Over the years, I have evaluated gear for magazines including Wired, Popular Science, and National Geographic Adventure, where I was a senior editor. The REI Co-op Screen House Shelter is easy to set up ozark trail canopy and pleasant to use, providing good protection from bugs, sun, and gentle rain showers. A high ceiling makes the tent feel brighter and more airy than other camping shelters with a similar footprint.
This shelter is also fully surrounded by a 10-inch-wide ground skirt, which goes the extra mile to keep creepy crawlers and flying annoyances at bay. This weight makes it somewhat difficult to load into and unload out of a vehicle, but once on the ground, the tank-grade roller bag allows it to be moved with ease, especially if you have two people. The price tag may also be too high for some shoppers, but we feel the quality increase is worth it if you can swing it. Since 2015, I’ve tested camping shelters and large car-camping tents on weekend trips involving more than a dozen families, and I have talked to dozens more about their tent travails.
The Pacific Breeze Easy Up and the Qipi Beach Cabana came in just behind the top scorers. This position is primarily due to their larger packed sizes, which makes them slightly more difficult to carry and store. The Qipi, in particular, has a much longer packed size and, at nearly 10 pounds, it’s heavier than the others mentioned above. The Easy Up may have been the lightest in our list of top scorers, but it also comes in a longer packed size, which affected its overall score.
The Eurmax Standard 10×10 offers 100 square feet of sun protection and a peak height of 11 feet. Very high-quality materials were used to produce this shelter, making it our hands-down choice for the best recreational canopy tent on the market. Despite its size and weight, the Eurmax is quite easy to set up and take down. Great canopy textiles, quick-release ozark trail canopy tabs, reinforced trusses, and a beefy steel frame allow the Eurmax to tower over other models we tested. It effectively blocks the sun, stands firm in the wind, and is impervious to rainwater. It’s a perfect shelter for any outdoor activity, but we feel it excels in settings that include commerce, command posts, campgrounds, and outdoor sports.
The easily recognizable logo has been seen by nearly everyone at youth soccer tournaments or beach vacations in recent years. Our second grading metric involves how fast and easy it is to set up and take down each shelter, but it also considers how simple and intuitive both processes are. While we recommend a minimum of two people to set up most shelters, the ease of this process can vary drastically depending on the design and quality of materials. While being timed, we set up and took down each product a minimum of 10 times.