a great place to put my jacket, because I'm not sleeping in it. And during the day, it just hangs there. That only took a couple minutes of 20-something pumps, and now I have a ledge to stand on. If you went from a ledge to a hanging belay, this thing's pretty nice to keep the stoke up, especially if your partner's going to take over an hour to lead the next pitch, this can be totally worth it. Now let's talk about adjustability. Right now, it looks super flat enough. I'm going to try it real quick. I took my personal anchors off, because now I'm on this, and I feel super comfortable standing on this. You can stand your feet all the way to the end of these green straps on either side, and it's not going to just twist on you. Not nearly as badly as a framed ledge, but a framed ledge, you can actually clip the corner of it, and secure it up to maybe like that butterfly up there, and then you can stand right up on the edge. I'm standing on the one-third point just fine. You can't really do that on a normal ledge. You might be tempted to stay tied in like that, and unless you're weighting the personal anchor, it's just one more strap to get in the way. Because I entered in this way, you have to exit this way, and that's how my Grigri is set up right now. So that's why I don't have this on. It keeps things simpler. Now, as far as adjustability goes, this is great, and if you want your head higher than your feet, you just scoot down a little, push against the wall, and now you're lounging. There's a zipper pocket inside of it. Usually has my cell phone, and it has a patch kit, and if you're worried about it popping, you can solve that problem if it happens, which we are going to break test later. This side also has a zipper pouch. Super nice for things in the middle of the night. If I wanted to adjust it, I would just put my personal anchor here, clip this, and I would clip maybe one of the next rings here, and clip the last ring like that, and now you can see that it's still level. If I wanted it even more, which if on low angle, you might need to do that, what I'll do is I'll clip there and there, or even really low angle, I will clip the last ring in there. You can see now that I'm tilted like this, and it feels like I'm falling out of bed, and even if you were to be this angled, like it's not that bad. You like have all these straps and stuff, and I slept like this one night. It's just not that big of a deal, but it's also pretty easy to adjust. I'm just chilling, and this is with it not that great. Sometimes I like to be tilted towards the cliff, so let me try that real quick, and now I'm leaning towards the cliff, and this is always the struggle you're going to have with any portal edge, but either way, like if I'm leaning towards the cliff, it feels pretty cozy if you're kind of scared at night, but I like the one carabiner on the other for we'll call this vertical, and if I was on overhanging, you actually want it in this configuration where it's one carabiner in both loops if it's overhanging. Now in every single strap, you have a butterfly sewn loop on two clipping points on all six of the legs, and that's really nice to clip anything. This one looks higher. You can clip there, and sometimes I'll clip three beaners all over the place if I have them because as soon as I have my shoes off, I have a place to put them, and they're all rated for zero kilotons. You never put your personal anchor in here and yard up on it. That's not what this is for. I haven't done this. You're not supposed to do this. They tell you not to do this. You don't need to do it. That's not what you need that for. It's just to clip your crap. You don't want to clip the ring and clip your personal anchor up here. If you were to ever put your personal anchor on something, you want to do it directly to the carabiner, which is directly into like some master point of sorts. The biggest concern people have had when I've talked to them about it, and my biggest concern when I first saw it was popping. This is made out of, first of all, really durable material, but the sides also have like this extra layer. And the G7 crew has rub tested it. And this is not smooth granite right here. It's pretty rough. They have rubbed and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed, and they have not got it to even show enough wear to indicate that it would pop. Ryan Sheridan said he used it on sharp limestone. Didn't pop it. I hung out in a tree and at a party and was kind of like bouncing in it all night and rubbing it. It's not not going to pop. If you maybe sit on it with a pecker or maybe a sharp nut tool, maybe. But we're going to test that at the lab and we're going to pull test on all of these. We're going to see how easy the patch kit is, but we're going to not do that up here. I love cloth grocery bags. This strap, you can go as high as this. And it goes right underneath. So you have access to the things you want most of. You could put like maybe a small haul bag under there, but like you don't want it too heavy, obviously don't put all your water under there. But all I have to do is reach underneath and have access to my bag. Another thing I've been doing each night is I'll have my pee bottle in my bathroom bag. So I'll keep my bathroom bag with me. And what I'll do is I'll clip the webbing in this hole right here, which is used to connect both of them together. And I use that clipping point for my bottle to be right there. So