The Best New Bushcraft and Outdoor Gear We Found This Year

Introduction

A big bushcraft gathering is the best place to find gear that has not hit the mainstream yet. This roundup collects the most interesting finds from one such event: small-batch tools from makers who actually use what they sell. Some are luxury buys, some are budget-friendly quality-of-life upgrades, and a few are genuinely clever pieces of problem-solving gear. Here is what stood out.

Karesuando Curly Birch Kuksa

Karesuando is a Swedish knife maker known for bushcraft blades, and their curly birch kuksa is a wooden drinking cup with real presence. The curl figure in the birch makes it as much a display piece as a camp mug, and it suits anyone who genuinely enjoys drinking from wood. Expect a break-in period before the characteristic new-cup smell fully fades.

This was a personal, emotional pickup more than a practical one, and only a single unit was available at the booth. If a traditional Scandinavian wooden cup appeals to you, this one is a beautiful example of the form.

Crystal Creek Gear Go Reel Pro

The Go Reel Pro is an aluminum hand fishing reel, and it has quietly become a favorite way to fish. The earlier 3D-printed Go Reel kits were affordable but did not hold up indefinitely; the move to injection molding fixed that, and the Pro takes it further with an aluminum body, braid spooled on, and a simple elastic line keeper to stop the line unspooling in storage.

The appeal is access. Ponds and creeks with heavy tree cover make rod fishing miserable, but a hand reel lets you reach under brush where a rod never could. It is a totally different style of fishing that works surprisingly well for bass and panfish in tight spots.

Brodin Expedition Works TI Pack Shovel

Brodin’s titanium pack shovel has a devoted following for good reason. It is a shovel, a chopper, and a batoning tool in one, and the bead-blasted titanium finish on early models develops a lived-in patina while newer stone-washed versions wear a bit better over time. Titanium also feels warm in the hand, which matters on cold mornings.

The handle takes well to tape wraps for extra grip, and a shovel edge cover is practically a required companion purchase to protect the edge and your pack. Brodin now offers multiple lengths, T-handles, and even a 48-inch overland version.

Brodin Dirt Dart Tent Stakes

The Dirt Darts are the kind of simple idea that makes you wonder why nobody did it sooner. These are thin titanium stakes with a welded cleat-style top, effectively a tarp tensioner built into the stake itself. Instead of carrying separate tarp ticks between your tarp and your stake, you tie your bank line straight to the stake, cinch it down, and boat-cleat it off.

The thin profile drives into hard dirt far more easily than typical V-shaped aluminum stakes. They cost more than a dollar stake, around $15 for a two-pack, and weigh marginally more, but consolidating two pieces of gear into one earns that trade easily.

Tough Possum EDC Trifold Trauma Kit

This is not a boo-boo kit. The EDC trifold trauma kit from Tough Possum is built for serious emergencies: a CAT tourniquet in an external elastic slot, two snap-closed internal pockets sized for nitrile gloves, two packs of wound packing gauze, and room for two chest or wound seals.

The layout is deliberate. Everything is positioned so you can patch the problem fast and wait for more help. If you carry a trauma kit at all, this trifold format is one of the most pocketable ways to do it.

Tough Possum Covert Slips

The Covert Slips are small concealed-carry sleeves with slits on either side of an opening, letting you anchor them over a pants button or similar fastener so a small kit hides in plain sight. They come as a two-pack and are sold separately from the lock pick sets that slide into them.

They are a niche product, but for anyone who wants an unobtrusive way to carry a compact tool set, the button-anchoring design is genuinely clever.

Bogota V2 Quad Plus Hook Lock Pick Set

This compact pick set includes a quad-hump pick and a hook, and both tools double as torsion wrenches. That means either piece can tension the lock while the other does the picking, which keeps the whole kit down to two slim flat tools that tuck neatly into a small sleeve.

It is a squeeze to fit into the smallest sleeves, but the redundancy and low profile make it one of the most portable legitimate pick sets around.

Lunnen Kentucky Belt Axe

Jason Lunnen, a toolmaker in Marion, North Carolina, makes this small belt axe, and it is by a wide margin the sharpest axe most people will ever handle. It is shaving sharp and then some, to the point where a very light accidental contact went unnoticed entirely until it mattered. Handle it with respect; the edge is no joke.

The last one at the booth went home with us, and it is hard to overstate how impressive the fit and finish is for a small packable axe. Anyone serious about a compact camp axe should look at Lunnen Tools.

Warrior Kid Medic Medic Multi-Tool

The Medic Multi-Tool is a triangular cotton cloth printed with first-aid instructions: wound packing, tourniquet application, pressure bandage, sling, splint, foot and hand wraps, and more. It appeared on Shark Tank and received funding, and it is available on Amazon.

