You’ll find orange buttons on each leg that are quite large so that you can effortlessly press them and move the poles up and down. This canopy gives 64 sq ft of coverage with an SPF of 50+ and features an easy-up design with telescoping legs, so it can be set up in just a ozark trail canopy matter of minutes. Plus it includes stakes, guide ropes, and a wheeled bag for easy transportation and storage. With the canopy arranged on the frame and attached at the corners, push the roof framework up the leg poles until the orange locking button clicks for each leg.
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 rain fly has an additional tent pole, too, to support the vestibule. Overall, these poles—all of them aluminum—contribute to a particularly sturdy structure, with or without the rain fly. During our testing, our Base Camp shrugged off both a rainstorm and a desert windstorm as if they were nothing. Despite losing some headroom in comparison with the Kelty Wireless 6 and The North Face Wawona 6, both of which measure six-foot-four in height, the Base Camp 6 offers a substantial six-foot-two. Adults as tall as 6-foot-3 can move about this tent standing upright.
With a 44-square-foot vestibule, and 86 square feet of interior living space, the tent has plenty of room to house beds, cribs, gear, pets, and camping furniture. Zippered doors can enclose the vestibule fully, so it serves as a separate room for the tent, or you can leave one or both open, so the vestibule can act like a porch or mudroom. The main tent body has a giant ozark trail chair front door that’s oriented to make entry and exit easy for all the tent’s occupants at night, and a smaller back window that doubles as a second door. Like most dome-style tents, the Wireless 6 withstands wind like a champ—it fared noticeably better than the Camp Creek 6 in 15-mph gusts. The continuous curve of the dome shape allows for wind to pass over and around it.
Temperatures ranged from the 50s at night to the 80s during the day. The most popular product in their line is the 10×10 Instant Slant Leg Tent with a blue canopy top. It is made with a steel construction frame and polyester material for the canopy, which is in line with just about every shade tent on the market today. The frame is that of a pyramid structure, which are generally found in all value brand canopy tents as they require less material to manufacture vs. that of a full truss system and as a result can keep the price lower. 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.
Finding a small, light tent is the logical approach when you’re backpacking. But with car camping—the industry term for what most people consider just camping—you’ll likely be parking next to your campsite and unloading. If you won’t be carrying your tent more than a couple hundred feet, more space means more comfort (as well as more room for your stuff). An avid hiker, camper, and long-haul road-tripper, Claire Wilcox has slept in (and occasionally improvised) tents in 11 states. She covers outdoor gear for Wirecutter and worked on the most recent update of this guide, testing couples’ tents and family tents. This dome-style tent has nearly vertical walls, high ceilings, and a single vestibule the size of an actual mudroom.
While it might not sound like much, that is a difference of 64 sq. You’ll be able to comfortably fit up to 4 chairs underneath the 64 sq. The benefit of the slanted legs is that these tents are more stable laterally which can increase the stability of the frame and make it less prone to toppling, an important benefit if on a windy beach.
Families who regularly pitch their tent in rainy locales need a wind-fighting tent with a good-size vestibule for storing wet shoes and gear, as well as a full rain fly for added weather protection. The geodesic structure of the Base Camp tents is built to withstand wind and rain. It has two main that thread through sleeves, stretching between the four corners of the tent. Generally, we like clip-on designs better, since those are easier to put together, but in the case of the Base Camp models, the sleeves add extra tension and stability throughout the tent fabric. There are also two poles that arch over each doorway and down the sides of the tent to add extra shape and support; these attach to the tent body with clips.