I can just reach my hand in here without my plumbing and pee. Remember, it's always shorter than you think it is. So if you're going to sit in this single, you can sit in between these two triangles and it's going to be cocked out a little. I'm level. The ledge as a whole is not. But what's nice is my legs are against this soft edge and not a frame. And so sitting in this all day is really, really comfortable. If you want to spread your legs out a little bit, you can just sit like this. Shaking the camera. Everything's interconnected. When you flag it, you connect this, this and this to the whole line after it's tight. And then ideally you would clip, let's say the master point as well in between some of these. And now it's sitting up like a flag. We did it on this and this isn't super, super steep. Usually you only do that on overhanging routes. You do that on a framed ledge, you risk damaging the spreader bar and things getting smashed against the wall while it's windy. This thing's not getting damaged. The one risk you would have is this webbing here. If it got caught in a crack and you weren't paying attention and your follower was not with the bag and you pulled too hard, you could like risk damaging these because it got snagged on something. But you just have to be mindful of that. And it's just nice to just have it at the next spot. If you wanted a blade just standing, it's still light enough that you can do that. So if you don't want this in your way anymore, you just clip it, kick it out of your way. Clip it there. Completely out of my way. And I can manage ropes or whatever. Rope bags are nice. If you're going to be belaying and you have that many straps going around. But it's way more convenient than a big ledge. It is squishy and you have to get used to that, but it's not anything that's hard to get used to. It felt weird when I first got on it for the first time at the Squamish Arcteric Festival when I first saw these and met Nathan who makes them. And now that I'm in them, they're great because I know I can step on the one third of the middle or the one third point. You just can't step on the ends here. So this is how you deflate it. No, if you deflate it, you want to lift this orange string up. And the reason this orange string is in this flap is so it doesn't accidentally get opened up. And so that's what that's for. And you can see here that they put a lot of thought and detail into every little component of this. And even this is a nice bomber there. Opens up the jacket secure, but it's also super lightweight. You can drop it. It's just amazing how many little details can be on an air mattress and six pieces of webbing. So this is where we slept last night and we actually had the portal edges like this because Andrea loves to cuddle. And we have, obviously you can see a very horizontal anchor, which is the best thing you can do. Otherwise you got to go vertical and we didn't have to in this case. So what I'll do when I have it, a pretty wide thing is I will take, let's say one strand of the static rope here and butterfly a lot and then clip it to the bolt over there. And then you have like this running cord and all these clipping points. But as far as being safe, again, I'm clipped to one of the butterflies, which is clipped to one of the bolts. So I'm always bomber and safe, but I'm not personal anchored in right now. Keeps it a lot more simple and you want to have good rope management. But that's more about big wall anchors than it is about the ledge. Let's connect this thing. Yeah, I just wanted to let you know that extremegear.org just revamped their whole site. Way easier to find stuff and it looks way more professional. And if you buy gear from there, it supports us with 10%. So if you like the break test we do or the A to Z content that we put out, that is a great way to support what we're doing here. To put these side by side, you clip that into this hole right here. But I figured out a hack yesterday. Check this out. I call it the big wall recliner. You don't connect shit and you clip it a little bit higher. So it's like 45 degree angle. And man, you can just sit here all day. Take my word for it. Because I did that yesterday. And this works really good with Andrea sitting here counterbalancing it. But like the Portaledge is holding me. It's just this, it's all a counterbalance game. But this is golden. So now in order to connect these together, I lower this side of the Portaledge back to the carabiner and carabiner. So it'll be more level. You definitely want to start it off with a little bit of an angle because when you push down, you have to anticipate what it's going to do, not what it is currently doing. I'd like to brag about how many free beaners we currently have available. It's so nice. The camp dions, a very narrow nose. And that really, really helps when you're trying to get this in these holes here. So I'm going to go this way with it. Lining up the first hole is not bad. Lining up the next two is the trick. You either step on it or get off of it to line the holes up. Just step on it until it like lines the holes up. Anyways, so now you could, in theory, go back to the recliner, which if I clip it, let's just clip it super high and see what happens. This is great. Best beta ever. Are you ready for this? Portaledges with flies to protect you from the sun cooks you, right? But this, what you do is you connect this loop right here up there, disconnect all