Here at The National Center for Outdoor Adventure & Education (NCOAE), we just aren’t all that interested in touting the attributes of the materials and products we use while traversing the worldwide wilderness areas in which we work. But every once in a while, we’ll step back and look at a piece of outdoor gear that’s still holding up well despite its age and we say, “Damn, we’ve been hauling that thing around for longer than we can remember and it’s still working.”
In particular, we’re reminded of the Canyon Coolers that we have stored in various sheds and aboard our fleet of river boats and rafts, and we marvel at how well these coolers keep stuff cold after multiple years of use.
We were attracted to this Flagstaff, Arizona-based manufacturer when we bought up our first Canyon Cooler a number of years back. We were looking for a sturdy product that would hold up to our strenuous schedule of river trips.
As background, we run guided trips and outdoor educator courses on a number of rivers, including the Deschutes River in in central Oregon (a major tributary of the Columbia River); the Grande Ronde River in northeastern Oregon (a tributary of the Snake River); tributaries of the Amazon River found in Ecuador; and in many other waterways across the globe.
What we were thinking back then was that we need a bomb-proof cooler that would hold up to the challenges any gear undertakes on one of our outings. But you know what really sold us on Canyon Coolers? It was their attitude.
They stood there, looked us right in the face and said that their stuff would keep ice “on ice” for a mind-blowing 11 days.
Yeah, but can you guarantee that, we asked.
That’s when they told us about how their Flagstaff location is the jumping off point for most Grand Canyon rafting trips, where river rafters — and their equipment — undergo extreme heat. They said their long history with super coolers is baked into their DNA.
Ergo, the well-worn but efficient characteristics of our own well-aging Canyon Coolers.
And then they told us about their no-hassle, no-fault, unconditional lifetime warranty on all of their coolers. In fact, they call it the Sh*t Happens warranty, which means “no matter how tough we build them, we know you buy them to use them, and sometimes Sh*t Happens.”
Specifically, Canyon Coolers offers a fully transferable lifetime warranty, with no warranty card to complete, no product registration requirements, and no need to hang onto the receipt.
Here’s some other stuff our river honchos (aka, field instructors and guides) tell us they like about these nuke-resistant chillers:
- They feature multiple tie-down points, which we need for challenging river courses.
- The flush and recessed features allow us to find multiple uses for these coolers, including as tabletops for food preparation.
- The squared off, slab-sided exterior design takes up less space in a tightly packed boat or raft.
- They can take a beating without any impact on ability to perform.
Canyon Coolers says what distinguishes its quality rotationally molded cooler from a discount store injection-molded cooler is the quality of the insulation. Roto-Molded cooler plastic is more durable and creates a plastic shell that has no seams. That enables them to inject their violently expanding Hunt-X Foam Insulation into the plastic shell without bursting the seams. As a result, a rotomolded cooler keeps ice in a solid state for much longer.
For more information, visit Canyon Coolers.
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