What’s Actually In Our Kit The honest inventory

Both of us carry one. We use it walking into and out of the woods, and it gives us all the distance that job actually needs — which is 80 to 200 yards, not the 1,750 on the box.

What we don’t love: the 2.5x base magnification is a little high for sweeping a treeline. That’s the one thing we’d change, and it’s why two wider-field units rank above it despite this one having the better sensor. Before you buy any thermal, read the law section of that guide — in five states we verified, carrying one while armed is itself the offense.

Used on every hunt. These are the glass we actually pick up, and after multiple seasons we have no interest in replacing them for whitetail work — they gather enough light in the last twenty minutes, which is the only test that matters from a stand.

What we don’t love: the eye relief is genuinely tight. If you wear glasses, we agree with every complaint you’ll read about these. That criticism is in the guide entry too, and it’s why they rank third instead of first.

Four seasons on these with no problems at all, and we’ll keep shooting them for the foreseeable future.

The awkward part, stated plainly: this is the one case where the product we own is also the top pick. The Axis ranked first before we disclosed owning them, on published spine range, GPI, the component system and the track record, and the value deduction for Easton not publishing a price still stands against them. We’d rather flag the overlap than let you find it.

We’ve recovered every deer hit with one. Blood trails have been excellent and every animal has gone down inside 100 yards — with the caveat we’d want anyone to apply to that sentence, which is that shot placement was good every time.

The limits of our own evidence: all of it is inside 50 yards. We have no data on marginal hits, no shoulder impacts, and a small sample. A guide built only on that experience would be worthless, which is why the ranking rests on the published testing and the recovery dataset instead.

Heavy, and we treat it accordingly — this is a set-and-leave stand, not something we’re packing in and out. What it buys with that weight is a seat we can genuinely sit in all day, which matters more in November than any spec on the page.

We run several of these. Comfortable, and the reason we bought more than one.

What we don’t love: they develop a squeak after a few seasons. Not a defect exactly, but if you’re hanging one expecting silence in year four, plan on chasing noise.

Running on one of our farms.

Running on the other farm, which is deliberate — two brands on two properties tells us more than four of the same camera would.

We like it a lot. Bright when we need it, and the runtime is honest.

What we don’t love: it’s a little heavy, and when we checked the numbers against the rest of the field, it turned out to be the heaviest lamp in the guide at 7.27 oz with battery and headband. The gripe was right before we had the spec to prove it. It still ranks seventh, because owning it didn’t earn it a promotion.

The base layer we hunt in. At 330 g it’s the heaviest fabric in our base layer guide, and on a cold sit it does exactly what it should. We haven’t been cold in it.

What we don’t love: $249, no zip to dump heat on the walk in, and Sitka won’t state the fiber content — only "ArmorSpun Merino Wool." We had a feeling there was something better out there before we researched the category, and the guide says that instinct was right: Ridge sells 270 GSM of stated 100% merino for $110, and Minus33 sells 245 GSM for $89.99 in tall sizes. It ranks sixth on a page where we own it.

A Muddy full-body harness, bought years ago. We like it, it fits, it goes up the tree every season, and we have had no reason to replace it.

What we don’t love, and it’s our fault not Muddy’s: we cannot tell you which model it is. It predates the current line. That matters more than it sounds, because three brands in this category have recalled harnesses for the same failure mode and you cannot check your harness against a recall list if you cannot name it. It also means we have no idea when it is due for replacement — though on that one, no manufacturer in the category publishes a replacement interval at all.

The spray we reach for first, and at twelve dollars there’s no argument against keeping a bottle in the truck.

In the pack, and we like it more than the evidence strictly justifies, which we’d rather admit than dress up. It ranks last because the company publishes no testing at all and no price.

It goes to the stand with us. We’re also not going to pretend that amounts to evidence.

Why we own one and still rank it ninth: we have never been able to tell that it saved us a deer, no peer-reviewed research on ozone for hunting exists, and the EPA states that at concentrations which don’t exceed public health standards, ozone has little potential to remove odor compounds. The real risk with a $500 device isn’t that it does nothing — it’s that owning it talks you into hunting a stand on the wrong wind. We’ve caught ourselves doing exactly that.

A perfectly good spray. It isn’t in our current rotation, which is about what ended up on the shelf and not a verdict on the product — it still ranks second on the method.

We’ve washed hunting clothes in it, and it’s still the cheapest sensible step in that guide at $11.99 whether or not it’s the bottle currently in our laundry room.