Best camping gear for beginners

Buy the pad before the tent. Cold ground, not cold air, is what ruins a first camping trip.

The counterintuitive advice that matters most: the sleeping pad is the first thing to buy, ahead of the tent. Beginners who have a bad first night almost always blame the sleeping bag, when the problem is that the ground pulled heat out of them through an uninsulated pad. A bag's insulation is compressed flat underneath you and does almost nothing. If this is too expensive to start with, buy a cheap closed-cell foam mat rather than a cheap uninsulated air pad -- foam at least insulates.

Cheap, simple and forgiving. Buy this rather than an expensive tent you have not learned what you want from yet.

A first tent should be cheap and simple, because you do not yet know what you want. Two poles, one obvious way to pitch it, nothing to learn. After three or four trips you will know whether you want two doors, more headroom or better weather margin, and then you buy the right tent on the basis of experience rather than a review. Size up to a 4-person for two adults: the rating counts sleeping pads laid edge to edge with nothing else inside.

The least glamorous item on the list and the one you will use on literally every trip.

Buy a headlamp before you buy anything else optional. Every camping task after sunset -- pitching, cooking, washing up, finding the bathroom -- needs both hands, and a phone flashlight occupies one of them while burning the battery you need for the drive home. This one costs little, runs on cells you can buy anywhere, and has a red mode that does not destroy everyone's night vision.

Buy the cheap big cooler. The expensive one solves a problem beginners do not have yet.

Your first camping trips will be one or two nights, and over that span the difference between this and a cooler costing five times more barely shows. Thick-walled rotomolded coolers solve multi-day retention, which is a problem you do not have yet. Buy capacity now, pre-chill it the night before, use block ice, and keep it in the shade -- those three free habits beat a cooler upgrade anyway.

Not strictly necessary, and the first thing worth adding once the essentials are covered.

Chairs are where the essentials end and the comfort items begin, which is why this is fifth. You can sit on a log, and plenty of people do. But a chair genuinely changes a campsite evening, and this is the cheap version that does the job. Expect it to be a consumable: the fabric at the frame stress points is what fails, usually within a couple of seasons of regular use.

Last on the list, because the campsite grate and a cooler of sandwiches cover your first trips.

A stove is genuinely optional for your first couple of trips. Most established campsites have a fire ring or a grate, and a cooler full of food that needs no cooking is a completely valid first-trip strategy -- it removes an entire category of things to get wrong. When you do want to cook, this is the stove: cheap, two burners, and fuel you can buy anywhere. Bring a lighter, because the base model has no igniter.