It started innocently. I had a free Friday, a truck with a quarter tank, and that dangerous feeling of competence you get after watching two YouTube videos. So I opened a chat window and typed the words that would define my weekend:

“Plan me a 3-day camping trip in the Uinta Mountains. Include a full packing list.”

What came back was fourteen pages long. It had section headers. It had a morning stretching routine. It had a packing list with 87 items, including, I am not making this up, a stainless steel fondue set.

The itinerary

Day one was reasonable: drive up, set camp, “enjoy golden hour.” Fine. Day two is where the AI revealed it had never actually been outside. It scheduled a 4:30 a.m. summit of Bald Mountain, followed by a “leisurely 12-mile lakeside loop,” followed by “fondue night.”

Twelve miles is not leisurely. Twelve miles at 10,000 feet is a cry for help.

I want to be clear that I did bring long forks. For safety.

The packing list

Here is a representative sample of what the AI felt I needed:

To its credit, the headlamp recommendation was spot on. The one I bought has a red mode, charges off the truck, and was the single most-used item of the trip, mostly to find things the fondue set had knocked over.

What actually happened

Friday went great. I set up the tent in about 20 minutes (the AI budgeted 90, which, rude), and watched the sun go down over a lake that looked like a screensaver. Ten out of ten. No notes.

Saturday I slept through the 4:30 alarm because I am a grown man, hiked about four miles, and spent the afternoon reading in a hammock. The AI did not schedule hammock time. The AI does not understand hammocks.

Then came fondue night.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to melt a pound of Gruyère over a camp stove at altitude in 38-degree air, but the cheese does not so much “melt” as “sulk.” It formed a kind of dairy asphalt. I ate it with a long fork, for safety, while a chipmunk watched me with what I can only describe as pity.

Would I do it again?

Yes, with edits. The AI is a great brainstormer and a terrible editor. It knows what gear exists; it does not know what gear matters. So here’s my revised rule: let the robot make the list, then cross off everything you wouldn’t carry up a flight of stairs.

The fondue set lives in my garage now. It’s a very nice fondue set. It will never see a mountain again.

Let me establish credentials: I have lost, at minimum, nine headlamps. One is at the bottom of Flaming Gorge. One is in a friend’s truck in Moab. One was “right here a second ago” and remains, two years later, right here a second ago.

This qualifies me to review budget headlamps better than anyone alive, because I’ve bought all of them.

How I tested

Four months, five headlamps, rotated through car camping, two backpacking trips, a deer scouting weekend, and roughly 40 late-night walks to various outhouses. I looked at four things:

1. Does it get bright enough to find a trail? (300+ lumens on high)
2. Does it get dim enough to read in a tent? (without searing your retinas)
3. Does it have a red mode? (non-negotiable; your tentmate will thank you)
4. Will I still own it in a month? (the lanyard loop question)

The picks

The all-rounder. USB-C charging, a real red mode, and a headband that stays put when you look down at your boots. It’s the one I grab without thinking, which is the highest praise a piece of gear can get.

If you lose headlamps like I do, the two-pack is the correct financial decision. They run on AAAs, which means they work in February when lithium packs get grumpy. The beam is a little floody, but at 2 a.m. you’re not looking for a sniper’s spotlight, you’re looking for the zipper.

Green light is the secret weapon here. Deer don’t react to it the way they do to white, and it doesn’t wreck your night vision the way a phone screen does. If you’re walking in before dawn, this is the one.

For backpacking where every ounce is an argument, this is it. Just know that “400 lumens” on the box means “400 lumens for about 90 minutes.” Run it on medium and it’ll last the weekend.

What to skip

• Anything that doesn’t tilt. You need to point it at your feet.
• Anything with a single brightness level. You will blind someone.
• Anything marketed with “tactical” in the name. Extra Velcro, same LED.

Bottom line

Spend $25 to $35 on a rechargeable with red mode and USB-C. Buy the two-pack as backup. Put one in the truck. You’re welcome.

