Camping Gear That Fails in Heat, Not Cold
Every camping list is written for cold nights. The best-seller chart is written for hot ones: ice packs at number one, water filters, bug spray.
Skadi is the goddess of winter. Skis, the bow, the high mountains. She married the sea-god Njörðr and could not sleep by his shore for the crying of the gulls; he could not sleep in her mountains for the howling of the wolves. They split their time between two homes that suited neither of them.
Nearly every camping list ever written was written by Skadi’s people. The desert is the other house.
The chart is a hot-weather chart
Amazon’s camping and hiking chart, read this morning, does not look like the cold-weather list in the back of the guidebook. There is no sleeping bag in the top twenty. No stove. No insulated jacket.
What is there:
- Ice packs at number one, number four and number twenty. Three of the top twenty places.
- Repellents at two, three, five, ten, eleven, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen. Eight of twenty. We wrote about that chart last month, and it has not changed.
- Water at twelve and thirteen. A filter straw and purification tablets.
- A quick-dry towel at nine, a headlamp at six, a first-aid kit at eight, an air mattress at nineteen.
That is a list for people who are hot, thirsty, and being bitten. Which, from May to October, is us.
What fails in heat
Cold-weather gear fails slowly: you get cold, you add a layer, you sleep badly. Hot-weather gear fails fast and it fails around three things.
The cooler. In the heat the cooler is the whole kitchen, and ice is what makes it one. The failure is not the cooler, it is opening it. Every lid-lift in the sun is an hour of ice, and the slim packs at the top of the chart are gone by mid-afternoon in a full-size box. Pack it once, in the shade, with block ice on the bottom and the packs filling the gaps, and open it as if it costs money.
Water. You drink roughly double in the heat, and you rarely carry double. The chart’s answer is to make water where you find it, which is why a filter straw with a hundred and twenty-five thousand reviews sits next to a tube of tablets. Carry the straw and know where the water is before you need it.
Shade and sleep. Here the chart is honest by omission: there is no shade product in the top twenty, because shade is a tarp and a tarp is not sold as camping gear. Bring one anyway. And the air mattress at nineteen is doing a job the cold-weather list never asks of it: it lifts you off ground that is still radiating the day’s heat at midnight.
Where these picks came from, honestly
Read off Amazon’s own camping chart this morning, rank, rating and review count together, best-sellers first. These are research picks. The climate is genuinely ours, and that is the part we can stand behind: the advice about coolers and shade comes from living in it, the product picks come from the chart.
The one honest warning
The number one product on the chart does not deserve its rank for this job, and it is worth saying plainly.
The slim ice packs at one and four are lunch-box packs. Fifty thousand people rate them 4.6 stars, and for a lunch bag they earn it. The chart calls them camping gear because that is the category Amazon filed them under. In a forty-eight-quart cooler on a hundred-and-ten-degree afternoon they are a half-day of cold, and a family that trusted them has warm milk by Saturday night.
Buy them for the gaps. Buy block ice for the trip. Freeze your own bottles for both.
The picks
Cool Coolers by Fit & Fresh XL slim ice packs, 4-pack
The number one product on Amazon's camping and hiking chart this morning, 4.6 stars across fifty thousand ratings, and ice packs hold three of the top twenty places. Nothing about a cold-weather trip needs this. Everything about a hot one does: the cooler is the kitchen, and ice is the only thing that makes it one.
- Best for
- Lunch coolers, day trips, and packing the gaps in a big cooler where loose ice would melt into soup.
- Watch out
- These are slim lunch-box packs that the chart has promoted to camping gear. In a full-size cooler in real desert heat they are a half-day, not a weekend. Block ice from the grocery store outlasts them, and freezing your own water bottles outlasts both.
LifeStraw personal water filter
Number twelve, but the most-reviewed thing on the entire chart: 4.8 stars across a hundred and twenty-five thousand ratings. In heat you drink twice what you planned to carry. A filter turns any creek or tank into the extra you did not bring, and it weighs less than the bottle it replaces.
- Best for
- Day hikes past any water source, the emergency kit in the car, and the one thing you carry when you carry nothing else.
- Watch out
- It filters bacteria and parasites, not chemicals and not salt. A stock tank with cattle in it is fine; a mine tailings pond is not, and neither is the sea. It also needs a source: in a dry wash it is a straw with nothing to drink.
Sawyer Products 20% picaridin insect repellent lotion
Number two on the chart, 4.6 stars across twenty-five thousand ratings. Heat brings the mosquitoes, and eight of the top twenty products are repellents. This is the one that is not DEET: it does not melt plastic, does not smell like a chemistry set, and the lotion lasts through the sweat that washes a spray off in an hour.
- Best for
- Evenings by water, kids, and anyone who has ruined a watch strap or a tent window with DEET.
- Watch out
- Lotion takes a minute to spread and a minute to dry, and people skip the ankles. A repellent that is on most of you is a map for the mosquitoes to the parts it is not.
Rainleaf microfiber quick-dry towel
Number nine, 4.6 stars across thirty thousand ratings, and it is on the chart because heat changes what a towel is for. In the cold a towel dries you. In the heat a wet towel around your neck is the closest thing to air conditioning you can carry, and this one wrings out and dries in the sun in minutes.
- Best for
- Neck cooling on hot afternoons, wiping down before sleep, and swimming holes.
- Watch out
- Microfiber does not absorb like cotton; it moves water rather than soaking it up, which feels odd the first time. And it will pick up every burr and pine needle it touches.
We do not list prices; they change daily. The button opens the current Amazon page.