Affordable High Quality Tents, Heavy Duty Recovery Gear, And Traveling For Your First Hunt, And Other Reader Questions

What you guys are asking for help with right now

Been a while since I’ve done one of these. And while I’ve been slammed covering the great public land heist, you guys have still been reaching out for plenty of help, so let’s round up some highlights from those conversations.

As a reminder, the idea with this Substack project is to formalize my relationship with my readers. I’m using it to write the kind of articles that can no longer exist in corporate media outlets, and those are finding large audiences. You, my most engaged readers, are supporting that by upgrading to paid subscriptions, which you can then use to tap into my experience, and extensive network of subject matter experts to ask for help with gear purchases, travel and camping destinations, and more.

Paid subscribers are welcome to reach out anytime via the “Chat with Wes,” feature in the navigation bar at the top of this site. Create a new thread in the public chat if you want community input. DM me if you’d like to keep it private. Email me on [my first name]@wessiler.com if that works better. I’ll keep anything you want private.

I work for you, here’s how some of you have been taking advantage of that over the last couple of weeks:

What’s The Right Recovery Gear For Wildland Firefighters?

Scott reached out with an unusual question about vehicle recovery gear.

“I’m a wildland firefighter and have been asked to help outfit our Type 6 engines with better off-road recovery equipment…they weigh from 16,000 to 19,000 pounds fully-loaded.”

Recovery is the art of getting a stuck vehicle unstuck. And while Scott went on to explain that the trucks he’s outfitting are equipped with appropriate winches and rigging equipment for using those, employing all of that can be seriously time consuming. What Scott and his department are looking for is an easier option, for less difficult stucks.

I pointed him in the direction of Yankum Ropes, which makes its range of stretchy recovery ropes, soft shackles and winch lines in the USA, and offers those in a range of capacities suitable for everything from ATVs on up to heavy construction equipment.

Kinetic recovery ropes allow one vehicle to pull another out of mud, snow or similar quickly, easily and safely. Their elasticity enables you to pull slowly, dampens very high momentary loads, and helps keep things as safe as possible. By connecting those ropes to appropriate recovery points on each vehicle with soft shackles, you then further enhance safety by removing any metal components from the equation, so those can’t go flying through the air with lethal force should anything break.

The caveat is that the ropes need to be sized to the weight of the vehicle’s in question not just in order to avoid breakage, but to ensure the right amount of elasticity is present to lengthen while being pulled on, then contract with enough strength to pull the stuck vehicle free.

Yankum makes all that easy to shop for, with items Scott and his crew will be able to rely on.

The Trouble Finding Good Rooftop Tents

On my recommendation, Patrick is replacing his 3rd gen Tacoma with a new Land Cruiser (Prado), and is slowly outfitting that so he and his family can start taking it camping this summer.

As part of that project, he wants a rooftop tent that will be higher quality than the Roofnest he had on the Taco, but which will still pack into a hardshell container and be large enough that he and his wife will be able to enjoy at least a queen-size bed.

This runs into the main problem with rooftop tents: Most of them are garbage.

As a consumer, it’s easy to get wrapped up in specs and pricing, as Patrick did. He was busy comparing weights, stack heights, and bed sizes, while forgetting the most important consideration: quality.

The vast, vast majority of “overland” style accessories sold in the American market are made in China. Most of that stuff is made by the same handful of factories, which then white label it to American brands, who slap their logo on, add margin and marketing, and sell it onto you.

Patrick texted me a link to one tent, which was photographed well and displayed on a slick website. I took me about 30 seconds to find the same item for sale on Alibaba, at about one-third the price, just with a different colors and logo.

Beyond just being a rip-off, China-made overland accessories are also a bad idea because a) they’re designed by the factory to suit its manufacturing capabilities, not by an experienced person considering the end user b) not only do they fall apart, but there will be zero warranty support or ability to repair them and c) they’re made with little or no consideration for safety. This can be as mission critical as the fabric treatments and foams containing cancer-causing compounds.

So I pointed Patrick to Overland Kitted, which is running a 50 percent off sale on Eeezi-Awn (as reputable a brand as it gets) tents right now. Those included in the sale are soft shell designs, but offer a ton of living space at prices that suits Patrick’s budget. They’ll need to come off the truck for winter, but will otherwise offer the kind of quality and aftermarket support that will enable whatever design he goes with to outlast the life of the Prado it gets mounted on. Plus they won’t give his family cancer, which is the opposite of the experience I think most of us are looking for when we go camping.

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Planning Your First Out-Of-State Hunt

After seeing through that high fence hunt that was the subject of a previous question, and harvesting a nice axis deer, Tim has gotten the hunting bug. But as a resident of Texas, he’ll need to travel out of state to find not only genuinely wild animals, but also public land on which to hunt them. So he reached out to ask the about the best way to start planning that.

Hunting is generally a misunderstood thing. Despite its common image as a blood sport, it’s what provides the on-the-ground tools to manage wildlife populations in our human-altered world, and is almost exclusively responsible for funding the science of animal conservation outside of national parks. An interesting facet of that general misunderstanding is also the common misperception that going with a guide is somehow less than rolling your own.