I bought a fish finder because I had reached the stage of fishing where you start blaming equipment. I had tried blaming the weather, the moon, the barometric pressure, and a specific pelican, and none of them had improved my catch rate, which hovered somewhere around “legally considered zero.”

So: sonar. Science. A little screen that would show me where the fish were hiding, so I could stop guessing and start harvesting.

First cast

I lowered the transducer off the side of the kayak, opened the app, and watched the screen fill with a beautiful, high-resolution image of absolutely nothing. Flat bottom, 22 feet, 61 degrees. Scientific confirmation that this specific patch of water was empty.

I paddled. The bottom rose. The screen lit up with structure: a big, angular shape with hard edges.

“Rock pile,” I thought. “Bass city.”

It was a shopping cart. I know this because I snagged it on the third cast, and after ten minutes of heroic effort, I landed it. It was a Smith’s cart. It had been down there long enough to grow a beard.

The submerged road

Reservoirs are built by flooding valleys, and the old roads are still down there. The finder showed me one in gorgeous detail: a crisp line across the bottom, perfectly straight, with what might have been a culvert. I spent an hour fishing the “road,” on the theory that fish like edges. The fish, if they exist, do not use roads.

The school

Mid-afternoon, redemption. A dense cloud of arches on the screen, right under the boat. A school. I’d found them. I dropped a jig straight down, heart pounding, and felt a hit on the first bounce.

It was my anchor rope. The “school” was the rope swaying in the current. I had been sonar-imaging my own boat for about twenty minutes.

What I learned

The finder is a great tool. It really does show structure, depth, and temperature, and I now know more about the bottom of that reservoir than the people who built it. But it answers the question “what’s down there?” and not “why won’t they bite?” The answer to the second question was: I was fishing in the wrong place, with the wrong lure, at the wrong speed, and no amount of sonar fixes that.

I went back the next weekend with a white swimbait, no finder, and fished the shady side of the dock. I caught three bass. Small ones. Real ones.

The finder is still great for finding drop-offs and the right depth. I’ll keep using it. I’ll just stop treating it like a treasure map.

Cast iron is the great equalizer of camp cooking. It costs less than a tank of gas, lasts longer than you will, and does not care whether you’re a chef or a person who once set a pot of water on fire. Here’s the whole system.

1. Seasoning (the part everyone overthinks)

“Seasoning” is just oil that’s been baked onto the iron until it turns into a hard, slick coating. Most pans come pre-seasoned. That seasoning is fine. Use the pan. Cooking bacon in it is seasoning it.

If you’ve got a rusty garage-sale find, do this once at home:

1. Scrub the rust off with steel wool. Wash it. Dry it immediately (iron rusts while you blink).
2. Rub a thin coat of neutral oil everywhere. Then wipe it off like you made a mistake. What’s left is enough.
3. Bake upside down at 450°F for an hour. Let it cool in the oven.
4. Repeat if you’re feeling fancy. Once is fine.

2. Managing fire (the part that matters)

You don’t cook on flames. You cook on coals. Flames are for ambiance and marshmallows. Build the fire early, let it burn down to a bed of orange coals, then rake a layer to one side for cooking. That side is your stove. The other side keeps making coals.

• Skillet: set it on a grate over the coals, or directly on a flat bed of them. Preheat it until a drop of water skitters.
• Dutch oven: put it on coals and put coals on the lid. Roughly a third underneath, two thirds on top for baking. For stews, flip that.

A rough coal count for a 12-inch Dutch oven: about 25 briquettes total gets you ~350°F. Eight under, seventeen on top. Rotate the oven a quarter turn every 15 minutes, and the lid a quarter turn the other way, so you don’t get a hot spot.

