Your selection has produced 0 results 'From' value that is a number Please enter a 'From' value 4 to 5 stars 3 to 4 stars 2 to 3 stars 1 to 2 stars This Is It Stores Number Of Sleeping Rooms Buy from This Is It Stores Buy from Mountain Warehouse Buy from The Sports HQ 1 Offer - Quick look Choice of buying options Did you find what you were looking for? Thank you for your feedback10% Off or More (57) 25% Off or More (1)Spring is in full swing, which means that camping trip you’ve been itching to take is just around the corner. Of course, you’ve also been meaning to buy the required gear too. Don’t worry, whether you’re a complete beginner or a vet looking to cover your bases, we’ve got you covered. What you should take on your camping trip depends on what type of trip you have in mind. Driving somewhere and going on small day hikes from a populated base camp? You can bring a nice, big stove.
Hiking 25 miles into the middle of the Grand Gulch? You want something a little more portable. The distinction between the two is usually labeled as “camping” or “backpacking.” Campers drive somewhere and camp out of that location. Backpackers hike in and then make camp with what they’ve brought.The gear best suited for each usually has to do with weight and packability, so make sure you consider which you’ll spend more time doing when you shop for gear. Backpacking gear tends to be pricier because it focuses on weight, but it’s great for both camping and backpacking. That dual-use nature is good for anyone planning on doing both. You should consider your specific needs instead of relying on a generic checklist, but the list of essential items for most trips remains the same. Let’s start with the most obvious camping-specific equipment: Tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, and all that other stuff that immediately comes to mind when you think of camping. This is all the expensive gear you’ve been putting off buying until you really needed it.
Thankfully, you can get by with a lot less you think. There are thousands of other gadgets, knick-knacks, and other gear available for camping, but most people don’t need more than what’s listed here when it comes to the essentials. You probably don’t want to sustain yourself on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches during your camping trip, which means you also need some cooking gear. Here are some of the basics: You’ll also need food to cook. That part’s up to you, but meal planning for backpacking trips is a skill in its own right. REI has a good guide, as does Backpacker. Both walk you through meal planning, which is important not only so you don’t die from starvation, but also so you get the nutrients necessary for the outdoor workout you’ll be doing. You’ll need to get used to bland freeze-dried instant meals, but it’s surprising how great a good cup of coffee and some decent oatmeal will improve your outlook for a day. Personally, two things I always overlooked but that I’ve found useful are foil pack tuna and a good, reasonably priced bourbon.
Of course, if you’re just camping, anything you can grill works. Just make sure you bring along a cooler to store any perishables in. Whatever you buy and pack, just make sure to consider your climate, needs, and environment. If you’re heading off to the desert for a long weekend in June, you can skip the rain jacket, but doing so would be foolish if you’re heading into the rainforest. Perhaps you want to get some fishing in, in which case you’ll need a pole, permit, and some bait. Maybe you’re going on a big bike camping trip, which requires not only camping gear, but also a slew of cycling-specific extras. The fact is, regardless of the millions of generic camping checklists out there, they’re all pretty much garbage because they’re just massive lists of almost random items. For everything beyond the basics above, you’re much better off searching for checklists suited to the specific trip you’re planning. Here are a few examples to get you started: Remember, your needs are likely a little different than everyone else’s so adapt and make your own lists.
Don’t forget things like medication, hygiene products (often left off of those checklists), or anything else that makes you feel a little more human after being out in the woods for days at a time. The basic rule of thumb is simple though: if you’re backpacking, you want to keep the list down the bare minimum of essential tools and needs. If you’re camping, feel free to pack that car with as much junk as you can, because you’re not going to have to carry it anywhere. Illustration by Sam Woolley. Photos by Zach Dischner and Maria Ly.The 2016 Consumer Electronics Show is barely under way—there's still plenty of news to come on TVs, smartphones, and other high end products—but we did make a few telling discoveries on Day One. Here's what they taught us: A Connected Home Can Help With a Sleeping Baby CES is getting to be a connected-home show as much an electronics venue. Case in point: The Onelink line from First Alert. The company is a stalwart of the home safety business, making smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and so on for the past 50 years or so.
In the fall, Onelink introduced smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors ($119) that connect to Wi-Fi in order to alert homeowners in case of danger. Now the company is adding a whole suite of other products. There’s a $249 thermostat; a $99 environmental monitor that can detect temperature and humidity, along with low levels of CO; and something called the Envirocam, which is meant to watch over a sleeping baby. It’s a camera, a thermometer, and a device that’s meant to send an alert if the baby stops breathing—the pricing should be just north of $250 once it’s set. All of these devices can be controlled through a mobile phone—as long as it was made by Apple. There are a lot of connected home competitors at CES, and one thing to watch is where they come down on the emerging ecosystem wars. Onelink is in the iOS camp, working with Apple’s HomeKit. Among the other big ecosystems out there are Google’s Weave, the Lowe’s Iris system, and Samsung’s SmartThings. We’ll be watching to see which of these gather the most business partners and, of course, the most consumers.
