Gearhead: UCO Gear lights up camping with LED tent stakes

If you’ve ever tripped over a tent guy-wire in the dark-perhaps sprawling painfully onto hard-packed ground or pulling your tent down in the process-you can appreciate the value of a lighted tent stake. Aside from keeping feet clear of ropes, they’re also a handy assist for setting up a tent in the dark, an attractive source of perimeter lighting, and make it easy to find your tent when returning from a midnight call of nature.

Each stake has a built-in LED that provides ?17 lumens of continuous light (if you need to locate your tent over long back-country distances, you can switch the light to strobe). Each LED-powered by one 1.5V AAA battery and housed in a highly water-resistant TPE housing-gives 10 hours of continuous light or up to 24 hours in strobe mode.

The 9-inch stakes are made from heavy-duty, 6000-series aluminum, weigh a mere 1.3 ounces, and have holes at the top for guy-lines. An on/off switch, which glows in the dark, is integrated into the lens, so once everybody’s safely in their sleeping bags, the campsite can easily go dark. The LEDs also can be removed and used for other tasks. $19.99 for a pack of four. ucogear.com

Suzie Rodriguez