MSR again… well for the liquid fuel stove anyway.  My experience in New Zealand with gas at low temperatures convinced me to stick with liquid fuel stoves for trips that may have very cold weather i.e. less than 0 degrees centigrade.

For gas stoves I have a neat little Kobea Titanium that has a self-igniter built in.

Kovea Titanium Stove With Piezo Ignition

I use this stove daily to make my early morning cup of espresso (yeah the old way…) and its been going strong for over 6 years now.  Highly recommended.

Windproof Hiking Stoves

One of the challenges of hiking trips is trying to cook if there is a lot of wind. You can end up burning a lot of fuel trying to heat water or food and its quite hard to figure out how much will be enough to for any given trip. For longer trips I use dehydrated food and take minimal fuel for boiling water only. Usually you have to use water from creeks along the way and this should be boiled before consumption so you may need to boil around 4 litres of water a day, depending on the conditions.

Recently there have been a few good innovations in this area in the form of the JetBoil Zip and the MSR Windburner stoves.

MSR WindBurner Personal Stove System, 1.0-Liter, Red

Jetboil Zip Cooking System (Black)

Both of these are designed to improve the efficiency of the stove by encasing the burner and by including heat transfer fins on the pots to capture more heat fro the flame. These stoves use under 10gm of gas to boil a litre of water so you can boil around 20 litres from 2 100gm canisters. That’s probably enough for around 5 days. You might also consider using one of the ultraviolet water sterilisers, such as the SteriPEN and save the gas for when heated water is required.

SteriPEN ADO-MP-EF Adventurer Opti Personal,Handheld UV Water Purifier

After a bit of research I got the impression that the MSR Windburner stove was slightly better than the JetBoil stove (and quite a bit more expensive). Most of the commentary seemed to indicate the JetBoil struggled a bit in cold windy conditions and a closer look at both designed seems to show that the MSR design has a much more enclosed burner. Be aware that for the most part these stoves are not great for cooking with and are really designed for boiling water. Both manufacturers have pots available that work with their stoves but all I was looking for was something to boil water as I was planning on taking dehydrated meals with me which only require addition of hot water. Breakfast was to be cereal with powdered milk and I might use hot water if the weather was very cold.