these, and it's basically sitting in front of you with your back on the wall facing that way. And the portaledge is blocking you from the sun, but you still have all the air. This was really nice yesterday to sit out the hottest part of the day and only climb during the shady parts. And then you could also, we took a nap. It's pretty nice. Okay, if you're not in recliner mode, put that to the lowest caribbean. And typically that is super good for us. And you can see that even without Andrea right here, that I could stand all the way out here. I'm bounce testing the camera girl. Hang on to the camera. Okay, this is super cool. You step on the outside of a framed ledge and there's no pressure on that side. It can go up and you fall. You can always step on the inside and it can't flip down because the straps are holding this up. So the fact that this is all squishy, it doesn't allow it to slide up. And so I can stand all the way out here. Hands free. All right. So now if I wanted to get into bed and this is without anybody on that side, which is a complete no, no. This is amazing. I can be on this side without you over here. When these are put together, this connection is actually pretty strong. I can stand on this this way and it does my foot doesn't slip through, but you can also sit here. Super chill. And have your legs dangling rather than have them up like this, even though this might be comfortable to have your feet up higher after being climbing all day. The benefit to this is if you don't want to cuddle with your partner. Though I could stand here and still hang out with them. So this is the way it's designed to be. But I feel a little claustrophobic not having a ton of space here. I do have their loop underneath I could use and I also have mine under there. I'm not quite sure how the top person is supposed to pee if it's 100% vertical anchor. Maybe that's what the bottle is for. But the bottom person can get away with a lot more. Now a trick I like is to make it a full two-story building by taking yet another beater clipping that and clipping that. Now this sling the shoulder length sling cuts into the mattress a little bit but that also is not that big of a deal. It can handle that. The best way for this to work to go up and down is to have whatever anchor point that I keep waiting to be on the side. Now what's nice is I can go in direct to the sling but it's not to hold me because it's just on that butterfly loop. It's just to pull me in a little bit closer as I stand on this and lower that guy. Hey! Yeah buddy! If you are going to try to clip things under here it might be nice to have a couple strands of rope that hang here that you can clip and have as full strength master points because what I'm attached to right now is not. Take two. Or I'll just leave it there. Lots more room up in this space. Sit and chill. Or sit and chill and I'm not married to my partner up there. It gives me a lot more privacy but you just have to plan how you're going to be connected to stuff. Depending on where the sun is you're going to set that up chill and take a nap. You can clip it off and clip it up and make it do whatever you want. Anyways you can do that with a normal ledge. Pop that. And that is how you set up and tear down the G7 pod. Welcome to the lab where we're going to do some science today with my big pecker here. We're going to find out if I can pop this thing and more importantly if I can patch it because I will pop it. I'm going to take a knife to it if this doesn't work. And then we're going to pull on these straps and pull this whole thing apart for science. If you're going to spend $800 on an air mattress it's nice to know what it can and cannot do. It's scary. I want it. This is by the way this is filled up pretty tight. First of all don't get on your G7 portal ledge. It's filled with air with a harness full of peckers. But if you did since that's not working this is for all your A3 plus routes. I have a little tiny hole you guys. This pitch is going to be a hard pitch. Did it! Oh I'm sinking. So I guess the biggest concern people have is what happens if it pops. Well what happened like if I did the same thing to a normal portal edge fabric and I tear it you have no portal edge. At least with this I'm hoping that I can show that taco mode still works. Pretty slow leak until you open it up. Oh whoa whoa whoa pecker you've done enough damage. What happens if all the air comes out? You have as what some people would know as a hammock. This is technically still sleepable but let's see if we can patch this thing and fill it back up and we'll put it in a bucket of water to see if we still got bubbles. Step one. Grab the alcohol. Not pass the Peton Pete's alcohol. This alcohol. You definitely want to have a clean spot if you're going to be patching this. You want to cut the corner so they're rounded. Stick it on there like so. I got this you guys. It's not working at all. Zero percent efficacy. Flex tape is something you can get at any hardware store and we're going to find out if that works today. Just this first part sticky but the rest of it's not because it has a film where it's super sticky because if you put it on something it's permanent. I try to avoid the baffle seam right there if I don't need to be on it. Really want to push the stuff down. And usually patches like this will do better after they've been on there for like an hour or even the next day. Let's just give that 15 minutes and