Best Hiking Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

Best Travel Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

Best Camping Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

Best Backpacking Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

This is an actual list of topics from the top search results for “best hiking gear,” “best travel gear,” “best camping gear” and “best backpacking gear.” I have looked at them all, as well as many more similar lists. They all say pretty much the same thing. And they are all wrong.

I am beginning to think that this universal advice may be the worst possible advice for anyone except the exact kind of person who writes such lists — which is to say, someone who already knows everything they need to know about the topic in question. If you are not one of these people (as I am not), then all that list-reading will do you little good. You will learn a few useful things and a lot of useless things. But you will not learn what you need to learn, which is how to decide what sort of outdoor activity you want to do and how to go about it once you have decided.

Best Hiking Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

Best Backpacking Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

Best Camping Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

Best Skiing Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

Best Snowboarding Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

Best Rafting Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

Best Kayaking Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

All of these activities are fun and have been around for thousands of years. And in all that time there has never been any good reason for the existence of any kind of specialized equipment other than just ordinary clothes you can get at any store. There is no such thing as “outdoor clothing.” There is no such thing as “outdoor equipment.” There is no such thing as “outdoor gear.” None of it is necessary, none of it is useful, none of it works, and most of it will actually get you killed by exposing you to hypothermia and/or sunstroke in addition to ordinary falling-down-and-blowing-yourself-up accidents.

Best Hiking Gear: Go to a store, buy appropriate clothing.

Best Music Recommendations: Post a question on MetaFilter or Quora.

Best Concrete Mix: Ask someone who builds houses for a living.

In this last case, the answer is not just that you should ask professionals, but what sort of professional you should ask. And that’s because there are many different kinds of concrete mix, and they have different uses.

People who spend their time thinking about problems like these are called experts. You can tell they’re experts because when you ask them questions like “What’s the best hiking gear?” they answer by asking more questions: “Are you planning to hike mostly in the South or in Alaska? How long will your hikes usually be? What sort of terrain do you prefer?” You can tell they’re real experts because the questions they ask show that they know even more things than you thought there were to know.

Getting good answers from experts can be hard for two reasons: (a) some kinds of expertise are expensive and hard to come by, and (b) even when you do find an expert, people often don’t know how to ask them questions in such a way as to get useful answers.

The great outdoors are an amazing place, and it’s hard to beat the experience of hiking in the woods or hitting the trails for a long walk. But you need the right equipment, and that’s what we’re here to help with. Below you’ll find our top picks for the best gear to take with you on your next hike.

Best Hiking Boots: Oboz Wind River II Hiking Boot

Best Hiking Pants: Outdoor Research Men’s Ferrosi Pants

Best Hiking Jacket: Marmot PreCip Eco Jacket

Best Hiking Backpack: Osprey Atmos 65 AG Backpack

Best Water Bottle: Hydro Flask Insulated Stainless Steel Water Bottle

Best Sleeping Pad: Therm-a-Rest NeoAir XLite Ultralight Backpacking Air Mattress

Best Sleeping Bag: NEMO Forte 35 Sleeping Bag

Best Tent: Big Agnes Copper Spur HV UL 2 Tent

Best GPS Watch: Garmin Fenix 5S Watch

The best gear is the kind that you don’t notice. It’s light, strong, comfortable, and interacts well with your other gear. This tends to be expensive. Which is why I don’t recommend buying it. Just go to an outdoor store like REI and try stuff on.

With a few exceptions, you don’t need the latest gear. The main reason to buy new gear is when they’ve made something lighter or more comfortable than what you have now. So older gear is fine; if it’s been around for a while, that means it’s probably pretty good at not being noticed.

Buy the best gear you can afford that fits your body type. Fitting your body type matters much more than how much money you spend:

If you’re big but weak, buy clothes that are big and loose (which will also save money). If you’re small but strong, buy clothes that are smaller and tighter so they won’t get in your way or flap in the wind as much.

If you tend to overheat, buy clothes made from lightweight wicking material like polypropylene that will keep you dry even if you sweat a lot – this will prevent chafing, blisters, and trench foot. This is important for both hot

Hiking and camping are not exactly rocket science. I don’t mean that as an insult to hikers or campers; but rather, it’s not a high-tech activity like, say, F1 racing. You don’t need the space shuttle for the perfect hiking trip. You don’t even need a car; in fact, if you walk to the starting point of your hike, you’re already halfway there.

The reason for this is that the outdoors has been around for a very long time, and although many things have changed since the days of Henry David Thoreau and his contemporaries, hiking hasn’t changed all that much, except to get easier.

In camping there is no technology needed: All you really need are matches and a knife (to light fires and cut up food). If you take the knife away from camping, however, it becomes more difficult (but not impossible).

If you take the matches away from hiking then it becomes nearly impossible to do anything useful because without matches then you have no way of starting fires which means that you can’t cook and can’t keep warm at night. To be fair to Thoreau he did have matches but they weren’t waterproof ones so they didn’t work when wet (which was often in those days

High Technology often gets confused with expensive, which is funny because high technology can be had quite cheaply. You want to see some sophisticated gadgets? Go to a store that sells camping equipment and look at their backpacks. Those suckers are full of high tech.

The best way to understand why backpacks are as expensive as they are is to compare them with the cheapest thing that would serve the same purpose: a plastic bag. It’s not hard to make a plastic bag that can carry thirty pounds of rocks for a few miles without breaking. In fact you can buy one for three cents at the grocery store. So why does a backpack cost hundreds of dollars?

Mostly because it has to do things that a plastic bag doesn’t have to do. If you’re going hiking, you want your pack to fit well, so you won’t get sore shoulders or chafed hips after carrying it all day. You want it to distribute weight evenly, so you don’t get tired more quickly on one side than the other. You want it to be waterproof, so your stuff doesn’t get wet if it rains or you fall in a river (not an unrealistic possibility when hiking). And so on.

All those requirements involve engineering compromises, and different designers will make different