Get More on CES 2016 • Hot Smartphone Tech • The Virtual Reality to See • Top 5 TV Trends Drones Can Do More Than Hover Like Hummingbirds Drone-maker Parrot wants to help you live out those Superman fantasies you entertained as a child. Most consumer models hover like hummingbirds. But the new 1.5-pound Disco wing-shaped drone is more of a soaring machine, flying at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour, and taking HD video all the way. It’s controlled via Parrot’s Wi-Fi Skycontroller, which gives a first-person view from the aircraft and connects to the Disco from up to 1.25 miles away, an impressive distance for a Wi-Fi signal. Don’t know how to fly a plane? Parrot says don’t worry—the Disco has an autopilot feature that helps maintain altitude and keeps the aircraft on course. The Disco launches (yes, that's a pun) later this year; no price has been announced. Virtual Reality Is About More Than Headsets You’ll find plenty of virtual reality headsets at CES this year, but the accessories could be equally important for the technology’s future.
And there are plenty of them coming on the market. One of the big questions surrounding the experience has been, How do you move about in a VR world without blindly running into coffee tables? The engineers at 3DRudder have come up with a novel solution. They’ve invented a footpad that lets you roam about while seated safely in a chair. The $175 device is round and roughly the size of a hubcap and it pivots beneath your feet, using gyroscopes and accelerometers to map your movements. The unit operates much like a hoverboard. Press down with your toes and you move forward. Press down with your heels and you move backward. But, when you press down with the toes on one foot and the heel on the other? Well, you fly, up, up, and away—literally taking the virtual reality experience to a whole new level. There's just something liberating about controlling the movement with your feet. It’s like touring the world with Peter Pan. But, of course, we have yet to see all the things virtual reality can do, so it's hard to say which of the innovative accessories will win out in the end.
A Washer/Dryer Combo May Actually Work Well While companies like Samsung and LG are constantly innovating in the laundry room, there hasn't been much, if any, attention paid to one of the least-loved appliances: the single-machine, washer-dryer combo. Marathon Laundry, founded by a former Apple veteran, has re-engineered this sad workhorse. Because most other machines rely on a condenser dryer, it's like trying to dry clothes on a humid summer day. And many people complain that the results are a never quite fully dry load. The Marathon machine has a fully vented dryer, so clothes should quickly emerge "toasty dry," which is actually one of the machine's four settings—Consumer Reports, of course, will withhold judgment until we get a unit in our labs. But the Marathon does seem promising. The machine has a touch screen with a super simple interface: 1. Choose the water temp, 2. Select the intensity of the wash cycle, and 3. Set the dryer temp. The machine remembers past cycles so individual household members can do laundry their preferred way.
Or you can save a recurring cycle such as the one for the super dirty soccer clothes that come home with the kids every weekend. The machine is Wi-Fi connected and can download software upgrades as needed. One downside: While it looks big in the exterior, the machine's 2.7 cubic feet capacity puts it in the compact category (average capacity is about four cubic feet, and some machines these days go up to over five). CR can't wait to try it out. The machine is available online for pre-order and should be found at stores starting in June. And at $1,199, it's well-priced for the category. Brewing Beer Just Got Easier Quirky products that began life on Kickstarter are scattered around CES, and one of the most appealing this year could be the Pico automated home beer-brewing kit, from a company called PicoBrew. There are two things to know about it. One, it’s about as easy to use as popping a coffee pod into a Keurig machine. Two, you can order the pods (which are big, like bigger than a breadbox) from an online marketplace that includes Dogfish and Rogue as its contributors.
Yes, you can make your own Dogfish at home now. The marketplace also sells pods based on recipes from about 80 other microbrewers, and 350 hobbyists. The machine costs $699 on pre-order ($599 if you order during CES), and the pods cost around $20 to $60, yielding about 5 liters of beer. Not super cheap, but this product is not only fun, but also rather practical. It turns your kitchen into a 450-variety beer emporium. And now wedding gift shoppers have a great alternative to the automatic bread-making machine. Stay on top of the news from CES 2016 Check out Consumer Reports' coverage from the show floor. Tweets about ces #ces OR #ces2016 from:consumerreports OR from:mariarer1 OR from:djmedfizz OR from:jeffreycullen2 OR from:r_fisco OR from:crcarsjake OR from:suecrhealth OR from:markallwood2 OR from:kellihalyard OR from:trishacalvo OR from:patbits OR from:gwendolynbounds OR from:marciswhalen OR from:briang84 OR from:rcunning1023 OR from:cray65 OR from:jtmac32 OR from:jasondfox OR from