The Base Camp also offers more privacy compared with our other picks—with or without the rain fly. At the Good Housekeeping Institute Textiles Lab, we’ve tested hundreds of products for more than a century, ozark trail canopy tent including the best mattresses and best pillows. To find the best air mattresses, we evaluated everything from overnight leakage and indentation over time to puncture resistance and bursting strength.
Inflating this beast with the hand pump is the most exhausting part of the day. (ISLE does offer a $145 Custom Electric Pump.) And rolling it back up can sometimes get a little frustrating. ozark trail canopy tent My buddy Diego used my Explorer 2 while I carried most of the gear on my Switch Pro. As we zipped past kayaks, canoes, inner tubes, and fishing boats, I never once wanted anyone else’s rig.
In many cases, small repairs or continued careful use is the right course of action. But when safety is compromised and functionality is greatly reduced, tent replacement is the clear choice. If you are wondering whether to replace your event tent, you’ll find that many of today’s top tent manufacturers offer high-quality event tents engineered to last a lifetime. Though replacing an event tent may be a big investment in the moment, it’s one that will pay for itself over time when a top-notch tent is purchased. With this in mind, tent replacement is often the right choice for event hosts, businesses, sports teams and other organizations.
The tent also comes with its own footprint, a groundsheet that protects the tent from abrasion, which we recommend that you have. One night during testing, for example, clouds loomed in the distance with clear skies overhead. After we pitched the tent, the Mineral King 3’s adaptable fly let us leave half the mesh dome uncovered. At the first sign of rain, it took only a few seconds—and a quick hand stuck outside the tent—to unfurl the fly and secure it for a dry night’s sleep. When we awoke, we could roll back one part of the vestibule, make coffee, and watch the sky lighten even though it was still raining. With nearly 60 square feet of floor space plus two large vestibules, the Tungsten 4 is roomier than our top-pick tent for couples.
The Wawona 6 is more complex to set up than a classic dome-style tent like the Wireless 6, but not by much. We recommend doing it with two people, but one person can manage in about 15 minutes. As with any free-standing tent, with this one you stake out the four corners, and then you feed the two main tent poles through the Wawona’s fabric sleeves, which go halfway down the tent’s body. The North Face’s color-coded poles make this process easy to navigate. (We were stubborn and didn’t look at the instructions.) Once you identify the front and back, the process is straightforward. The fly goes up and over the tent body, covering only the upper half of the mesh dome, and then forms the glorious vestibule with the aid of a third pole.
But when ISLE released the Switch Pro, we decided it was worth a revisit. Just a half hour of driving from my apartment in east Atlanta, I can hop on the river and find myself immediately surrounded by nature’s abundance. Singing birds, bubbling rapids, and the frequent absence of other humans — I’ve had some of the best days of my life lately. The North Face Wawona 4, which we used to list in our Other Good Tents section, has been redesigned; it’s now made of polyester, not nylon. I do repairs on homes, swimming pools, recreational vehicles & PC Computers when I am off of work.