Quote from MaxineM on October 22, 2022, 4:29 pm

. . . the One Tent to Rule Them All??    😀  Warning: Long, rambling post ahead!

To set some context: I plan/hope to retire in just under two years, so for about the past year I've been very consciously going through all my gear to see what I want to upgrade or add while I'm still working and making the (relatively, ha!) big bucks, and selling/donating things that I just don't use much any more, or that I've bought new/different versions of.  So: the backpacking/bike camping tent situation.  🙂

I have done a fair amount of short-trip bike camping. (I deliberately say "bike camping," because what I do is not at all like what the cool kids nowadays call "bikepacking," lol. I have a traditional road touring bike fitted with treaded tires and four traditional panniers. It's good for rail trails and not-too-aggressive fire roads, but that's about it.) For years I used various modest models of REI 2-person tents, and generally liked them all. When it came time to replace the last of those, I was thinking that I wanted to give backpacking a try, so I was more conscious of weight and pack-ability, which seem a bit more critical when you're carrying stuff on your back vs. on your bike.

So my first fancy-pants lightweight tent was a Big Agnes Copper Spur HV UL2 Bikepack, and my first real outing with it was my first baby-steps  🙂  backpacking trip, in May of last year: a 4.5-mile hike to a state park campsite, one night of camping, hike back out the next day. I was most intrigued by the short pole set of the BA -- the tent poles have many extra joints, so that when collapsed, the whole stack is much shorter than normal, which makes them FAR easier to pack. And I *loved* the "3D gear shelf," which is an absolute genius use of the otherwise dead space above your feet. And of course the tent was quite light. It seemed a little fragile to me (having been used to the beefier REI tents), but I am generally pretty easy on my gear.

The one thing that I found annoyingly fiddly was the fly door: it could be deployed as an "awning," using your two trekking poles to hold it up, and to make that work, it had two zippers that opened only vertically, leaving you with a rectangular piece of loose fabric (where with more traditional tent fly doors, you have a vaguely triangular piece of fabric that you roll away to the side.) (I'm not sure I'm describing that very well, but if you check out pics of the BA tent, you'll see what I mean.) I did not use the "awning" feature, and opening only one zipper made for a tight squeeze to get out of the tent; I needed to unzip both, and then sort of fling the rectangular piece of fabric up toward the top of the tent, where it would generally only hang a second or two before sliding down.

My next trip with the BA tent was a 3-day bike camping trip on Pennsylvania's Pine Creek Rail Trail in October of 2021. The weather was gorgeous when I arrived at the campsite and stayed that way while I got set up . . . then the rain came, and it hung around for pretty much the rest of the trip.  🙂   And that is when the vaguely-annoying tent fly door became a deal-killer: in the pouring rain, opening the two zippers and trying to fling the rectangle up -- only to have it slide back down onto my back as I was backing out of the tent, and then dangle and flap toward the inside of the tent once I was fully backed out -- meant that water got inside my tent until I could get all the way out and close both zippers. I was not a happy chicken: you have ONE job, tent: keep the water out!  😀

(Also on a similar note: I had been side-eyeing the BA's footprint right from the outset. It was shaped to include triangular sections that provide "floors" for the vestibule areas. Which sounds cool in concept, and it is, kind of . . . until it rains. A footprint needs to be slightly smaller than the tent, otherwise water can pool between the top of the footprint and the bottom of the tent. The BA vestibules are fairly protected by the fly, but not enough, if it's raining hard enough/long enough, as it was on the PCRT trip, and water did indeed collect on the vestibule "floors.")

So I sold the BA tent and got an MSR Hubba Hubba. Sturdier than the BA, and with a fully rectangular shape, and excellent weather-proof qualities. I took it on my second-ever backpacking outing, a two-day/one-night trek along the ocean to a back country site on Assateague Island, Maryland, in November of 2021.  I really like the MSR, but I did miss the BA's 3D gear shelf (I bought an add-on gear loft for the MSR, but it doesn't work nearly as well), and I really missed the short poleset. Another feature, missing from both the MSR and the BA tents, was a way to *easily* put up the fly first (if it's raining when you arrive at camp), and then crawl under the fly to put up the tent. (It could, in theory, be done with the MSR and BA tents; I practiced it with both. But it was an epic pain in the rear end, because neither tent/fly system was designed with that capability in mind -- some of my older REI tents had been, and it is a very useful thing.)

So when Sea to Summit came out with a "bikepack" version of their Telos TR2 tent, I debated . . . I liked the MSR tent, and the Telos was pricey, but . . . the Telos has the short poleset, the designed ability to pitch fly-first, an optional add-on gear loft that works well, about the same floor area as the MSR but with bigger vestibules and more headroom (not that that is much of an issue for me; I'm quite short.) So I bit the bullet and ordered the Telos.  It arrived last weekend, and I set it up in the back yard and messed around with it for a while. I haven't slept in it yet, but I think I might really like this tent. I suspect (based on reviews, and looking at it) that it might not be quite as weather-proof as the MSR, and I wish it had more storage pockets, and the whole setup, as I would carry it, is a smidge heavier then the MSR -- about 6 ounces more. But I think the tradeoffs may be worth it. I need to plan a trip in it soon!   🙂