I'll be testing The North Face Wawona 6
for its ease of setup, its base area, rain and wind protection,
vestibule usage, and much, much more! Before I take you through the actual testing itself, here's just
a couple of unboxing shots. I bought my Wawona 6 from Amazon, although you can get it from REI
or Backcountry as well. So, this is me unboxing my Wawona 6, here's what it looks like, brand new, out of the box, and you'll get this
small product tag, right here. After taking everything out, like so,
I got the tent body right here, this is the orange rainfly, here are the poles
in a separate carry bag, here are the stakes, guylines, and instructions in another
smaller carry bag, and finally, here's
the bigger orange carry bag. I also took out all the poles, stakes, and guylines,
and I got these four poles, these 14 stakes,
plus two of these orange guylines. For the ease of setup, here's a quick
time lapse that you can watch, and first, I'm gonna go through a few
things that I liked about this tent's setup. For one, I liked that I could set up the entire Wawona 6 on my own,
and I'm not even very tall, I'm only about 5'3. It didn't take me very long too. This entire set up, including staking and guying out the tent,
took me about 20 minutes. And I really loved all the color
coding all around the tent. Each pole is fully color-coded, all the pole sleeves are color-coded, and even the pole clips, webbings, and rainfly
grommets were fully color coded. If you need more info on this set up,
I put together this step by step guide, which you can find on my
channel if you need it. But for now, let's go through
the cons of this set up. First, for cons, during the setup,
I found the orange pole sleeves a little bit long, and each of them snagged
between one to three times. Second, and I think the biggest setup con of all, is that when I was trying to set up
the orange poles, this last corner here, and only this corner, was ridiculously
difficult for me to set up. It was extremely tight, I had to not only un-stake that corner,
plus the two corners next to it, and I also had to use all my strength
just to get the pole into the grommet. Third, the rainfly of this Wawona 6
has a lot of fabric and pole clips, which always catch either
on the tent fabric or the poles. So, setting up the rainfly on my own takes me two attempts,
sometimes even three attempts at getting it up, which really slows down
the set up process quite a bit. On the other hand, for most tents, I'm actually able to set up the entire
rainfly on my own, no problem at all. And the last con is that The North Face didn't give me enough
stakes and guylines. For guylines, I got 6 pre-attached guylines, plus 2
of these un-attached ones, but even with these, I'm still short about 3 guylines, 1 for this window,
and 2 more for these 2 vents. And if I wanted to fully stake down and guy out the entire tent,
I'm short about 9 stakes. As for the ease of take down and pack away, unlike the setup process,
I never had any issues with my Wawona 6, and the entire process
takes just 14 minutes. It's so user-friendly because
the carry bag is really nice; it's top-loading and the opening of the bag is super big,
so you can easily get everything in. If you wanna know how I pack away my Wawona 6, you can check out
the separate set up video as well. For the base area, I measured the length
of this Wawona 6 to be about 116 inches, and I measured the width
to be about 94 inches. This gave me a total base
area of about 76 square feet. Sadly though, my Wawona 6 was quite a few
inches smaller than the marketed dimensions of 120 by 96 inches, or
a base area of about 80 square feet. So, mine was about 5%
smaller than it should be. But despite the smaller than marketed base area, I could still fit six
regular pads in my Wawona 6. Here's me inflating my sleeping pads, and
here's what having six pads looks like. Of course, with six pads, you would have
to sleep shoulder to shoulder, like this, and as you can see here, all my pads are basically side by side
with each other, so it's a very tight fit. There is this small space here, but that's not gonna be
enough to fit much of anything. I definitely do not recommend fitting six
people in here, because it's just so tight, especially if you have to sleep
at the sides of the tent. I never like sleeping at the sides of any tent, and in this Wawona 6,
my hand would touch the wall of the tent when I raise my arm up, and my head
definitely grazes the wall when I sit up. So, to me, it feels
a little claustrophobic. Instead of six pads, I was actually able to fit two almost
queen-sized beds inside this tent. Here's me inflating my two queen beds, here's what they look
like inside the Wawona 6, and here's what four people
would look like inside the tent. Honestly, even with just two queen beds, it somehow still felt
