The gear and testing it was very expensive, I wanted to make my own but didn't know how to sew - but quickly found the "cottage" industry of lightweight and ultralight backpacking gear and fell in love again. Now I loved the trail and the gear, but I was also broke.
One of my first non-visual basic programming projects was building a scraper for a handful of backpacking forums' used gear sections - I found that I was able to acquire and test the gear I wanted at a fraction of the cost this way, as well as find buyers for the gear I was ready to cycle out.
While I did build this for myself I eventually realized that there were so many good deals and people with good gear looking to offload it - but the forums and the communities were so fractured it made it hard for others (just like it did for me). I ended up building the whole thing (again) as my first foray into playing with Laravel.
It's still up and working - thousands of people still using it, maybe some of you would also enjoy it... [0] (no ads, no affiliate offers, ever)
* Note, I'm aware some of the "source" forums are broken/no longer scraping properly, will be updating it soon.