Jetboil PCS + new accessories

The Jetboil Personal Cooking System (PCS) has been called a total rethink of the traditional camp stove.


The Jetboil PCS

The all-in-one $80 product, which debuted two years ago to much fanfare in the outdoors press, integrates a small butane burner with a special heat-transfer ring and a 1-liter metal cup. The end result is a cooking system that is about twice as fuel efficient as competing stove models, according to the company's tests.

New this year, Jetboil Inc. (www.jetboil.com) is offering a line of accessories to use with its stove. The Jetboil French Press, for example, is a simple and light weight coffee press with a metal rod, a rubber lid and a mesh strainer. The $20 press is sized for the standard Jetboil cup, letting you brew up a couple mugs of coffee in less than five minutes.


The Jetboil French Press

As with most Jetboil-prepared food and drink, the coffee is prepared and consumed in the Jetboil's metal cup. After heating the water and adding the coffee grounds, the cup twists and unsnaps from the stove base ready to drink from, thus eliminating the hassle of bringing an extra pot and a mug. The lid on the French Press is removed by unscrewing the threaded plunger rod, which lets you leave the mesh strainer inside the cup to contain the grounds.

In my tests, two cups of cold water boiled in about 2 minutes, 20 second with the Jetboil PCS set to its highest flame. There is an integrated push-button piezo electric igniter to get the burner going, so matches are unnecessary, and the flame can be adjusted with a small knob to regulate temperature while cooking.


The Jetboil Pot Support

Another new accessory I tested, the $20 Jetboil Pot Support and Stabilizer Kit, allows campers to use frying pans or pots on the Jetboil stove. Simply remove the Jetboil cup and place the pot support adapter over the burner to add the metal platform on which pots and pans can be placed. The kit also comes with a small plastic tripod that fits onto the base of the fuel canister to provide added stability.

One disadvantage to the Jetboil PCS stove is the cup’s small capacity. It really is a personal cooking system, and if you want to heat soup or warm water for a group, be ready to deal with multiple small batches.

But this winter, the company will debut the Group Cooking System (GCS) version of the Jetboil stove, which is essentially the same product as the original stove with a larger, 1.5-liter pot instead of a 1-liter cup. The group version will sell as a complete stove kit for $100; the pot and lid, which are compatible with the original Jetboil PCS, will also be sold alone for $45.


The Jetboil Exploded

After use, both versions of the Jetboil stove can be quickly disassembled and stowed away inside their respective cup or pot. With a full fuel canister, the Jetboil GCS weighs 21 ounces. The Jetboil PCS, which packs up with its fuel canister to become smaller than a Nalgene water bottle, tips the scale at a feathery 15 ounces.

Big Tents

A small tent really has no place at the common drive-up campsite. For car camping, you want a cavernous, feature-full, stand-up-and-stretch-out nylon lodge with pockets, vestibules and all the bells and whistles. Here's my quick review on three such outsized tent models:

The Paha Qué Promontory was the largest of the tents in this review. It's made to sleep up to eight adults with 120 square feet of space inside. The ceiling has a peak height of 7 feet. There are three doors, two windows, and a removable divider sheet to let campers create a veritable nylon castle with two distinct rooms.

The Paha Qué Promontory

This is the kind of tent in which you can set up cots, chairs and a large table to play cribbage late into the night under the flickering light of a lantern. Or, a large family of six or even more can sleep comfortably under one roof. For storage, the company (www.pahaque.com) includes removable gear attics, which are swaths of nylon that connect up high by the ceiling for storing clothing or lightweight camp accessories.

Despite its impressive size, the Promontory has several faults. Its boxy shape, for example, is about as non-aerodynamic as a tent design can be. Wind hits the Promontory's outside walls with a brute force that causes the nylon walls to arc inward and push against campers on the floor. The tent's awning is poorly designed, as it sags in the middle if not staked out as tight as can be.

While weight is not a huge concern for car camping, the Promontory is ridiculously large when packed up, weighing 24 pounds and taking up about a quarter of the trunk space in my car. It retails for $419, which I felt was too high for a tent with more than one significant fault.

Kelty pitches its new Pagoda as a tent that brings backpacking technology to the campground. Indeed, this big dome tent looks like an enlarged version of many small, lightweight models made for long wilderness treks, but it includes luxuries like multiple interior mesh pockets for gear stowage, two doors, a window and air-flow vents to keep things cool inside.

The Kelty Pagoda

The six-person tent has a large vestibule with about 30 square feet of space. Inside, there is about 100 square feet of space, which is enough room to comfortably sleep four or cozily sleep six. Rolled up and packed in its duffle, the Kelty tent ($400, www.kelty.com) weighs about 20 pounds.

Hilleberg's Stalon Combi tent has an interesting tunnel design, which sets up with three poles and several staked guy lines. While it is the smallest tent in the review, there is still about 50 square feet of space to fit four adults with their gear stashed away in the two zip-off vestibules.

The Hilleberg Stalon Combi

It is less than 4 feet tall, so you cannot stand up inside, but this lower profile, in addition to the curved, tunnel form factor, causes wind to flow over and around the Stalon Combi with little resistance.

Packed up, the tent weighs about 10 pounds, making it usable for canoe camping or on a backpacking trip where the tent's contents are divvied up into the packs of several hikers.

At $620, Hilleberg's (www.hilleberg.com) Stalon Combi is quite pricey. But it's a quality tent made to stand up to stiff weather while providing a roomy interior for weekend campers as well as trekkers or serious mountaineers using the tent at a high and gusty base camp.