The Chair That Fixed Every Campfire Supper

Campfire supper used to be the worst hour of our weekend, and we had it every single weekend. We would come in off the water, build the fire, and then stand around it eating, plate in one hand, fork in the other, leaning out of the wind that always seems to find the one open side of the fire. The fish was good. The fire was good. And nobody lasted more than ten minutes before their knees started complaining and their eyes drifted to the truck.

I tried every fix I could think of, and I suspect you have tried the same ones. A low folding stool that sank into the gravel the moment it took my weight. Dragging a kitchen chair from the house, which lived in the truck because nobody wanted to carry it down the bank. Leaning against the cooler, which worked about as well as you would expect, and stopped working the moment someone wanted a drink.

Then my brother-in-law showed up to the June trip with a Coleman camping chair, the kind with the cooler built into the armrest. And here is the part I should have seen coming. He sat down, opened that armrest, and pulled out a cold drink. He did not get up for two hours. I have fished with this man for thirty years, and I have never seen him sit still that long unless a rod was bending.

By August I had a Coleman of my own, and the whole camp caught the idea within one trip. Nobody walks back to the truck for a drink anymore. My wife sets her coffee in the cup holder at dawn, the foil-wrapped trout goes on the grate, and for the first time in years supper runs two hours instead of ten minutes. It is not the food that changed. It is the chair.

The part nobody warns you about is what a chair does to a fire. A fire eats attention. When the group is standing, the fire is just a light source and people drift toward the truck the minute the last bite is gone. Once the chairs make a circle, the fire becomes the center of the camp and nobody leaves until it is down to coals. We stay until the logs are ash now. That did not happen once before the chair showed up.

He sat down, opened that armrest, and pulled out a cold drink. He did not get up for two hours, and I have never seen him sit still that long unless a rod was bending.

Now the honest part, because nothing is without trade-offs. The cooler arm holds four cans, not a twelve-pack, and it does not keep ice cold for two days, it keeps a drink cold for an evening. That is exactly the size of the job a campfire chair needs. The side pockets swallow a pocketknife, a lighter, and a pair of reading glasses. The seat is cushioned and sits at a height that makes getting back out of it a one-motion thing, which matters more than any of us want to admit.

It is not the lightest chair I own, and if your weekend is a backpack into the hills, you want something that breaks down much smaller. This is a basecamp chair, a boat chair, a truck chair. It trades ounces for the ability to stay put for four hours, and on my trips I will make that trade every time.

The best supper it ever hosted was a cold October night with the wind coming off the water sideways. Any other year we would have eaten cold sandwiches in the cab of the truck. Instead we set the chairs with their backs to the wind, built the fire up behind us, and ate chili that had been working in the Dutch oven all afternoon. That is the real job of this chair. It is not holding a drink. It is keeping a person in the circle long enough for a camp to happen around them.

That is a short list for any piece of gear: the thing that changes how the whole trip feels. I have owned chairs that packed smaller and chairs that weighed less, and none of them earned their spot on the boat the way this one does.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you already own a camp chair you like, none of this applies to you, and keep it. But if supper at your camp is a standing meal, try this before you spend money on a bigger tent or a fancier stove. Buy one chair, sit in it for one evening, and watch what the fire does. If your camp is anything like mine, you will own a second one before the season is over, not because anyone talked you into it, but because the first one got claimed the moment supper was ready. That is the whole review, and it is why the chair still rides in my boat.