Aerospace-engineered platform extends capabilities of award-winning, one-ton Dragan Pocket Winch, enabling portable lifting in remote environments without relying on trees, vehicles or other fixed anchors
Dragan Systems, the Bend-based backcountry safety and utility gear company founded by aerospace engineers Ryan Neil and Jake Ruhl, today launched the Dragan Pod, a lightweight support platform for the Dragan Pocket Winch, the brand’s award-winning, power-independent pulling and lifting system. The Dragan Pod is available now for $249 at DraganSystems.com.
Introduced in 2025 as the world’s lightest one-ton winch, the sub-one-pound Dragan Pocket Winch established Dragan Systems’ aerospace-engineered, purpose-built approach to backcountry gear, delivering meaningful pulling and recovery capability in a compact form. Today, it is used worldwide for motorcycle and ATV recovery, trail clearing, vehicle repairs, moving heavy equipment, dressing wild game, and other remote applications.
The new Dragan Pod extends that usability into more remote places and scenarios. Weighing approximately 1.5 pounds, it gives users a freestanding structure from which to lift, eliminating reliance on a tree, vehicle, overhead beam or other external anchor. Paired with the Pocket Winch, the highly portable kit weighs roughly three pounds, packs down into a compact footprint, and provides an estimated lifting capacity of 500 to 750 pounds.
“The Dragan Pod reflects how we approach product design at Dragan Systems: start with a real problem, strip away unnecessary weight and complexity, and build something people will actually carry and use,” said Ryan Neil, co-founder of Dragan Systems. “We’ve spent a lot of time in remote environments ourselves, so that purpose-built mindset comes from firsthand experience. With the Dragan Pod, we’ve created an external support without compromising the lightweight and portable characteristics that make the Pocket Winch so valuable in the first place.”
Constructed with lightweight, slip-jointed carbon-fiber tube segments, the Dragan Pod forms an upright support when deployed and disassembles and packs quickly for transport. Paired with the Pocket Winch, it supports applications including ATV and side-by-side repairs, lifting motorcycles and small trailers, aircraft tail-wheel service, repositioning heavy equipment, backcountry maintenance and recovery, and more.
The Dragan Pod arrives after more than a year of development, prototyping and testing in demanding field conditions. Earlier this summer, the Dragan Systems team undertook a 10-day, 4,000-mile backcountry flight through Alaska and northern Canada, logging approximately 50 flight hours while meeting with pilots, boaters, public-safety professionals and other Dragan users to test ideas and better understand the environments and challenges the company designs for.
“Products built for remote environments have to prove themselves outside of the workshop,” said Jake Ruhl, co-founder of Dragan Systems. “That means putting them in the hands of the people who actually rely on them and experiencing those environments firsthand. That kind of real-world R&D is fundamental to how we engineer at Dragan Systems, and the Dragan Pod is a direct result of that design philosophy.”
The Dragan Pod is available now for $249 at DraganSystems.com. A Dragan Pocket Winch is required for operation and sold separately. Customers can bundle and purchase both products together at a discounted price of $599 at dragansystems.com/products/dragan-pod-pocket-winch.