The Best Portable Jump Starters

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0500

The truck was dead on a November morning at the end of a two-track east of Newberry, six miles from pavement and twelve from any town with a gas station open at that hour. I’d gone in before light for the morning woodcock flight and came back three hours later to nothing. Not a slow crank. The silence that tells you exactly what kind of morning it has become.

My phone had signal, barely. One bar of LTE, enough to reach someone who’d driven separately and left an hour earlier. He turned around and came back. We sat there for fifteen minutes with both trucks idling nose to nose while the battery took enough charge to hold, and I got home. But twelve miles of that drive I was thinking about what I would have done if he hadn’t been there. What I would have done on a colder morning, later in the season, further in.

Gear on Sunday Evening Review

The Best Portable Jump Starters