Awnings are cool. No seriously, they really are, anyone who has been camping for a few days in the middle of sunny no-where can tell you the importance of keeping cool and getting a break from the sun when you set up camp. Eezi-Awn has just launched what could be the coolest (or maybe hottest) awning I've seen in a while—It's called the Bat ($1200), and it provides 270 degrees of coverage over your vehicle and deploys in less than a minute. The Bat's frame is made completely of quality aluminum, with a waterproof rip stop canvas to ensure a long life in the field. Equipt Expedition Outfitters is currently taking pre-orders on this seriously cool piece of kit. 

Come join Equipt Expedition Outfitters, The Maya Rally, and Overland Gourmet at booth #20 at Overland ExPo on Saturday, May 19th!

By Paul Archer

Twitter @Paul_K_Archer

Whether you’re off to climb Everest, walk backwards across the Antarctic or heading to South East Asia for a few months with your greatest friend in the world, one of the toughest aspects of any kind of trip is the group dynamics.  Very rarely in life will you spend such extended periods of time with people other than when you travel together.  You will find yourself doing everything together, having little or no privacy and relying on them as they rely on you.  You might spend more time with these people than you’ve ever spent with anybody ever before.

As a first responder in the backcountry, one of our main goals is keep our patient from going into shock. 

Shock is a life-threatening medical condition and a major medical emergency! It is vitally important to recognize the signs and symptoms of shock and to treat as quickly as possible to prevent your patient from going deeper into shock. Shock is easiest alleviated when it is treated early - when not treated properly or in the early stages, shock can rapidly to lead to unconsciousness and death. Shock is a serious medical condition that needs immediate treatment. 

Words by Matthew Scott

Photos by Clark White

 The last month or two has been a wild ride for enthusiast rallies - first Easter Jeep Safari, then most recently I was at Cruise Moab, they were huge fun, but being a Land Rover enthusiast, it goes without saying that I was feeling a bit out of place. Luckily, the Arizona Land Rover Club holds a fantastic annual rally that we usually attend each year, and it happened to be this past weekend in Cottonwood, Arizona. It was time to load up my Series IIA and head "over the mountain" from Prescott. Google maps reliably informed me that it would approximately take an hour and five minutes to reach my destination. Unfortunately, that isn't in vintage Land Rover time, and there happened to be this fantastic bar-b-que joint in between the two that Clark and I ended up finding, so we made it in about three hours. A few words of advice, steep hills, and a complete lack of brakes in a vintage car can be a scary thing.

So, you're sitting in your camp, quietly and peacefully enjoying the quiet evening sunset when all the sudden someone finds it completely neccesary to start up their generator for the sole purpose of powering some random object that you're currently finding completely unnecessary. Only if someone made a device to save those calm, peaceful sunsets and provide your lovely neighbor with all the electricity they could ever want—minus the put-put-put-put-put-put-put....put of the gas eating generator. Well finally someone did, and it's called the Goal Zero Yeti 1250.

This advertisement may not be the newest, but it's one of the best I've seen from Land Rover in a long time, and that's why it's our wallpaper of the day! Don't you wish you had a Defender 90 hanging out in the garage?

"Less is more."

Before the days of color photography and the rise of the digital image, photographers expressed themselves in black and white. Today, even though we live in a digital generation, black and white photography still has incredible capability, but unfortunately, never makes it out the introductory class to photography, where people are often taught what it takes to make a photograph. The idea, is to first have students learn and master the basics of photography in it's most primitive form, unfortunately many decide to discredit the power of a black and white image, and quickly move onto color photography, and inevitably digital photography. For most, creating a black and white image these days consists of nothing more than selecting the monochrome setting on their camera, or perhaps taking a color image and doing a bit of work in a post-processing program. Leica is out to make a statement and change the idea behind this with their M System MONOCROM camera ($8,000, body only), a full-frame, black and white only digital camera.