GSI Pinnacle Dualist Cook Kit, is Light and Strong
By Rick Shandley
The GSI Outdoors products lightweight Pinnacle Dualist cooking kit, offers some great features to consider for your next backcountry trek. It’s light, sturdy, and self-contained. The Pinnacles Dualist takes up minimal room in your backpack, cleans up efficiently in the field, and endures the dishwasher with no problem.
This two-person cook kit is fashioned from hard anodized aluminum and weighs in at 20.7 ounces. It’s entirely self-contained in its own seam welded carry sack that doubles as a water basin. The carry sack has self-supporting side walls so you can even store stream water at your campsite for disinfection or to fill up your water bottles for the trail.
We took the GSI Pinnacle Dualist cook set on several overnight treks and used it both as a solo kit and a two-person kit. Since this writer tends to use boiling water for most food preparation and disinfecting water supplies, the GSI Pinnacle Dualist was a great fit.
The primary 1.8-liter pot offered plenty of capacity. A folding pot handle makes dealing with hot water and gas-stoves safe, and the handle also serves to lock in the entire cook kit for transportation. A crush proof pot lid, made with BPA-Free resin, keeps its shape regardless of the potentially deforming pressure sometimes exerted by other gear while inside the pack on the trail. Engineered into the pot lid are vent holes, allowing steam to escape and giving you the ability to pour off excess water without spilling. A tab-handle at the top of the lid allows you to safely grasp it while your other hand is controlling the pot by the handle. GSI cautions you to always point the vent holes away from the handle and your body, to avoid contact with the steam exiting the side of the lid.
Two 20 fluid ounce insulated mugs, worked well for coffee, hot chocolate, and simply as water cups while hanging out at a bivouac site. Two 20 ounce bowls also come with sip-it lids to contain sloshing contents. One pair of sip-it lids, and one pair of insulation bands work equally well for the cups and the bowls. If there are two in your party, you each have to choose whether to use the insulation band on your cup or your bowl. But if you use this kit as a solo cooking set, (minus a cup and bowl) the band can be used on each.
Two dual-purpose eating utensils, called “Foons” are collapsible and fit nicely inside the Dualist kit. At first, these multi-tasking fork/spoon devices appeared fragile. But at no time did they ever fail. Regardless of how well an eating implement is cared for on a backcountry trip, they still go into the dishwasher to ensure any bacteria or microbes are killed. Fortunately, the GSI Foons held up here as well.
In general, we found the GSI Pinnacle Dualist cook set excellent for ultra-light backpacking or long-day hikes where it’s nice to cook a lunch and have some coffee or tea. GSI now offers an even lighter version of this cooking system in the Halulite Microdualist, that weighs 17.8 ounces, but the kit components are similar, including the low center-of-gravity bowls and mugs. The weight difference comes from the use of GSI’s proprietary Halulite alloy that is light as titanium. Between the two kit alloys and the weight difference of about three ounces, we are indifferent. The Pinnacle Dualist worked just fine for us, both as a compact cooking system and a piece of gear that appears to be well thought out.