pretty tight at the sides. My hand would still graze the wall when I
raise my arm up, and here's a closer look at what sleeping at the
sides would look like. Not exactly the most spacious. Here's a couple more
things to take note of. First, both my mattresses aren't exactly
a true Queen size of 80 by 60 inches. They're actually a little smaller, and I'll put the dimensions of both
mattresses on the screen here. And even though they're both slightly smaller than a Queen, the fit inside
this Wawona 6 is already very, very snug. Both beds touch the sides of the tent, and there's only a few inches
of left over space between them. So, there's probably no way to fit
two actual queen beds in here. On top of that, with just these two queen
beds inside the tent, there's barely enough space left over
for me to even walk around in the tent. So, my recommendation is to fit
at most one queen bed in this tent, and here's what it looks like. I wouldn't recommend having your mattress touch any of the walls,
so one queen bed is probably the max. Not 2, for sure. You can also fit a twin bed or another single pad beside this
queen bed, if you want to. The peak height inside this
Wawona 6 is about 77 inches, and of course, I'm not very tall, so I can stand up completely upright under
the peak height, no problem at all. It's also not the tallest peak height though, so I can easily reach the top
of the tent by just raising my arm up. Also, the tent shape of this Wawona 6 is
a dome-shaped tent, so just take note that the peak
height is only at the center. In fact, when I take just two small steps away from the peak height, my head would
touch the side of the tent, right here. Unlike a cabin tent with vertical side walls, where I can walk really close
to the walls and even stretch my arms out, the walls of this dome-shaped Wawona 6
slant inwards a little bit, like every other dome tent, so I can't really
walk around the tent as much. This is as best as I can. Also, when I stretch my arms out, it touches the sides
of the tent very easily. But there's one really cool wall in this
Wawona 6, which is the front wall. It's actually completely vertical, because of the extra pole that extends
the tent fabric upwards. So, I can walk really close to this wall,
thanks to the vertical shape. On top of that, the extra pole also pulls
the tent fabric outwards, giving me much more livable space
nearer the front of the tent. I think you can see it
better without the rainfly. Okay, so this is me going to stand
in front of the wall, and notice how I'm able to stand
completely upright against the wall? That's how vertical it is. And this is the part in front of the wall that gives you a little more livable
space than any other regular dome tent. You see it, right? Moving onto the vestibule area,
here's my own personal measurements. To summarize, the longest length of the
vestibule comes in at about 99 inches, the shortest length of the vestibule
at the top here comes in at about 56 inches, and the longest width of the
vestibule comes in at about 84 inches. After doing a little calculation with these numbers,
plus some other numbers that I can quickly flash on the screen right now if you're
interested, well, the total base area of this
Wawona's vestibule is a whole 14 % bigger than marketed, coming in at
a whopping 51 square feet. So, a huge thumbs up
to the Wawona 6 for this. Now, for the vestibule sizing,
I've got a couple of my REI chairs right here, and we're gonna set this up and
see how it fits in the Wawona's vestibule. Okay, so this is my REI Camp X Chair, which has been re-branded
to the Skyward Chair, and this is my REI Camp Xtra Chair, which is one of the biggest
camping chairs that I have, and both these chairs fit perfectly into the vestibule with a ton of left
over space for even a camping table. When I re-arrange both these chairs like
this, they fit really perfectly as well, so you get tons of flexibility on how you
want to store your stuff in the vestibule. The height inside the vestibule is pretty
consistent throughout the entire vestibule, but it does taper down
a little bit towards the end. This is how it looks like from the outside, and this is how
it looks like from the inside. The side of the vestibule nearest the inner tent has a peak height of about
74 inches, and it slowly tapers down all the way to the other side,
which has a height of about 65 inches. So, overall, for the vestibule, there was a ton of livable space,
and I was very impressed by it. Moving back to the inner tent, this
Wawona 6 has three windows in the tent, let's talk about these two side windows
first, and here are some pros and cons. Here's what each of these side
windows look like up close, here's all the mesh, and there's actually no way that I could open
them from the inside. So, whenever I wanted to open these side windows, I had to go out
of the tent, and open them, like so. Why?