3. Cooking

Cast iron holds heat like a grudge. Preheat it slowly, then cook with confidence. Things that are great over a fire:

• Smash burgers. Screaming hot pan, thin patties, flip once.
• Skillet potatoes. Cubed, oiled, salted, left alone. Stop stirring them.
• Dutch oven chili. Brown everything in the pot, dump in the rest, bury it in coals, walk away for two hours.
• Peach cobbler. Canned peaches, a box of yellow cake mix, a stick of butter sliced on top. Twenty minutes with coals on the lid. It’s not fancy. It’s perfect.

4. Eyebrows

Everything about a fire wants to hurt you. The handle gets as hot as the pan. The lid, when you lift it, dumps a draft of superheated air straight at your face. Respect the three tools:

And a long pair of tongs, which you already own.

5. Cleaning (the part that starts arguments)

Here’s the truth that ends every campfire debate: you can use soap. Modern dish soap won’t strip seasoning. What strips seasoning is soaking it overnight or putting it away wet.

1. While the pan’s still warm, scrape out the food. A plastic scraper or a wad of foil works.
2. Hot water, a little soap, a quick scrub. Stuck bits? Coarse salt as an abrasive.
3. Dry it over the coals for a minute. Rub in a few drops of oil. Done.

No dishwasher. Ever. That’s the only hard rule.

The whole thing in one sentence

Cook on coals not flames, wear the gloves, use thin oil, dry it hot, and your great-grandkids will be making cobbler in the same pan.

Here is my list, in the order I forgot things last season. Each one comes with the gear that fixes it.

1. The tag

Left it on the kitchen counter. Drove 90 minutes. Drove 90 minutes back. Got to the trailhead as the sun came up and the other trucks were already parked. Now the tag lives in a dry bag, and the dry bag lives in the pack, and the pack goes in the truck the night before.

2. Rangefinder batteries

Mine uses a CR2. The gas station does not sell CR2s. Buy a spare and tape it inside the case.

3. The right glove

I had one glove. The left one. The right one was in a different jacket, which was in a different closet. The fix is not “be more organized,” the fix is gloves that live in the pack.

4. Hand warmers

I remembered the hand warmers. I’d just used the last two on an October scouting trip. The 40-pack is the correct quantity. It feels excessive. It isn’t.

5. Something to sit on

A frozen log is not a chair. A closed-cell foam pad weighs nothing and turns three hours into five.

6. Game bags

I had no plan for what happened after. The animal was down, it was warm, and I had a pack and a knife and a lot of optimism. Game bags. Four of them. Light, washable, and they keep the meat clean on the walk out.

7. A sharp knife

Mine was “pretty sharp.” Pretty sharp is a lie you tell yourself in September. A replaceable-blade knife means it’s actually sharp every single time.

8. Paracord and a small pulley

Dragging is for people who like back problems. Even a cheap pulley cuts the effort in half.

9. A headlamp with red mode

See the headlamp roundup. The one with green mode is the hunting pick.

10. Water

I packed a 20-ounce bottle for a full day. I am not sure what I was thinking. Two liters minimum, and a filter if you’re walking far.

11. The forecast

Checked it Thursday. Hunted Saturday. It snowed. Check it the morning of, and pack the rain shell even if the sky is clear, because the sky is a liar.

Good luck out there. Shoot straight, and check for your tag twice.

The prompt was simple: “Best dispersed camping near Moab with great views and no crowds.” The AI gave me GPS coordinates to a bluff I’d never heard of, with a confident paragraph about “sweeping vistas” and “solitude.”

I want to say up front: the vistas were sweeping. Deeply sweeping. Everything swept.

Arrival

We rolled in around 4 p.m. on a bluebird afternoon. No other trucks. A view of the La Sals you’d put on a calendar. I popped the rooftop tent, set up chairs, and felt like a genius. The dog agreed.

This is technically true in the same way that “the ocean is generally wet” is true.

2 a.m.

I woke up because the tent was moving. Not swaying. Moving, like a boat, like the whole truck was leaning into a turn. The fabric was doing a sound I can only describe as applause.

