I have come to appreciate what the Jetboil Helios brings to the table.  In every review I read,the Helios is compared to Jetboil’s PCS which set the standard for self-contained, compact, easy to use, personal cooking systems.  The Jetboil PCS is so revered, that I noticed that it had at least 3 mentions in the latest issue of Backpacker Magazine, including veteran mountaineer Peter Whittaker citing it as a big leap in mountaineering gear .  Getting back to my point,  the Jetboil Helios is not the Jetboil PCS, nor was it ever intended to be.  It takes some of the qualities of the PCS (self-contained, easy to use) and applies it to a more complex cooking system that is engineered to serve a group of up to four people.  It adds features intended to increase the efficiency, and help it function where the Jetboil struggles (cold weather and high altitude) Most of my experience with Jetboil Helios has been with cooking duty for four hungry backpackers.  It served as the only cooking tool we had for our Grand Canyon adventure, and worked perfectly, cooking up my home dried gourmet backpacking meals.  I  also carried it with me as my snow melting stove during a winter snowshoe trip, the details I will get to later.

As I have mentioned before on Outside San Diego,  the design of the Helios is nothing short of amazing.  I think it is one of the prettiest stoves on the market.  But does it perform as well as it looks?  The results are mixed, although once I got the bugs ironed out, the stove worked perfectly.  The bugs being a malfunction during my snowshoe trip in which the orifice which feeds the gas to the burner became plugged, and I was unable to light the stove.  If I would have been diligent when receiving the stove, and read the directions, it mentions this possibility, and provided a simple solution in which I could have corrected the problem and been on my snow-melting way.  Instead I waited until I came home, unduly bothered the folks atJetboil , who held my hand through the simple process and got my stove working better than when it arrived.  If anything can be said about this experience, is that my gear ADD was no match for the superb customer service at Jetboil.  No harm no foul, a lesson learned.

My experience on the longer trek in the Grand Canyon was much different.  The Jetboil Helios worked perfectly,  providing meals for the four of us with unyielding reliability.  I prepared and cooked all my own dehydrated food from scratch for this trip,  producing a month long chaotic mess in my kitchen that had my wife shaking her head daily, and the large capacity of the Helios was ideas for reconstituting the meals.  I would drop the food for four into the pot, add water, and let soak for awhile before placing on the burner and heating.  I was very pleased with meals, and happy to see that I had gas left over in the 230 gram canister after four days of cooking meals morning and night,  including multiple boils for evening tea and hot cocoa.  The boil time of about 4-minutes I reported in the original post was somewhat longer than I experienced during this trip, and I believe was colored by a blockage I reported earlier.  The Helios is not a quiet stove.  the rumble of the burned reminds you that it is blasting out heat,  and there was no serene contemplation while cooking dinner.  This happened afterward while enjoying my home dehydrated fair.

The question as to whether the Jetbiol Helios is a success boils down (no pun intended) to whether I would bring it with me again.  Will I give it another chance in a critical piece of gear in a situation such as a snow camp?  After careful consideration, my answer is yes.  I really believe that if I had read the instructions carefully I would have been able to clear the blockage, and reduce the problem to a 10-minute annoyance.  Like any piece of critical gear,  I will need to prove its performance to myself,  and will not put myself in a situation where I am depending on the stove without a backup plan until I am 100% confident in its performance.  Its unfailing performance in the Grand Canyon proves that this stove has what it takes to be a cooking machine, cranking out food for a group of hungry backpackers.

Get Your Jetboil Helios at REI