I'm not really sure either. But anyway, to open these windows, there's one zip and one Velcro
strip on each side of each window, and to keep these windows open, you'll get these two toggles at the top
to tie the window fabric up. There's no zipper or Velcro at the bottom of each window though,
but there is this guy-out loop at the bottom, so you can guy this
window out for some ventilation. When open, each window measures about 69 inches in length and 16 inches
in width, so not the biggest. However, I did like that there's a little versatility in opening
the windows, like this. And also, the zippers
on the windows are SBS, and I found them to be completely
snag-free and good quality. The last window is actually
at the back of the tent, and while I liked that I could open
and shut this window from the inside of the tent, the process
was a little bit annoying. I first had to unzip the window, then unzip the outer fabric,
then tie that fabric up using these two toggles at the bottom of the window, and
then, finally, I get to zip up the window. When opened, this last window measures about 42 inches in length by 37
inches in width, so not super big, and also, these storage pockets
kinda block your view a little bit. But I did like the SBS zippers though,
they're completely snag free as well. Moving onto the tent doors, this Wawona 6 has two of them, and again, I'll give you all the pros
and cons that I could think of as well. This is the front door of the Wawona 6, notice how it's completely snag free, I needed to use only one hand to unzip the entire door, and unzipping
it takes just three seconds. After that, to keep the door open, you gotta roll the fabric up neatly, and
tie it to the top with these two toggles. When open, this front door has a longest length of 60 inches, and a
longest width of 58 inches, so basically it's pretty big,
and it's about three times my size. This front door also measures 70 inches from the ground to the top of the door,
which is also much taller than my height. So, when walking in and out of the Wawona 6 through this front door, I never had
to duck at all, which is super nice. I also love how zipping this door up
takes only three seconds as well, it's completely catch-free, the zippers are made of SBS, I do wish it could have been YKK,
but SBS isn't too bad, and I love how a good three-quarters of this front door, anything above here,
is made of mesh for tons of ventilation. The mesh looks fine and high quality,
and I think it could be no-see-um mesh. As for cons, well, I don't think
this front door has any of them. I loved it, and it's really great. Now, this is the back
door of the Wawona 6, I like that it's completely snag free, takes about three seconds
to zip and unzip as well, and the zippers are
the same as the front door, they're these SBS zippers.
And that's it for the pros. Now, here are some cons. First, and I found this to be the most annoying, to keep this door open,
you gotta unzip not just the door fabric, you gotta unzip the inner
window fabric as well, then you gotta tie up the inner window fabric first, before you can
tie up the door fabric. And that's because there's only the same two toggles for tying both the window
and door fabric up together. If you try to roll both the door and window fabric up together,
you won't be able to tie it up with the toggles, because the toggles
would be stuck somewhere in between. When opened, this back door is
actually really quite small, it measures just 42 by 37 inches, and here's what it looks like
when I stand in front of it. It also measures just 48 inches
from the ground to the top of the door. So, even if you're not tall like me, you would still have to duck down
quite a bit to get through the door. And also, I wish that The North Face would have color-coded the door
and window zippers, right now, they're just all orange in color, and I kept pulling
on the wrong zipper. Onto the vestibule doors, this Wawona 6 has two vestibule doors, one on the right, one on the left,
and they're both exactly the same. When I was unzipping each of the vestibule doors, they were completely snag-free, one-
handed, and took three seconds as well. To keep these doors open, each vestibule door comes with two toggles
by the side to tie the door fabric up. Each of these doors measured about 53 inches in width, they were
about three times my size, and each door also measured about 58 and a half inches from the ground
to the top of the door. Not exactly super tall, but it was okay. I still had to duck a little bit
to get in and out of the vestibule. When I was zipping up the vestibule doors
though, I found that this rain flap or storm flap from the outside tends
to get in the way of the zipper track. Not always, but only sometimes. The zippers are SBS as well, so decent
quality, and each door has two of them. For pockets, this Wawona 6
has nine of them in total. There are four pockets over the small back
door, three pockets on the window fabric of the back door, plus two more pockets
at the sides here, one at each side. Unlike some of the more budget-friendly
tents like Coleman, I love that all these pockets are protected by either
the backdoor fabric or the rainfly fabric, so that there won't be any leaking
into the tent through the pocket seams. The positioning of the
pockets is pretty smart. On top of that, I really liked that I had some pockets that I could access when
sitting down, like the backdoor pockets and side pockets, and also more pockets up
top that I could access when standing up. For loops, this Wawona 6 has
also quite a few of them. There's one loop right at the very top of the tent, at the center,
plus four more loops around it, like so. Also,
there's another three more loops in the vestibule,
so you can hang tons of stuff from all these loops or some lanterns
for lighting at night. For wind protection, I was able to test this Wawona 6 out
in light to slightly more moderate winds of about 10 to 15 miles per hour,
and it held up like a champ. I had almost the entire tent guyed out,
so that really helped. I love that each length of this Wawona 6