I checked my phone. The forecast I hadn’t looked at said: “Wind advisory. Gusts to 50 mph.” It had said this, apparently, since Tuesday.

Here’s what you need to know about a rooftop tent in 50 mph wind: it is a sail. The truck is the mast. You are the ballast, and you are not heavy enough.

The descent

Getting out of a rooftop tent in a gale is a procedure. You unzip the door (it tries to leave), you find the ladder with your foot (it is swinging), you climb down into a sandstorm wearing socks, and then you have to close the tent, which requires reaching up and pulling the shell down against a wind that very much wants it open.

I got it halfway. The wind got it the rest of the way, back up. We did this four times. The dog watched from the cab with the expression of a creature who had chosen the correct sleeping location.

Eventually I got it latched by lying across the top of it. Lying across the top of my truck. At 2 a.m. In socks.

The rest of the night

We slept in the cab. The dog got the back seat; I got the driver’s seat, reclined to the exact angle where the seatbelt buckle finds your kidney. The truck rocked all night like a boat in a harbor, and sand came through gaps I didn’t know a truck had.

At dawn, the wind stopped like someone flipped a switch. The sunrise was, I’m forced to admit, incredible. Sweeping, even.

What I do differently now

• Check the actual forecast. Not “general conditions.” The hourly, with wind gusts, the morning of.
• Camp low, not high. The “sweeping vista” bluff is sweeping because nothing blocks the wind. Camp behind something.
• Close the tent before bed if there’s any doubt. Sleep in the cab one night; it won’t kill you. The alternative might.
• Bring the little wind meter. It’s a $20 toy, but “the app says 35” hits different when the toy says 41.

The AI, to its credit, found a spectacular spot. It just didn’t know what “no crowds” actually meant. Now I do.

The Ten Essentials started as a list from The Mountaineers in the 1930s and got reorganized into “systems” in the early 2000s. Here’s the modern list, what each one is really for, and the time I skipped number seven and spent an hour walking down a trail by the light of my phone screen at 4% battery.

1. Navigation

Map, compass, and these days a phone with the route downloaded offline. The word “offline” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Cell signal in the mountains is a rumor.

2. Sun protection

Sunglasses, sunscreen, a hat. At altitude, the sun is closer and angrier. You will burn in 20 minutes through clouds.

3. Insulation

One more layer than you think. The summit is always colder than the trailhead, and it’s always windier, and you’re always sweatier than you expect. A packable puffy weighs nothing and ends arguments.

4. Illumination

A headlamp. Not a phone. This is the one I skipped.

See the headlamp roundup. Put one in every pack you own.

5. First aid

Blisters, cuts, headaches, the occasional sprain. A small kit, plus blister pads and ibuprofen, which the small kit never has enough of.

6. Fire

A lighter and some tinder in a bag. Not for cooking; for the night you don’t plan to spend out there.

7. Repair kit and tools

A knife or multitool, some duct tape wrapped around a water bottle, a couple of zip ties. Fixes trekking poles, packs, boots, and attitudes.

8. Nutrition

More food than you need. Hunger makes bad decisions, and the extra bar weighs an ounce.

9. Hydration

Water, plus a way to make more. A squeeze filter is the best $30 in the outdoors. With one in your pack, every stream is a refill.

10. Emergency shelter

An emergency bivy or even a big trash bag. If you have to stop moving, you have to stay warm, and wind is what kills you.

The modern eleventh

If you hike alone, or anywhere without signal, a satellite messenger is the single biggest safety upgrade you can make. Two-way texting so someone knows you’re late and fine, plus an SOS button for when you’re not.

Here’s my situation last spring: a sedan, an apartment, and a strong desire to be on a lake. Hardshell kayaks need a rack and a place to live. Inflatables need a trunk and a closet. So I bought one, mostly expecting a pool toy with ambitions.