Tim has two young kids and a busy career. Time off comes at a significant cost. By booking a guide, he’ll avoid not only the tricky process of navigating non-resident tag lotteries, but also the weeks and often months it takes to scout a new area, and pattern its animals. With only a week or so in which to enjoy a hunt, going with a guide will enable Tim to make the most of his time. It will also prove the kind of learning experience that might enable him to go onto pursuing a species or area on his own in the future.

Does that guarantee success? Will Tim still get to work hard, put in miles, and enjoy a little type 2 fun? One of the things you get by booking a guide is the ability to tailor the experience to exactly what you want. You can make it as hard, or as easy as you want the hunt to be.

But how do you find the right one? Last September I went on a guided antelope hunt on Crow Nation land, organized by an operation called Outdoor Solutions. In addition to cooking schools and shooting classes, one of the things they do is work with clients to help direct them towards guide services capable of meeting their expectations. Call them, explain that you want to hunt hard, and they’ll back you into the right opportunity.

The Best Turn-Key Off-Roader For Families?

Josh reached out to complain that his Ford F-150 Tremor isn’t delivering the kind of off-road capability he was expecting, and to ask for a recommendation on an upgrade to something that will. He has a wife, kid, and two rescue dogs. Josh also explained that he’s hesitant to perform significant modifications, so would like to access as much capability as possible from a stock vehicle.

He does run a GoFastCamper and Decked drawers in his current truck.

The trouble with the Tremor is tire size. 33s just don’t endow a vehicle as big as that F-150 with the angles necessary to clear serious obstacles. Josh explained that they’re already rubbing a little bit, even in totally stock form, so there’s no way he could go up without fitting a new suspension system, an investment he’s not willing to make.

Tires are the primary determining factor in a vehicle’s ability off-road. Beyond tread patterns, construction, weight ratings, and construction, a tire’s diameter and sidewall height create traction and enable a comfortable ride. All other thing’s being equal, the greater the diameter a tire has, the longer its footprint will be, the more traction it will have. You can then air that tire down to extend its footprint further, and increase sidewall deflection. On loose surfaces, this will enable the tire to “float” through mud, sand or snow. On rocks, this will enable the tire to wrap itself around obstacles, again massively increasing grip while adding significant puncture resistance.

And while its common to hear uninitiated types talk about the ability to get up and over big obstacles in terms of ground clearance, it’s actually angles that matter. Again with all other things being equal and speaking in some huge generalities, a larger tire will create bigger angles.

In order to match the angles of a smaller vehicle like my Ranger, a bigger vehicle like an F-150 needs to be on bigger tires. My Ranger is on 34s, an F-150 needs to on 37s or larger to match its ability.

What truck comes stock with 37s, enabling Josh to perform zero mods? The F-150 Raptor 37. Sticking with one of those will allow Josh to move his GFC and drawers over without buying anything new, and the Raptor retains all the spacious luxury of the regular F-150. It also has, by quite some margin, the most capable suspension system available on any full-size truck. That makes it ride and handle as well on pavement as it does on dirt roads. And the big tires should give Josh all the angles he needs to climb rocks in Moab, or navigate boulder fields where he lives in the Colorado rockies. He’s test driving one this week.

The Raptor 37 comes at an $11,000 premium over the 35. Josh will be saving more than that by keeping the same GFC and drawer system.

Quality Camping Tent On A Tight Budget

I don’t support boycotting REI, even if the company is behaving really badly right now. Doing so will only punish the employees that are already struggling.

But in the article explaining all that, Sheri dropped a question about a tent purchase. She explains that she regularly car camps in Minnesota from March through early December, requires a large standing-height tent, and has a $300-500 budget.

While I’d have loved to point Sheri towards a quality canvas hot tent like a Snowtrekker, that budget just won’t get her there. So we need to stick with sil-nylon construction.

Sheri runs a Buddy Heater. Combusting propane produces equal parts heat and moisture. Dumping all that water into at tent’s interior is going to create some major issues with condensation absent really good ventilation. And when I think of ventilation in a normal tent, I only think of Nemo.

The ground tent space is actually very similar to the problems I describe with RTTs above in that most tents are made in Asia, in the same handful of factories. Those tents tend to be designed not by the brands you buy them from, but by the factories themselves, to suit their own capabilities. So most aren’t designed with you in mind. Two exceptions there are Nemo and MSR, which design their tents here, then work with specialty manufactures in the far east to make those designs a reality. You’ll feel that every time you use one of their tents in the ease of setup and take down, the effectiveness of the ventilation, and in their tangibly superior quality.

Nemo’s flagship car camping tent right now is the Aurora High Rise. But in the 6P size (tents are sized in human body dimensions, not in their ability to comfortably sleep that number of human bodies) that suit’s Sheri’s needs, that costs $500, which would max out her budget.

Fortunately, REI has them for sale right now for $350. I told her to buy one before that inventory sells out, or the tariffs catch up with inventory already on American shores.

Are you shopping for new outdoors gear this year? Reach out and I’ll help you find the right items, at the right prices too.

Wes Siler is your guide to leading a more exciting life outdoors. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports independent journalism and gives you personal access to his expertise and network, which he’ll use to help you plan trips, purchase gear, and solve problems. You can read more about what he’s doing on Substack through this link.