can be held down by five guylines, plus one more guyline at the vestibule,
so a whopping 11 guylines in total. Also, this Wawona is mostly dome-shaped,
which sheds wind pretty well. I have a friend who gave me his old Wawona 6, after using it through crazy
winds of like 50 miles per hour. Yes, the poles ended up bending quite
a bit, but they never broke, and I was even able to set up
and continue using the old Wawona 6. So, very sturdy in the wind. I put my Wawona 6 through about one hour of fairly light rain, not super heavy,
and it looked something like this. After the hour was up, and the rain
stopped, I didn't find a single leak inside this Wawona 6 at all,
and it held up super well. Also, for light rain ventilation,
I found that I could leave this window vent open, and no water got
into the tent through this vent. Unfortunately, I forgot to leave this
smaller vent open, but I'll do so in a bit, in the heavy rain test,
so stay tuned for that. And because the light rain test just wasn't heavy enough,
here's my heavy rain test. It rained super heavily for about three
hours, and I think I put every single part of this Wawona 6 through an insane
amount of heavy rain, like so. In fact, it rained so heavily that after a few hours, my entire yard was flooded,
so flooded that the water was up to my ankles, like this. And when I checked my Wawona 6, I found that the entire bottom of the tent
was completely submerged in the water. And one of the corners of my tent was even
sitting in like two inches of water, like so. After the rain stopped,
I checked in on the tent, and as you can see, there's not a single drop
of water inside the tent. I also checked the seams at the corners, and this was the corner that was like
submerged in two inches of water. Honestly, there isn't any leakage at all. Even when I pressed down on the corner
seam gently, there was no dampness at all. I also checked the rest of the seams,
the flooring, and all the fabric around the tent, and none of them leaked, despite
being exposed to so much rainfall. For ventilation, I found that these two
window vents didn't leak at all, despite the heavy rain plus
relatively moderate winds. But just bear in mind that the rainfly doesn't overlap the window mesh very much,
probably only 4 to 5 inches or so, like this, so this might be
an issue in horizontal rain. On top of that, this Wawona 6 also
has two of these smaller vents. I noticed that they're almost facing downwards, and it's the perfect angle that
water doesn't go into the tent at all. After the heavy rain stopped, I checked the vent from the inside of the
tent, and the mesh was completely dry. And apart from these four vents
in the tent, there's also a small gap between the rainfly
and the ground at the vestibule. The ground is a little bit flooded,
but you still get ventilation. And if you want to know the breaking point of this Wawona 6, well,
I found it after putting this Wawona 6 through a whopping
three afternoons of really heavy rains. And after the third day of heavy rain, I noticed that this wall with the back
door was slightly damp from the inside. It didn't drip into the tent or anything, but my hand was slightly
damp from touching the wall. And it was only this wall that was slightly damp after the three
day heavy rain test, while the rest of the walls were still
completely dry from the inside. I could be wrong about this, but I think it's because this back
wall was exposed to the most rain. For the sides of the tent, there's this guy-out point on each side
that allowed me to guy out this window vent, which I think gave the Wawona
a little more rain coverage. On the other hand, the back wall
doesn't have a guy-out point, the rainfly is much closer to the tent body, so less rain coverage,
and more water over the tent. Hence, the slight dampness. Moving onto hot day ventilation, I like to take the rainfly off on sunny days, and if you do so,
you'll get a nice mesh roof for stargazing. And I really love the mesh
of the front door, there's so much of it
for lots of ventilation. The rest of the walls have a little less mesh though, and here's
what they look like. For the materials used to create this Wawona 6, well,
the flooring is made of 150-denier polyester, with a hydrostatic head rating
of 1,200 millimeters, while the rest of the tent body and the rain
fly is made of 75-denier polyester, so half as thick, but they also
have the same waterproof rating. All five poles of the Wawona 6 are
made of high quality DAC aluminum, the zippers are SBS, and the holes
of the mesh are very fine. I also looked at the quality of the seams,
and I found them to be nicely double stitched, and consistent
all around the tent. I didn't find a single
loose thread at all, all the seams were properly reinforced when they needed to be,
especially at the corners, which is attached to the stake
loops and pole grommets. For portability, I measured the packed size of my Wawona 6 to be about
26 by 16 by 10 inches. Here's what it looks like beside my Coleman 2-Person Sundome Tent, and also
one of my 32-ounce Nalgene bottles. And it also comes with a hand strap
at the top, plus another smaller strap by the side, and a plastic flap
that covers the contents of the bag. I wish they made the strap at the top a little bit bigger, so I can more
easily sling it over my shoulder, and this Wawona 6 weighs about 19
and a half pounds for everything. For pros, I think the best thing about The North Face Wawona 6 is
easily the phenomenal rain protection. I was really lucky to have been able to put this tent through the worst
rain I've seen all year, three afternoons of non-stop,
heavy, pouring, flooding rain, and this Wawona survived much better than any other family camping
tent I've seen so far. On top of that, there's no seam
sealing required for this tent! I checked the entire Wawona 6,
and it was perfect, really. So basically, all the rainfly seams were
taped, and on the inside of the tent, you can kinda make out the rainfly
from the inside, and all the seams not covered by the rainfly
have been seam taped. Yes, every single one.
