My $30 Coleman stove beat a $200 Jetboil on a rainy trip near Bend, prove me wrong
Three days of cold rain and the cheap stove fired up every single time while my buddy's fancy one kept sputtering. Is fancy camp gear actually worth it, or are we all just paying for the brand?
My uncle still has the same Svea 123 he bought in 1974 and that thing has boiled water on every trip from the Winds to the Smokies. It weighs about as much as a brick and sounds like a jet engine, but it has never once let him down. Meanwhile I watched a guy at Lake Solitude last summer baby his fancy integrated stove for 20 minutes because the piezo igniter died in the cold. Sometimes simple just works, and sometimes we buy gear for the features we imagine using instead of the ones we actually need.