Cold Weather Camping

Cold weather camping is an enjoyable family adventure

Cold weather camping is an enjoyable family adventure

Labor Day is the traditional signal for the end of camping season for most families. We tend to equate camping with sunny summer days by the lake or beach and, let’s face it, by the end of September warm sunny days are getting fewer and far between for many of us.

Winter camping offers many advantages, though, including the fact that all of those “other” campers are staying at home and not crowding your campground! The trails are still there, the fish are still biting, and the peaceful winter calm will make you wonder why you didn’t start extending your family camping season earlier.

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Camping Checklists are Overrated

Checklists tend to be either too generic or too detailed

Checklists tend to be either too generic or too detailed

If you Google the term camping list right now, you will get just under half-a-million hits. That’s a lot of lists! I’m not a big fan of lists, I suppose they’re fine for things like shopping, where you have a lot of things to do or get and all the things are different each time you go, but I think their utility for camping is greatly overstated.

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Top 5 Useless Camping Products

Like most outdoor recreational activities, camping is one of those things that seems to draw the snake oil salesmen out of the wood, or probably cubicle, every time you turn around. I’ve never seen any of this stuff in the woods, so I’m not sure who they’re selling it too, but these are all actual products so someone must be buying them.

Coleman Propane Fry Well

Coleman Propane Fry Well

Coleman® Propane Fry Well

Why don’t we just start letting McDonalds setup shop in our parks? Seriously, how intricate does your camp kitchen have to be before you start wanting a deep fryer to round it out?

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5 Lessons to Teach Kids about Camping Responsibly

Watching your kids grow up and learn about responsibility is one of the great joys of family camping.

Watching your kids grow up and learn about responsibility is one of the great joys of family camping.

One of the most important things we can do as camping parents is to pass along our love of the outdoors to our kids. Now, kids naturally love camping so this isn’t a difficult task, but we need to remember that our kids are constantly learning by watching what we do, so teaching our kids starts with us doing the right thing, too.

Keep a clean camp.

In the military we called it “police call,” walking through an area and picking up everything that doesn’t belong there. Fortunately my kids aren’t in the military, but that’s no reason to not “enlist” them in helping clean up the campsite. It’s a Scribner Family ritual that we perform twice; once to pick up any trash and debris that the previous campers left behind, and again after we break camp, to ensure that we don’t leave anything behind for others to deal with.

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Camping Stove Buyers Guide

A camping stove is much more efficient than a campfireWhen it comes to the camping stove, there are lightweight backpacking models and large multi-burner models for car camping and base camp use. Camping stoves are further segmented by the kind of fuel that they burn. Some stoves burn liquid fuels like kerosene, alcohol, or a pressurized liquid like propane or a mixture of propane and butane. Solid fuel stoves burn wood, or a solid tablet like hexamine or trioxane.

All of the different types of fuels have their plusses and minuses. Propane is the most popular type of fuel, due to its ease-of-use and the readily available 1-pound canisters. Those canisters are heavy for backpacking, though, so manufacturers have introduced lower-pressure isobutane and isobutane / propane canisters that are much lighter, at about 5 ounces.

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Quick Takes