The Camp Chair Everyone in the Family Fought Over

Every camping trip has one piece of gear that disappears the moment you set it down. At our camp, it's the chair with the cooler built into the arm. Not the fire pit, not the food, not even the hammock the teenagers fight over. That chair. Last summer at a state park in Idaho, I watched all five kids orbit it like it was the last seat on a school bus, and by Saturday night my wife Jenna had claimed it for good by draping her jacket over the back like a flag.

We are a family of five kids, ages four to fifteen, and we camp out of one Ford Expedition with a rooftop cargo box, so every inch of trunk space has to earn its place. Over about twelve years of summer trips through Utah, Idaho and Wyoming, I have hauled chairs that weighed as much as a child, chairs that folded down to the size of a suitcase but collapsed the first time a teenager leaned back, and chairs that looked great in the store and wobbled on the first uneven patch of dirt. The Coleman chair with the four-can cooler has survived three summers and roughly twenty trips, and it is still the first one out of the car.

The reason is simple. It solves the one problem every parent at a campsite knows, which is that somebody always wants a cold drink and nobody wants to walk back to the big cooler by the car. The cooler pocket in the arm holds four cans, the cup holder holds whatever the youngest is drinking, and the side pockets swallow the sunscreen, the bug spray, the phone, the book. Once it is set up, people just settle in and stay.

The first time it happened, I thought it was a fluke. We had just pulled into a national forest campground in Wyoming, and before I had the tent halfway up, our youngest had dragged the chair over to the picnic table and parked herself in it with a juice box in the cup holder. She stayed there for the better part of an hour, and when she finally got up, the 12-year-old took the seat without a word. That was the pattern for the whole weekend.

I will be honest about what the cooler is and is not. The arm pocket holds four standard cans, and it does its job for an afternoon or an evening by the fire. It is not a replacement for the big cooler by the car, and I would not trust it to keep things cold overnight. But for the chair you are sitting in, four cold drinks within reach is exactly the right amount. You refill it on the trip to grab another log, and it is ready when you get back.

Three summers, twenty trips, five kids, and it's still the first chair out of the trunk. Nothing else we own has earned its space like that.

What surprised me is how the rest of it held up. The cushioned seat and back are comfortable enough for a full evening by the fire, the cup holder keeps a mug from tipping when somebody bumps the chair, and the carry bag means the kids can haul it to the fire pit without dragging it across the gravel. Nothing has broken. Nothing has ripped. The frame has handled a 15-year-old flopping into it at full speed more times than I can count, and the legs have not buckled once.

The details are the kind of thing you only notice after a dozen trips. The side pockets catch the things that otherwise end up in the dirt, the cup holder fits a standard water bottle and a coffee mug, and the chair folds down and goes back in its carry bag without a fight. It is not the lightest chair we own, and it is not the cheapest. It is simply the one that works, every single time, in a way the others never quite did.

We ended up buying a second one so the arguing would stop. That is the review, really. We bought a second Coleman chair for the exact reason we bought the first, because one was never enough. On the last trip of the summer, I counted three of them in a row by the fire: mine, Jenna's, and the one the kids had claimed, with a bag of marshmallows sitting in the cooler pocket like it was built for it.

If you are reading this because you are trying to decide whether a chair with a cooler is a gimmick, I get it. I had the same thought before the first trip. But a gimmick does not survive three summers of five kids using it as a seat, a table, a toy, and a place to stash snacks. A gimmick gets left at home. This chair gets fought over, and then it gets loaded into the car for the next trip without anyone asking whether it is coming.

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

I would tell you to buy one and see who ends up in it. If you camp with kids, it will be the most fought-over seat at the site, and that is not a bad thing. It means the gear is working. It folds flat, it rides in the cargo box without complaint, and it does what it is supposed to do every single trip. I would also tell you to order the second one at the same time, because you are going to anyway. That is not a sales pitch. That is just what happened at our house.