Outdoor gear-maker Big Agnes always puts its products through extensive field testing before releasing them to the market, in the laboratory and its backyard of the Park Range in its home of Steamboat Springs in Northwest Colorado. Rocky Mountain Youth Corps is now giving it more firepower when field-testing its award-winning sleeping bags, pads, tents, and other outdoor gear.

The company recently partnered with RMYC to have its crew members put Big Agnes’s gear through its paces and provide feedback from their fieldwork throughout the Rocky Mountains. Recently celebrating its 30th anniversary, RMYC serves over 850 youth and young adults through its Youth Corps, Conservation Corps, Natural Resource Internships, and Yampa Valley Science School programs. Over 235 project weeks last year, these crews improved 1,621 acres of public lands, including 705 miles of trails and nearly 16,000 trees removed or mitigated. Their work takes them from Colorado’s 14ers to wildfire sites, hiking and camping in the field for 10 + weeks. RMYC will also field an all-women’s chainsaw crew this year and send a team into Wyoming’s rugged Wind River mountains for a month-long trail-building project. All this makes RMYC a perfect fit for testing Big Agnes’s gear.

“Our adult crews spend most of their summer outside 24/7, sleeping in their tents every night for up to 16 weeks and using their backpacks daily to transport their gear,” says RMYC’s Mark Wertheimer. “They’re exceptionally hard on their equipment, exposing it to various weather conditions. One week a crew might be removing barbed wire fencing in 95-degree heat and the next they’re hiking and camping in hail. And our fall programs often work in damp, snowy conditions.”

The program will involve RMYC crews using a variety of Big Agnes gear, including sleeping bags, pads, and tents, and recording their field-testing results. The information will then be sent to Big Agnes’s R&D teams and used in various marketing programs for both organizations.

“For all the years we’ve worked with RMYC this might be the most exciting of them all,” says Big Agnes sponsorship director Rob Peterson. “We’ve partnered with them for a while to get their crews gear so they can camp safely and comfortably outdoors and have also donated gear for their annual fundraisers. Now we get the bonus of receiving true feedback on how that gear works from those who live outdoors all season long, which we can document and share with our entire team.”

RMYC’s service area for the field testing is quite large—its crews regularly traipse throughout northwestern Colorado and eastern Utah and as far north as Wyoming’s Bridger Teton National Forest. “It should be a great partnership,” says Wertheimer, adding that RMYC also has a loaner system for crew members who can’t afford the gear. “We’re an excellent program for testing gear because everything gets pushed to its absolute limit.”