The best part is that the instructional content is free to everyone through a QR code on the cloth or the accompanying card, no purchase required. At around $12 for the cloth, with an optional case, it is a budget-friendly, zero-excuses piece of first-aid preparedness that weighs almost nothing in a pack.

Pangea X Survival Tools Firefly

The Firefly is a tiny neck knife machined from a single solid piece of D2 steel, so there are no joints or failure points. One end is threaded with a cap holding a ferro rod, and opening it reveals a whistle. The 90-degree spine and fire-board-friendly blade belly make it a legitimate friction-fire tool, and the roughly 2-inch blade keeps it legal for concealed carry in many states.

An optional Fat Bottom accessory adds a larger waterproof base with its own ferro rod and internal storage for tinder, plus a sheath with adjustable retention and over three feet of paracord, whose strands total about 21 feet. The Fat Bottom version simply fits the hand better and is the configuration worth choosing.

Helbender Blade Co Mud Pup

Helbender Blade Co is the in-house USA manufacturing arm of River’s Edge Cutlery. The Mud Pup is their large fixed blade: a MagnaCut steel knife with close to a 5-inch blade and roughly a 4.5-inch cutting edge. The burlap micarta handle has been textured with a wave-like mill pattern that gives it surprising grip, even for people who normally dislike burlap micarta.

It ships with a JRE Industries sheath featuring a slot for a ferro rod. The Mud Pup was not yet on the company website at the time of the show, but availability information was listed, and the smaller Snot Otter knives were already available.

Bear Forest Knives Novaculite Sharpening Stone

This is a raw novaculite whetstone from Bear Forest Knives with a rounded side and a flat side, needing only a little water or moisture to touch up a knife edge. Sold as a unit with a JRE Industries sheath, the clever detail is the sheath’s rough-out back panel, which doubles as a strop.

A sharpening stone and strop in one compact, pocketable package is a neat piece of kit for anyone who spends long stretches outdoors and lets edges drift.

Empire Woolen Canvas Company Oilskin Jacket

The oilskin jacket from Empire Woolen Canvas Company was arguably the favorite pickup of the whole event. Made in America and offered at the show as a prototype for around $150 cash, it is a true rain layer built from oilskin, which needs some maintenance to stay performing but outlasts delaminating technical shells many times over.

The standout feature is the giant pit vents. Most waxed canvas and oilskin jackets lack any venting and become saunas, but these vents make the jacket wearable well above freezing temperatures. There are two zippered front pockets, a chest pocket, hood and hem cinches, a hanging hook, and a small printed message on the wrist that says this weather sucks.

One sizing note matters: these jackets run extremely large because they are designed to fit over a PFD, a life vest. A wearer who normally takes an extra large needed a medium here. They were not yet on the website and will likely cost more when released, but if you can find one, size down accordingly.

Brodin Titanium Spatula

Pete at Brodin Expedition Works is a wilderness camper who identifies small annoyances in his own gear and then fixes them with titanium. The spatula is exactly that: a proper camp spatula in titanium that is light, indestructible, and genuinely pleasant to cook with. Brodin also makes sporks, spoons, forks, and tongs in the same spirit.

This was a repeat purchase, which says everything. Anyone who cooks over a fire or on a camp stove should have one in the kit.

Brodin Twig Savers

The Twig Savers solve the eternal camp problem of keeping gear out of the dirt. Each is a Dyneema cord system that loops around a tree, passes back through a knotted keeper hole, and terminates in a boat-cleat-style hook where you tie off and hang your pack, lamp, or food bag.

Multiple units can be strung together on one line for several hanging points. At roughly $10 to $12 each, they are a cheap, near-weightless quality-of-life upgrade for anyone who camps outside established sites.

Buying Advice

A few patterns emerge from this list. The titanium camp items from Brodin, particularly the Dirt Dart stakes and Twig Savers, offer the best value-to-impact ratio because they replace multiple pieces of gear or solve daily annoyances for very little money. The Go Reel Pro is the pick for anglers frustrated by brush-choked water. The Lunnen belt axe and the Empire Woolen Canvas oilskin jacket were the two favorites overall, representing craftsmanship and weather protection respectively. Safety-minded readers should look at the Tough Possum trauma kit and the Warrior Kid Medic cloth, both of which are small, affordable, and genuinely useful. The kuksa, the Firefly, and the Mud Pup sit in the fun-and-crafted category where the appeal is as much emotional as practical.

Conclusion

The common thread across all of these finds is that each maker uses their own gear hard, finds what annoys them, and builds a fix. Whether it is a stake with a built-in tensioner, a stone with a strop on its sheath, or a jacket with vents that actually work, the best bushcraft gear still comes from people who live with it. Any of these picks is a solid starting point, and the small-batch makers behind them deserve the attention.