Camping
Deer camp and family camping want most of the same gear. A tent that stays dry in a three-day rain, a bag rated colder than the forecast, a chair that survives being thrown in a truck bed every weekend for six years. Our camping lineup runs mostly on Browning Camping and ALPS Mountaineering, which is where the overlap between hunting camp and campground actually lives.
You can outfit a whole site from here. Tents from a 4-person backcountry shelter up to a two-room cabin tent, sleeping bags rated from +20°F down to -30°F, cots, pillows, chairs, tables, lighting, and a soft cooler to haul the food in.
Start with these
- Tents and shelters: the Big Horn 5 ($299.99) is the straight-sidewall cabin tent you can stand up in, while the Glacier ($499.99) trades floor space for aluminum poles and a heavy oxford floor built for weather.
- Sleeping bags: thirteen bags across the temperature range. The Discover 0° ($99.99) covers most of the season, and the Klondike -30° ($249.99) handles the nights that end early for everybody else.
- Chairs and tables: the Basin Table ($39.99) sets up on a folding hub and folds down small enough to forget it is in the truck.
- Lighting: headlamps and spotlights from Cyclops, plus HME predator lights for anyone who camps because the coyotes are worth the drive.
- Cots, pillows and blankets, coolers: the parts of camp you only notice when you forgot them.
Buy the bag for the coldest night, not the average one
The mistake that ruins more trips than any other is matching the sleeping bag to the daytime forecast. A 40-degree afternoon in November can drop into the low twenties by 4 a.m., and a +20°F bag leaves you awake for the last three hours of it. Buy roughly 10 to 15 degrees colder than you expect. If the bag ends up too warm you unzip it, which is a problem you can solve at 4 a.m. The other one you cannot.
Planning the trip around a season? Start with our Missouri hunting seasons calendar, check dates in the Missouri deer season guide, or plan a summer float with our Missouri gigging season rundown.