I was in a large tent (admittedly, a smaller tent would have been better) with one other person. I had to add a fleece sleeping bag for more insulation. And every time you move your feet you get to hear the crinkle of the fabric on the bottom. Yeti has clearly set themselves apart as the biggest player in the cooler space. Since they launched, they have carved out an incredible market share delivering products across the board from coolers to dog bowls.
For fifteen dollars I wasn’t expecting (or needing) anything that would stand up to freezing weather. Unfortunately the workmanship was more than a little upsetting, even for that price. I notice this isn’t the first review with this complaint. The zipper broke on my warm weather bag on the second night out.
On one of the hottest days, the remote sensor reported temperatures exceeding 107 Degrees Fahrenheit while the air temp was in the high 80’s. I spend a great deal of time on the water every summer boating and fishing in Northern Michigan. I will often load a large cooler up at the beginning of the week and leave it on my Pontoon packed with drinks and ice.
If you have a boat and bring kids or friends on the water, you know that once you leave the dock the requests for drinks start rolling in fast and furious. Sure, you can load a cooler out each morning packed with fresh ice, but it is just so much easier to cut down all that work with a cooler than can keep ice for days on end. I used this bag two nights last weekend and found it was too cold on its own—lowest temp was 51 degrees each of those nights. The bag is very lightweight and comes with a compression sack. It’s compact, and keeps you warm and comfortable throughout the night.
I could have gotten better quality from a teenager’s home ec project and lighter weight. Similar to the Ozark Trail cooler, the Pelican features orange wheel rims and also has orange clasp accents. You can get this cooler in three colors, Tan which is featured here, as well as graphite and white. The other two colors will have different rims and accents, so if you don’t love the orange you have options. Pelican is a newer entry in to the world of rotomolded coolers and have taken their own spin on design and function.
It has ClimaTech fiber for added warmth, comfort, and durability. It is terribly heavy for backpacking and definitely not rated correctly. If you just can’t afford a better bag…DO NOT GO OUT IN COLD WEATHER OR YOU WILL REGRET IT. The only way you would sleep well in this bag is if you are under 5’5″ and very ozark trail chair slender and use it summer nights or maybe push it to early fall. My own personal beverage drama every summer has really pushed me to do this review. To me, worrying about the temperature of the drinks I have on my boat is the absolute last thing I want to be thinking about when I am heading out on the water.
I’ll be totally honest, I was not expecting this cooler to be as nice as it was. It’s easy to get caught up in brand perception and often times very difficult to break away from what you think you know about a brand. I used the word “think” intentionally, because what I thought I knew about Ozark Trail was not correct.
Trailspace’s community of gear reviewers has field-tested and rated the top warm weather sleeping bags. Trailspace’s community of gear reviewers has field-tested and rated the top warm weather synthetic sleeping bags. We have stayed nicely warm while sleeping in the cold in this bag. The bag, by itself, is not very warm at that temperature. We layer a blanket between the sleeping pads and the sleeping bags for some extra insulation.
With a hard plastic latch, you run the risk of brushing by the cooler and hitting your shin, which I have done and is awful. One of my favorite features though is the rubber wheels vs. the hard plastic wheels on the Pelican and Yeti. Not only will the rubber allow for a slightly smoother roll when you are pull this cooler along, but it will also be quieter. You won’t wake the neighbors up when you are pulling this down your dock. Rounding out the exterior is a lid that features 4 cup holders and inch notches for measuring your catch of the day. Our sister site Alloutdoor.com recently reviewed a hiking backpack sold by Ozark Trail that had an overall stellar performance and it triggered a question among our staff.
Overall the Pelican coolers have sharper edges and a bit more of an industrial feel than the competition. One of the first things to note about it’s design is that it has a larger drainage hole and a tethered drain cap, which is a nice feature. I have lost a couple of drain caps in my day which makes the cooler unusable until a replacement arrives. I’m using my North facing deck as the staging area which receives direct sunlight at almost all hours of the day. I also placed a small weather system on the deck rail to help get a sense of how hot surface temperatures are in the area.