Mystery Ranch Hunting Pack- Sawtooth 65 Review

Alright folks, well Paul Morrison here with Bowhunting.com and our season here in Wyoming bear hunting is winding down. We've got a couple days left and that's it. Got to go back to fishing but I wanted to give you guys a look at something that I've got to enjoy for the past four weeks and that's the new line Mysterium line from Mystery Ranch. Now we're going to look at two packs today is out of that line. There's actually four packs in that line. You have the Sawtooth 45, Sawtooth 65, which that's what this is. You have the Beartooth 85 and you have the Marshall 105. So a wide range of sizes for anything from the day hunter to, you know, a couple weeks in the mountains if you need to be. So the main difference, this is the Sawtooth 45, this is Sawtooth 65. 65 has very quickly become my favorite. I've ran a Sawtooth 45 and I have it right back here for the past eight years or so and just been super pleased with it. The main difference between it obviously is just the bag size. The 65 has another bag on the front exterior compartment that you can get into that the Sawtooth 45 does not. The Sawtooth 45 has your upper bag, all your compartments, all your attachments, and all the new upgrades to it. But we're just basically going to talk about the 65 and like I said they're pretty much interchangeable. All these bags are on the same frame, the same shoulder straps, hip straps, and everything and the upgrades that they did to that. So like I said, Sawtooth 45, Sawtooth 65, very similar. I'm going to set this one to the side. I'll show you guys. Here's my Sawtooth 45 that I've ran for the past eight years. It still has blood all over it from packing out elk. I've had anything from elk, deer, I don't know if I've done moose on this one yet. But yeah, it's put it through the ringer. It's done phenomenal and worked well. So I'm excited to see, you know, the new stuff that they did to make the pack work better. I've been enjoying it the past couple weeks and I'll get into those details. So just to give you an idea of, you know, way back in the day when I first started coming out west to to hunt, you know, elk, you know, over two decades ago. Talking to people, trying to get info of what I needed pack, you know, gear wise. Everybody always talked about, you know, having a good pack, having good shoes. Those are a couple of things and then also being in good shape. So the first couple times I came out, I'm sure I used a pack that was either from Cabela's or a yard sale, but very quickly learned that I needed to upgrade. So talking to guys out here, everybody was always saying, you know, Mystery Ranch, you can't go wrong with Mystery Ranch. So sure enough, I bought those two packs and been super happy with them. For the past decade, I've guided out here, which has been nice. Got to see and try a bunch of different stuff and still one of my go-to packs is the Mystery Ranch. So just to give you an idea, I'm very familiar with them. This is the Saw 265 and this is the way that I usually carry my bow on it. So these Matthews and Gim Engaged Limb Legs fit right through one of the molly webbings on the bottom, which pulls the bow back to the back. And then I just put one or two straps across it like that. That's pretty much how I run my bow. Comes off super fast, super easy. One clip, you're out and then the limb leg comes out. So that's basically how I run it. I always am messing with, you know, designing my pack a certain way where I can get whatever I need out of my pack when I need it. Water bottles usually on the side somewhere. Usually my camera that I'm filming with right now and bipods in this side. And yeah, here's the front bag on the 65, which is like I said, one of my favorite things about this and one of the reasons why I'll be running this pack. Usually keep hats, dude wipes, stuff that I need to get to easily. It's got a nice little accessory bag in here that is easy access. You know, opening up the interior of the bag, you'll have the two interior pockets there. And then you'll also have some attachments for some accessory packs from Mr. Ranch if you want to put some extra ones in there for carrying snacks or whatever to keep those where you're not having to dig them out of the bottom of your bag. But going into the updates that they did this year for the Mysterium line and one thing is the color. Immediately you notice the color of these bags. It's cool that the hunting industry has gone to a lot of solid colors and everybody, it looks good, seems to perform well in hunting scenarios. This is Ponderosa. Ponderosa is the brown and the green. They have three different. You have your Optifade, Ponderosa, and then you have Nice in this mystery in the Mysterium line. So this is probably one of my favorite packs as far as color goes. The green and the brown goes good with all the terrain out here. You got a lot of grass and rocks and trees. So that's the first thing that jumps off to you. If you start touching the pack, you'll notice that they use some different materials for a little bit better waterproofness. You know, water shedding capability on the places where most of your weather is hitting. So on the top front of your bag, on the bottom of your bag for setting it down, and on some of the hip sides, a couple little spots there to just help keeping that water away from your pack and away from your stuff inside. One of the coolest updates that they did is they added a ton of different molly webbing attachments on these packs and that's probably one of my favorite things and the reason why is I always end up adding something whether I carry paracord in here and I need attachments. The cool thing that they did with these straps here is these straps you can unclip and move them up to whichever one fits your style for that day. You can also buy accessory ones, I believe, and add more straps to it and it seems like I can never have enough straps. So I usually do something like that. Obviously you have your bottom straps to keep the bottom of your bag in. Sometimes you can put stuff down in there whether it's your camping roll or hunting glassing pad or whatever on the bottom. You've got your clips that go in there. Switching around to the front of the pack here, another thing that jumps out to you is their shoulder straps and hip belt. They went with a different fabric but also interior fabric here. It's kind of like a honeycomb style material and it's more breathable, lighter, and more durable. So they gave an upgrade to that already phenomenal shoulder straps and hip belt that they have in all of their lines. So probably obviously the coolest thing that they did and I would assume the thing that I'm going to use the most of when I'm in the woods is once you unclip this pack. There's six clips here real quick that you clip and your back clip, if you're not familiar with it, pops off super easy right like that. Your pack opens up. Immediately you see there is two attachments here and straps that are right from the frame to the frame. What this is for is for your out quarters or whatever heavy thing that you're putting directly against the frame on your back. You can now secure this directly to the frame whereas in the past the bag and the straps that go around it was the only thing holding it. Which did fine but this is just an extra thing to keep there. The other nice thing is you can strap it to it and if you need to open your bag to you know if you had your tent or whatever in here supplies or something in there you it wouldn't fall apart when you open it. So that secures your meat load better. I'm getting super excited about that just because it seemed like a lot of times I would use paracord and lash it or whatever if I needed to to make sure that it didn't the bulk did not move. So that's a super cool upgrade. These are also interchangeable as well so you can take these off and use them for the front or use the front for back in here whatever you need to do there. So pretty sweet like I said these packs are relatively the same between the Sawtooth 45 and 65 and we'll open up the bag here and look inside. To open up the whole way the zipper goes all the way around there and you get into the interior of the bag. Immediately you've got your pockets accessible there as soon as you open. You've got you know plenty of bag room with that 65 liter storage there. You've got your water bag for your water hydration pack and then they also added these attachments here and these are for their accessory bags that you can get. You can attach your their accessory bags to here to keep like I said your snacks and stuff from flying around in your pack and just another way to organize your pack. It's just a another cool thing that we did. Obviously you have your spotting scope holders in in both sides here your big pack pockets there just for good organization and yeah I think they did a really good job upgrading a superior product already. Like I said with the new water resistant material, colors, shoulder straps and attachments and also attachments to the mainframe. So if you guys want to check these packs out hopefully you have a local store that you can go actually get your hands on them because they are it's better to look at them that way but if not go to mysteryranch.com and you can find out more information on this new Mysterium line of packs and hopefully pick up one get out in the woods try it out and hopefully it does as good for you as it's done for me for the past couple years. So yeah get out there try them out and stay safe out there and good luck.