It's awesome. It's so rare to find a tent
with all the proper seam taping. Wind protection, in addition to rain
protection, is great as well. And we're just getting
started with the pros. I found this Wawona 6 to be made
of very high quality materials. In addition to all the materials I mentioned in Section 26 of this video,
I wanna expand a little bit more on the quality of the poles, because
that was really impressive. All the poles of this Wawona 6 are made
of aluminum, not just regular aluminum, but top of the line DAC MX,
which is stronger and sturdier. In the weeks that I spent testing my Wawona 6,
through crazy rains and some winds, none of my poles even bent at all,
even in the slightest. I also really loved how easily they
snapped together, and stayed together, which makes this tent all
the more user-friendly. The vestibule of this Wawona 6 is also incredible, one of the biggest I've
ever seen in a family camping tent. The two black poles of the Wawona 6 create this awesome vestibule with fairly
consistent height throughout, and the entire vestibule,
even the shortest height all the way at the end, is actually still
slightly taller than my height. So, I found that I could stand completely
upright throughout the entire vestibule. For more info on the vestibule,
check out these sections. I love that the vestibule also comes with
two doors for lots of cross ventilation. That, plus the two inner tent doors, when you open all of them, you get a huge
wind tunnel for lots of ventilation. And this is with the rain
fly still on the tent! And if you take the rainfly off,
you get even more ventilation. And the front door is huge, I love that I could take even entire
double pads in and out of tent. Plus, the wall that the front
door is on is also amazing, and I've gone through all of the incredible pros in these
sections of this video. There's also a decent amount of storage options, with nine pockets and eight loops,
although there aren't any other features like gear lofts,
room dividers, and e-ports. Before we move on to the cons,
if you found this video helpful so far, it would mean so much if you could
help me hit that Like button. And also, if you happen to buy a tent
because of one of my reviews, could I just request that you use my
affiliate links in the description below? It would really help the channel out so I
could continue to buy these tents, and to produce these kinds
of unbiased reviews for you. Thank you, and I really appreciate it. As for cons, I think there are two
bigger ones, and one smaller fixable con. First,
I think the base area is easily one of the smallest I've ever
seen in a 6-person tent. You can technically fit six people, but I recommend fitting a maximum of three
to possibly four adults, for sure. Also, I found it a tad annoying that the two windows are accessible
only from the outside of the tent. If you have the windows open, and then it starts raining,
you gotta run out of the tent and zip the window shut from the outside,
before coming back into the tent. A bit annoying, if you ask me. And I also found the set up of this Wawona 6 to be very tight the first
time around, at this corner here. To fix this, I recommend breaking in this tent in your yard or your
house before going camping. Now that we're done with the pros and
cons, here is my recommendation to you. I think this Wawona 6 is one of the best
family camping tents in the summer. There's a ton of ventilation,
although this also means that there's too much mesh for you to use
it in much colder weather. But for summer, it's absolutely perfect. And if you're expecting tons of rain
and wind, don't worry, because this Wawona 6 has got you
covered in the worst of rainstorms. I think it's one of the best all-rounder
tents for any weather in the summer, good or bad weather,
and I'd highly recommend it. But wait, I say it's one of,
but is it the best tent for you? If you wanna see how this
North Face Wawona compares to other similar camping tents on the market,
I highly recommend that you watch these videos that I'll leave
up on the screen here. Thank you for watching this review
video, and I'll see you in the next one.
