Don’t sleep with a fuel-burning heater running in your tent. No official source we checked says otherwise, which makes it the one settled rule of tent heater safety. Awake is where the answers split: the U.S. Forest Service says never…
The way to keep a tent warm is to keep you warm inside it, and most of that work happens before dark. Get insulation between your body and the ground, go to bed dry, stop moving air from pulling heat…
Here’s how to connect an RV sewer hose: check that both tank valves are closed, take the cap off the outlet, push the hose’s bayonet fitting onto the outlet’s lugs and turn it until it stops hard. Seat the other…
Black first, then gray. That order exists for one reason: the gray water rinses the inside of your sewer hose on the way out, and nothing else you carry does that job as well. Almost everything else about how to…
Here’s how to level a camper, start to finish: raise the low side on leveling blocks while you’re still hitched, chock the wheels, unhitch, then run the tongue jack until the floor reads level front to back. Stabilizers go down…
Learning how to set up an RV at a campsite is mostly learning one fixed order: position the rig, level it, shut off the pedestal breaker and connect power, then water, then sewer, then open the slides and awning. Work…
Canvas fails in a way nylon never does. It rots. A synthetic tent tears when something sharp finds it, and the tear stays roughly the size it started. Cotton quietly loses strength wherever it sat damp, and one day a…
Most tent damage is fixable, and most of it is fixable in twenty minutes with three materials that fit in a sandwich bag. A tear in the fly, a snapped pole section, a zipper that won’t stay shut, a hole…
Most tent accessories are optional. Four are not: stakes better than the ones in the bag, something under the floor, a light that hangs from the ceiling, and a repair kit small enough that you forget you’re carrying it. Add…
Start with a file. Sharpen a camp hatchet with a mill bastard first, pushing into the edge until a burr forms along the back, then refine it with a sharpening puck and finish on a strop. Aim for a cutting…