Some climbing friends of ours gave us a Kelty Kid Carrier FC 3.0 when we had our baby shower. If you aren’t aware, it’s a backpack that you can carry your gear as well as your child in. Everything on the pack seemed really well thought out and was really nice except I couldn’t find a place for a camelbak. Anyone that knows me knows that I try to hydrate a lot. When we go climbing I usually have 4.5 liters of water just for me for the day; maybe a little less if it isn’t hot. So through some playing around I was able to work out a system where I could attach a camelbak bladder to the pack and still not lose any functionality or storage.
First off, I found some space to store the bladder behind where the child sits. If you notice in this picture you can see the handle and above the handle you can see there is the frame and it’s pretty beefy. I then accessed the frame and the space by unvelcroing and unsnapping the area above the lower storage. I then found some extra webbing I had around the house and wrapped the webbing around the top of the frame between the frame and the frabric shell of the pack. Make sure your webbing fits the plastic hook on the camelbak before attaching it to the pack. Since I am a climber I used a figure 8 knot to create a loop in the webbing but you can use an overhand or whatever knot you feel comfortable with. This loop is used to hang the camelbak bladder off of. This part was a little difficult because I had to do all of this without being able to see what my hands, the webbing or the knot.
Next I used the plastic hook on the camelbak bladder to attach the bladder to the loop I made with the webbing. This again takes a little time because you have to feel around and you can’t see your hands, the hook, or the loop while doing this. After it’s attached, I made sure the bladder is inside the opening and re-attched the velcro and snaps. The tube from the bladder goes through the velcro and I wrapped it around to the front strap. Then you are good to go!
