Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We chose this cooler for a very particular reason: it's as tall as a cooler can be and still fit in the bear boxes most commonly found in national parks like Yosemite, where it's actually illegal to leave coolers out--even visible inside your car. Big, big fine for doing so. On our last trip to Yosemite, we found that it worked well. This may not be a Yeti, but a standard chunk of block ice lasted at least 3 days in warm weather. And a Yeti's much thicker insulation mean it holds appreciably less stuff for a given outside dimension. I'd only consider a Yeti if I were going to be camping somewhere without a convenience store or supermarket nearby or least accessible every three days or so. As long as you can get ice every few days--3-5 depending on the weather I'm guessing--you won't get the benefit of the Yeti's vastly higher price and smaller storage capacity. This is about as big a cooler as an average person can easily lift I think, BTW. I was a bit taken aback by the lid relying on a press fit to close and seal rather than a latch. It seals well enough to keep the cold in, but you have to make sure that when kids or unobservant adults get stuff out of this cooler, that they take the trouble to forcefully push the lid down. Otherwise it will sit ajar and lose its cool. The bottom train plug is also a press fit. It didn't leak. You do have to tilt the cooler quite a bit to completely drain it. Wheels and handle seem sturdy and worked fine. Likewise the drain's plug is a press fit. You can't lose it--it's attached to the cooler on a tether, and it showed no signs of loosening, but it still isn't as secure as a valve. Less to go wrong, though. The drain hole is an inch or so up off the bottom of the cooler, so it won't dran completely unless you tilt it quite a bit. A minor beef. The major question is whether it keeps your stuff cold. And it does. Will the press-fit lid still work after years of use? I honestly don't know. I'm guessing that it will, but I don't know. I also don't know whether raccoons can open it. I certainly wouldn't leave it accessible to them. It's quite sturdy. You could use it as a seat (unless you're morbidly obese I suppose), and the big handle is equally sturdy.. It also has two smaller handles, which I used often to lift it out of our van and onto the ground and vice-versa. They seemed reasonably sturdy, though someone who's careless might risk damaging them--they slide up and down in channels to transition between the stored position and the deployed-as-handles position. The current fashion in coolers is to have them more cubical, with a telescoping handle on one side like what you'd have with luggage. That would be much easier to pull along the ground than this cooler--you have to hold up much of its weight to pull it along on its wheels. We didn't consider such designs, despite them being more popular now I think, because none of them would fit in a Yosemite bear box--none that had remotely the capacity of this one at least. Also, our van has a place in which this cooler would fit out of sight of bears and park rangers, while again a luggage-style cooler of comparable capacity would be too tall (we have a VW Eurovan). So make sure to measure everywhere you might need to stow the cooler in before getting a telescoping handle/cubical form factor cooler. It would be possible to build a cooler of this one's dimensions that way, with the wheels mounted at each end of this cooler's long side--but no one has done so. And you couldn't pull such a cooler through your house to the kitchen to offload/onload groceries, most likely. So we'll probably stick with this one's design for the foreeeable future.+ Overall this cooler seems like a much better value for most uses than a high end cooler like a Yeti, unless you're affluent or are going to be unable to buy another block of ice every four or five days, or if you're camping at Furnace Creek in Death Valley in the summer.