then we'll reinflate it and see if it's going to work. So this flex tape is very thick and it's been on here for 20 minutes or so. And you can peel it off and if that got lifted up and then stuck to this side when it was all folded up I'm concerned it would start to fail over time. I'm not convinced that I would want to use flex tape but we tried rubbing alcohol on here and then putting the type A patch kit that comes with it and it wouldn't stick at all. And then we let the alcohol dry completely which can take like 20 minutes and then now you can see it's sticking really well. This has sharp corners I'm not supposed to have those I'm supposed to have brown but it's it's pretty you can see it's pretty damn sticky. I think it would work just fine I just want to really understand the adhesion part first and now we can cut another hole in this and use the type A to patch the hole and then we'll dunk the whole thing in water. Okay so let's pop it again and see what the type A patch can do for us. Really annoying trying to pop this you gotta really like if you're trying to pop your G7 the trick is to get it on there and then rip it to an oval. Honestly if it's not that dirty don't even use the alcohol because you gotta let it dry for quite a while for it to actually work but you don't want to touch the sticky part if you can help it. Wow it's not even centered. You definitely have to push really really well you don't want this to look like a bad tint job on your car you really want the bubbles out of this thing. So that usually does better after about an hour but let's just blow it up now. Obviously the patches are working if I'm able to fill this up with air but I'm going to dunk this in water and see if any air bubbles come out. Type A patch seems to be doing just fine. Okay I had to let some air out just so I could get this part under the water. All right I do not see any air bubbles. If it looks like that patch works I don't know how it would work long term. This patch seems to be great so let's make a bigger one. Before I pop it again I want to see if I can actually over inflate it because you do wonder that when you're using this thing up on the wall is how much air is safe to put in. So I feel air slipping out of the sides when I push the bag down so clearly you can see how stiff that is. So the other test I want to do is leave it in the sun for a little bit and see it's not 100 degrees out but like the sun is definitely going to expand it more to see if it either pops or bulges so I'll just kind of leave this out here for a little bit. You can see with it so full it's kind of how that patch looks and in this patch you can actually see a bump right there and that's where the air is trying to come out. It's sealed around here but just an interesting note. That's pretty warm in the sun. This thing is so stiff. Holy crap. This is nice for standing on but I don't know if you want it this stiff for sleeping on but it's nice to know like this is working the patches are working but let's make it not work anymore. I want to try to get the edge to pop. It has this extra black layer on there and I'm going to try to get through it with the pecker here. Maybe I'll just try a knife. Enough pun and games. Ah, oh that is a big hole. So I'm going to round off these edges and I'm just going to use this whole thing. I'm not even going to clean it because the alcohol takes so long to dry and I don't think this is dirty enough to be a problem. Okay so I got about one metric inch all the way around this thing. It is a big slit right in the side and it's a little bulgy but it's holding the air and let's go put it under the water and then see how it looks. I had to let out some air in order to get it under the water. It's too stiff otherwise but I don't see any air bubbles. It looks okay. So there's two things that come in the patch kit I want to tell you about and that is an extra valve in case the valve for some reason falls out of that one and then this fishing line and this is something I should have used on that sidewall there to give it more structure. This is like framing for the thing it'll reinforce it because the tape seals it but the sides it wants to open up and that's why it's bulging. Do it again and I'll add some of this in there and see if that helps to prevent some of the bulging so it'd be a long-term solution. Can I repair that? God I hope so. There's insulation what looks like a skeleton inside this thing. Pretty interesting. These two patches are barely long enough. I'm going to use those for reinforcement. So I put tape on the inside which really really helps if the slit is big enough and then fishing line as reinforcement on the outside. It's not the prettiest thing in the world but I think this will hold it. That fishing line created a little ripple and it's basically got air coming out of that hole very slowly. It's repairable but that is the risk of using the fishing line anywhere near the edge of your patch job. So I like the fishing line idea but you can see like that one's too close and it's got that little hole in the top so I'm going to push that down you can see air bubbles coming out of that one spot. The rest of it looks fine but I just got it too close to the edge on that one. So something to be aware of if you are trying to use reinforcement whether it's fiber tape, fiber mesh or this fishing line is not to do that right there. Now let's see how hard this is to replace. Okay this is