Best Truck Camping Gear

What better way to improve your mood and lift your spirits after a tough work week than go on a camping trip.

You're surrounded by nature, can breathe in clean air, trek along hidden mountain paths, and make some fantastic wildlife photos, too.

Now, as great as camping tends to be unless you're a sort of fellow that's grown up with wolves or Bear Grills himself (although he's been rumored to drink Coca Cola in a warm van when off-camera), you're going to need some supporting equipment and assets while you're out there in the wild.

The thing is, taking photos and enjoying setting up a campfire and roasting marshmallows is all fun and games – but what happens when your flashlight battery dies?

Or, imagine your starter motor is acting up and you cannot push-start your car because you’ve parked it awkwardly and it weighs 3 tons.

Or, worst of all, your beer pack’s gone lukewarm because there isn’t a creek nearby you can plop it into?

Misfortunes can pile up fairly quickly if you go camping unprepared.

So, in this article, we’re going to recommend to you a couple of must-have pieces of camping equipment you should always have in your vehicle when going on a camping trip.

Here’s the deal.

Electric Cooler

Let’s address the elephant in the room straight away.

Warm beer.

If camping is a bag of peanuts, then discovering your beer is warm and you can’t cool it is like eating peanuts without looking and then stumbling upon that single sour one that puts a dent on the whole peanut experience.

To avoid the terrors of being forced to rehydrate yourself with warm beer, bring an electric cooler with you.

Electric coolers or mini-fridges come in all shapes and sizes nowadays, so finding the one for your needs won't be that much of a problem.

GPS

No matter how confident you are in your orientational skills, other than a map and a compass, you should probably set up a GPS in your truck, too.

While GPS navigation is at times the laughing stock of the automotive world for the imprecise instructions that have people drive into a field in the middle of nowhere, modern-day sat-nav is getting better and better.

Once you’ve set up your GPS device, you may also want to download a local map of the area you’re going into, if it’s available.

Detailed GPS maps of certain patches of wilderness will not only show you where the north pole is but also have points of interest marked, as well.

Fishing spots, bear-frequenting areas, and camping sites, for example, can be some of the entries that these electronic custom-made maps will have in store for you.

Emergency Battery Backup

… can be a lifesaver if your car battery suddenly dies on you.

The thing is, if this happens, it's not only your car that you would not be able to use but likely a host of other gadgets such as the aforementioned cooler, for example. This can land you in all sorts of trouble while out there in the wild.

So, what you want to do is come prepared with a backup battery booster. These contraptions act as jump-starting cables – but you don't need another car to make it work.

These appliances will give your battery a surge of electricity needed to crank the starter motor, and then once the engine is working, the alternator will refill your battery.

Now, while this battery booster thing is not the largest of all camping items you might need, you will probably still need a lot of space in your car for other stuff, so you may want to consider getting a large container such as a site toolbox for the back of your truck.

These are easy to set up and can make packing up and unloading later on much easier than if you had to make impromptu compartments in your truck every time you need to pack a bunch of things at the same time.

Winch

During his catastrophic attempt to conquer Russia, Napoleon noted in his diary something along the lines of – ‘In Russia, I discovered a new element – mud.’

Now, if mud can hamper one of the greatest conquerors that ever lived, it can very well create some problems for your camping trips.

One thing that Napoleon didn’t have back in the day, though, would be a state-of-the-art electricity-powered winch.

(He didn’t have a large gas-guzzling truck, either, for the record, but that’s not the point.)

With a winch, as long as there’s a strong-enough tree nearby, you can get your truck out of any situation, no matter how sticky the mud is.

All in all, the better prepared you are for the camping trip that lay ahead of you, the better your experience you will have. After all, as long as your car works well, tackling any sort of difficulty you might encounter will be much easier.