Our only quibble with the Mineral King 3 is that it comes with only six stakes. (Our runner-up pick comes with eight.) Six is enough to secure the tent and fly but not to fully secure the tent’s extra lines in very windy conditions. This shouldn’t be an issue in most situations, but if you’re headed into a particularly windy place or simply want some backup, we suggest picking up four extra tent stakes at your local outdoor shop or online. These inexpensive stakes are comparable to the ones that accompany the Mineral King 3; these slightly more expensive stakes will serve you well in any car-camping terrain.
Like the Mineral King 3, this tent comes with a footprint. Like our couples’ tent pick, the Wireless 6 is a dome-shaped tent with a tried and true two-pole design. It has an interior footprint of 87 square feet, which sleeps four adults on single pads, or two adults and two or three children, and can accommodate a crib. It has two large doors, and a peak height of 6-foot-3.
What you wind up with is a web of pipes and plastic pieces that falls apart at one end as you assemble the other. Then the instructions start to get really funny. ‘Insert the leg poles into the hubs to raise the screenhouse frame’ got the first laugh. The “frame” barely ozark trail canopy stayed together on the ground. Any attempt to lift a corner and insert a leg pole resulted in pipes flying everywhere. I thought of resorting to duct tape, but since I had none handy, with great finesse I managed to lift each corner one pipe segment at a time.
It also comes with a groundsheet (aka footprint) to protect the tent floor. If the Mineral King 3 is out of stock, or if you’d like a slightly larger tent, we recommend the Marmot Tungsten 4. The Tungsten 4 shares many of the Mineral King 3’s best features, and provides 10 square feet of additional living space as well as excellent weather protection—as long as you set it up properly. Like our top pick, the Tungsten 4 is a sturdy, two-door dome-style tent that can be deployed in about 5 minutes. It uses high-quality materials such as aluminum poles, breathable mesh, and water-resistant polyester fabric, and it comes with a full fly and a footprint. The Tungsten 4’s larger size accounts for the higher price tag (about $40 more), but campers who would like that extra room may find the expense worthwhile.
When heavy trade winds buffeted our Oahu-coast testing site, we pitched each tent in full face of the blast. We then rotated the tents looking for structural weaknesses, and we tested their guy lines and tabs to see which tents had the best and most intuitive design for withstanding wind. If you can afford to spend more on a family tent, we recommend The North Face Wawona 6. Everyone who tested this tent loved it, and it’s not hard to understand why.
Hook the S-Hooks into one of the holes located at the bottom of the leg poles. Wrap the velcro tape , located inside the screen house, around the poles to secure them. When the screen house is in its proper location, stake it down by driving stakes through the four D-rings located on at the corners.
To compare tent fabrics, you also need to know their overall rip strength. For most fabrics, rip strength is expressed as a measurement of the diameter of the fibers in their thread, or a denier—the higher the denier, ozark trail screen house the stronger the fabric. We found 40 denier up to 150 denier to be typical for car-camping tents; you can read more about these measurements in gear manufacturer MSR’s blog post and in this Outside article.