the Sea to Summit valve. Just pops out like that it's just that little nipple right there. This replacement has the same one. Get through there like that and voila! Super good enough. Yeah it's pretty easy. Time to break test the most expensive piece of climbing gear out there. Rated for zero kilonewtons and that is a very clever and efficient way of saying don't trust your life to these. This is great to clip bags to and other things but not you. And so we're going to take one of these loops that helps you adjust this thing and we're going to pull this to failure and see how strong they actually are even though I do not advocate for you using them for your life. Down right there see how strong that ring is. Oh almost a thousand pounds of force. Let's see what clipping both loops does. Zero kilonewtons is actually rated for 5.84. That loop is still in the game. Now keep in mind as I break test this each side is sharing the load so you're only putting on let's say if you're a kilonewton or 225 pounds for example half a kilonewton is being put on something rated for five. Don't clip your personal anchors to these. It's just nice to know what it's rated for if literally you're laying on these and hoping it holds. Let's see what the butterfly loops break at. So this is all just a butterfly or folded loop in this. It's sewn. That's the other side of it. Broke at 6.52. That should be able to hold your shoes. All right so that webbing goes inside of there so you can connect your other G7 or other stuff to it and this other side is going to just be on the butterfly loop. Oh that's funny at 1.89 the fabric tore. Now there's a hole that would be a challenge to patch. Don't clip this loop and take a whipper on it. That is uh that's inside. Damn well I was gonna try to patch this and use it later. This is the very end of the G7 and then just because it's kind of a long pod here I'm just gonna go to this hole here right there. That's where it broke. 1.17. Since it only weighs three and a half pounds and that's about 350 pounds strong that is a hundred to one safety ratio because all you're ever doing is clipping the pod to something at that contact point. Okay the middle strap again through that hole and on this side I'm clipping the fabric not the webbing. Let's need to see the fabric tear. Almost a kilonewton or about 200 pounds. Okay here's the inflatable bag. This is what you clip the the pod to so I kind of want to see how strong this guy is and if you put a jacket in this how strong is it when you just let it dangle and that's going to be connected there. Whoa all right so it tears the bag when you do it this way. Oh that's not that much. Let's just pull on this now. Oh that's stronger than I thought. Here's the patch from the inside. Now that's a good look on the inside of a G7. Now you can see all the insulation a lot better. You can see all those baffles inside. Looks like a Halloween haunted house in there. Oh there you go. That's the insulation inside. Wow that's a lot to cover in one episode. Anyways I want to do gear reviews if you're going to be spending this kind of money on gear to make sure you don't have any questions before you buy something like this. We do break gear fear. There's not a lot of gear fear with this other than will it pop and then I'm kind of not able to sleep well or have to bail because of it. I think now that I've done this I'm going to probably take extra type A patches. I'm only going to take those type because I think that I could patch anything even 12 inches long if I got that big of a gash in something. With that for just a few days I did that and if it was really bad I could reinforce it with some fiber material or fiber tape with epoxy on it if you really want to get like hardcore about the patches if you're just here at home. But if you're on a wall type A patches super good enough. Just be careful not to use the alcohol unless you have 30 minutes to wait because if there's any residue of the alcohol left it won't stick at all and then you ruin that patch and then you have no patch left. I'm glad I discovered that on the ground. Nathan from G7 said that they had eight people lay on this which is super strong enough. It's not going to uh the webbing is not going to break and you're not supposed to be clipping your life to it anyways. It's just kind of fun to pull test this and don't worry I know you're like oh man I could have used that. This is a unit they couldn't even sell so this is uh not a waste as much as just a good use of something they technically had to get rid of anyways. Let me know if you like the more in-depth gear reviews for especially like weird gear like this something that isn't apples for apples you can't really find anywhere else and it's hard to find the information we discovered anywhere else online. I know that I just wouldn't have ever spent almost 800 bucks on something that was like eh I'm not quite sure if that's gonna work or be comfortable or pop but I want to cover A to Z on bigwalls.com in our big wall bible and that's what we did here. Now G7 did not pay me to make this episode. They are not sponsoring me. They did give me the G7 pods though to be fully transparent. Even though they did give me the pods it does cost money to make the videos and so one dollar per episode for my patrons is why I can do this and be somewhat not biased. Please share this video with anybody you think might benefit from the information. Hit this. Cheers.