What it actually is

A modern inflatable kayak is three air chambers wrapped in heavy PVC, with an inflatable floor and a couple of removable fins. Inflated, it’s about 12 feet long and surprisingly stiff. You can stand on it at the beach. It holds two adults, a cooler, and a dog who is not sure about any of this.

Where it shines

• Flat water. Lakes, reservoirs, slow rivers. It’s a genuinely good time. Stable enough for a beginner, roomy enough for a lunch.
• Storage. Deflated, it’s a duffel bag. It lived in my closet all summer.
• Price. A quarter of a comparable hardshell, and no $300 roof rack.
• Setup. Ten minutes with an electric pump. Fifteen with the hand pump and some grumbling.

Where it doesn’t

• Wind. It sits high and light. A 15 mph crosswind turns a paddle into a workout, and you’ll drift sideways while you rest.
• Speed. It’s a barge. A hardshell will pass you like you’re parked. If you want to go somewhere, this is not that boat.
• Tracking. The fins help. The fins help the way a shopping cart with one good wheel helps.
• Rocks. It’ll take a lot, but it’s still plastic and air. Drag it over a sharp rock and you’re learning to patch.

The honest verdict

It’s a real boat with real limits. For lakes, calm rivers, and anyone without a garage, it’s one of the best values in the outdoors. If you want to paddle fast, far, or in weather, save up for a hardshell.

One summer later: it’s got a patch, it’s a little saggy, and I’ve paddled it more than I ever would have paddled a boat I couldn’t fit in the trunk. That’s the whole argument.

I gave the AI everything: my yard dimensions, my zone (6b, Salt Lake), the fence location, and a photo. I asked for a raised-bed plan “optimized for yield.” It produced a gorgeous, color-coded layout with companion planting notes and a watering schedule. It looked like something a landscape architect would charge for.

It also put the tomatoes on the north side of a six-foot fence.

The plan

Two 8×4 beds. Bed one: tomatoes, basil, peppers. Bed two: lettuce, kale, strawberries, with a note that “leafy greens benefit from afternoon shade.” Correct! Great note! The AI knew the greens wanted shade. It then put the tomatoes in the shade and the greens in full sun, because it had read “north side of fence” in my description and, I assume, pictured the Southern Hemisphere.

Both sentences are true. Together, they are a crime.

What I did

I’m not proud of this: I built it as drawn. I figured the robot had seen more gardens than me. I assembled the beds (the kit was great, assembled in an hour with one beer), filled them, planted exactly to the diagram, and waited.

By late June the tomatoes were tall, pale, and leggy, reaching over the fence like they were trying to flag down a passing car. The lettuce, in full afternoon sun, bolted in about nine days and tasted like a dandelion’s regret.

Enter Gary

Gary is a fox squirrel. Gary lives in the neighbor’s cottonwood and considers my yard a buffet with inconsistent service. The AI’s plan did not include Gary, because I did not mention Gary, because I didn’t know about Gary until the morning I found every single strawberry with exactly one bite taken out of it.

One bite. Each. He wasn’t hungry. He was reviewing.

The netting cage ended the Gary situation in about a day. He sat on the fence and watched me install it with the energy of a man watching his favorite restaurant close.

The recovery

Mid-July I gave up and swapped the beds. Moved the tomatoes to the sunny side, moved the greens to the shade, lost about three weeks of growth but saved the season. Added the drip system at the same time, which is the one piece of gear I’d recommend to anyone, robot-planned or not.

By September: a respectable tomato haul, more basil than any household can use, a second crop of lettuce that was actually edible, and a squirrel who has moved on to the neighbor’s peaches.

The lesson

The AI knows every gardening rule ever written and has never once stood in a yard. Use it for the stuff that’s pure knowledge: spacing, companion planting, frost dates, when to start seeds. Then walk outside at 3 p.m. and look at where the shadows are. That’s the part only you can do.

Gary sends his regards.