About Dragonfly Supply

The first thing my son and I do on a camping trip isn't pitch the tent. It's get a fire going, set up the cooking station, and make kielbasa, onions, and pierogies in a beat-up steel pan that sits right down in the coals. Store-bought, all of it, kept in its own cooler so it's the first thing out of the car. We cook, we eat, and then we set up camp. Didn't matter what time we arrived. That was the ritual.

We've done some version of that hundreds of times now. My son came up through the Boy Scouts, becoming an Eagle Scout, and went on to hike sections of the Appalachian Trail; the rest of my kids grew up around campfires too. As a Cubmaster and then an Assistant Scoutmaster, I spent a lot of time teaching young scouts how to cook, how to set up camp, and how to get around.

Here's what all those trips actually taught me: most camping advice is written for a weekend that never happens. Blue skies, a flat dry site, top-shelf gear, everything going to plan. Our motto was "if it ain't raining, we ain't camping" — because it always seemed to be. The stuff that really matters is how you set up when the conditions are against you, and which gear holds up when you're tired and cold and the light's going.

That's why Dragonfly Supply exists. Not to point you at the highest-rated thing on Amazon — half of those quietly get returned. It's to hand you the two or three things we'd actually hand a friend, to tell you straight when the cheap one is the right one, and to admit when the smartest move is to stay in the car with a full tank of gas and try again tomorrow.

So everything here is the advice I wish someone had handed me on my first trip out with a kid in the back seat. The gear we'd buy again. The meals that work when everyone's hungry and the daylight's running out. The how-tos for the muddy, rainy, real version of camping — not the brochure version. No filler, no fake enthusiasm, no top-ten list padded out to fill a page.

If you're brand new to all this, start at the Trailhead. If you just want to eat well outside, the recipes are where our family actually starts. And if you want the hard-won stuff, it's all in the Camp Log.

Either way — pull up a log. Welcome to the fire.

— Brian Diamond, Dragonfly Supply