The current interest in kayaking and camping has led to new equipment geared toward being lightweight, efficient and compact. These are the same things the backpacker or kayak camper seeks to lighten the load of equipment that they feel that they need when spending extended time in the boondocks. Two of the items that tend to put more weight on a camper’s load are cooking gear and food. Modern camping equipment has come a long way since the days of heavy tents, cooking gear and heavy foodstuffs.

When freeze dried foods began to enter the outdoorsman’s list of items they required, it began to literally remove the problems of taking fresh, heavy food items in their camp gear. The list of freeze-dried foods available for outdoorsmen these days is extensive. The foods were first frozen and then had all the moisture removed by a vacuuming process. When stored in an airtight bag the freeze-dried foods do not need to be refrigerated.

When campers want to have a freeze dried meal, they simply heat some water and pour a measured amount of hot water into the freeze dried food bag, wait a few seconds for the food to regain its moisture and then eat a meal that is nearly as good as a meal made from scratch. All that’s needed for camp foodstuffs these days is freeze dried food, something to heat the water in and some flatware to use to eat with. Freeze dried meals are pricey but lightweight and good eating when properly prepared with a little hot water.

We outdoorsmen (to be politically correct, perhaps I should call us “outdoors-people”) have it good with all these “new-fangled” kinds of gear and innovated campers are constantly coming up with new products that enable us to enjoy the outdoors with a minimal amount of weight to carry around.

I was recently reading an article in one of the magazines that cater to the survivalists who are trying to have on hand all the best gear that they might need when “stuff hits the fan,” and read about a portable camp stove that sounded like it was worth investigating. I went to the local Sportsman’s Warehouse and purchased one of the models that was mentioned in the article and tested it out.

The Emberlit stainless steel compact cook stove (sometimes called a “Hobo” stove) weighs a mere 11 ounces and is packed into a 5.5-by-6-by-12-inch bundle. It consists of four sides, a base and two cross pieces that are a mere 1/8-inch thick when packed flat into its carrying envelope that will fit in your pants’ cargo pocket. The parts slide together nicely and when fully constructed, the little package extends into a small but sturdy stove that’s 5.5 inches square at its base and 6 inches tall with a top cooking area of 3.5 inches square. The assembled stove is strong enough to support a heavy cooking pot.

The true beauty of this Emberlit stove is that you do not need to take any fuel along. The stove is designed to operate by utilizing small pieces of wood, twigs, animal dung (as did the plains dwellers of old who used buffalo “chips” for their campfires) and anything that burns that you should find in the woods or on the beach.

By using some dried grass or leaves as tinder in the Emberlit stove, you begin to add small twigs to the growing fire and increase the size of the wood as the fire grows. An opening in the door panel allows wood branches of 1.5 inches to be added to the fire as needed.

The stove is designed to allow the air to enter the stove from the bottom and feed oxygen to the hot fire. The chimney effect in the stove’s design makes for a hot cooking fire that’s described as being like “the fire in a blacksmith’s forge.” Unless you’re out on the water or in a desert where the chances of finding some burnable materiel isn’t good, this stove that burns mostly anything is a camper’s dream come true.

If the camper should find himself or herself in an extremely wet area, one could find that there isn’t enough dry tinder to bring the small twigs to the ignition temperature. In cases like this, it might be advisable to take along a small, modern fire starter such a small piece of fatwood or a half-packet of ESBIT fuel to get things going. Once the fire is hot enough, even some slightly wet twigs should burn.

Another tip to have as a back up plan to get this little stove going under adverse conditions is to take along some of the canned heat as found in the old reliable Sterno cooking fuel. The can of Sterno (jelled alcohol) fits very nicely into the Emberlit stove and each can is supposed to give you over one hour of smoke-free cook time. I tried the Sterno canned heat and, in one of the Stanley brand stainless 20-ounce cooking pots with 16 ounces of water in it, the water was brought from room temperature to the boiling point in 5 and a half minutes. I feel sure that by using some dry twigs to fuel this little “Hobo” stove as it was designed for, that the cooking temperature would be much hotter.

At the Sportsman’s Warehouse the Emberlit stove sold for about $43. For a lightweight, well-designed and nearly indestructible cooking implement that could be a good thing to have when TSHTF, it’s money well invested.