Watch this BEFORE you buy a tent for backpacking

okay so we're talking about the different types of tents today we're talking about backpacking tents specifically there's a lot of different tents out there from freestanding to semi-freestanding to trekking pole to tp uh to four season tents to three season tents we're going to touch on all of those we're not going to get super in-depth but we're going to get enough in depth to hopefully clear up some confusion about maybe what the differences are and hopefully help you guys decide what tent you should be using for your next backpacking trip all right so i have five different tents to show you all representing uh all of these tents this is the big agnes copper spur uh this is the platinum version this is a free standing tent now what makes this a freestanding tent is that the pole structure creates the tent so this does not have to be staked in order to set up so if for instance if i get to a campsite and i want to set up my tent but i'm not really sure where to set it up i can set up the tent like this and then i can literally pick it up and i can walk it and i can move it and set it somewhere else if i don't like where it's at now the downside dude tent like this is that it's likely gonna be a little bit heavier than some of the other tents that i'm gonna show you because it's going to need more pull structure to actually stand up and you'll notice too that this is kind of flapping right here this is a vestibule and it will require a steak to stake out the vestibule and a vestibule is where you're going to put like your backpack or your shoes and all your gear when you are inside of your tent at night okay so one of the benefits of having a freestanding tent like this is that it's actually what's called a double wall tent if you've ever heard anybody talk about a double wall tent versus a single wall tent that just really means that the tent has an inner wall and in this case it's just uh a no siem mesh tent portion and it's got an outer wall which is the rain fly so it's got two walls what that's going to do is it's going to prevent condensation from getting on you in the middle of the night especially when it's cold out so you're essentially going to have all your gear pushing up against this no cm mesh rather than where the condensation would end up on which is the rain fly here but it's going to make the tent heavier like i said so what we're going to do is we're also going to take a look at some other single wall options for you guys but they're not freestanding options now this is a semi-free standing tent and it just means it's just that it's semi-freestanding so this actually requires a couple of stakes to set it up properly so when this tent doesn't have the stakes i can pick it up and i can still move it around just like the freestanding tent but for it to actually be used properly it's got to have two stakes at at least one end you'll see here that this particular tent has a stake here and a stake at that end and that's to open up the end of the tent because there's only one pole that goes down the whole length of the front of this tent and the reason it's a semi-freeze-damning ten is because they don't have to use as much of a pole structure which actually makes the tent lighter weight now this tent also has vestibules on it that if you want to use them they also have to be staked out and that's just real easy to do just pull the vestibule out put the stake in the ground now you've got a vestibule you can open it up and you've also got a double wall tent so you've got the outer wall and the inner wall uh very similar to the freestanding tent it's almost identical to the freestanding tent other than you got to stake out a couple of ends okay so we've talked about uh freestanding tent we've talked about a semi-free standing tent those are three season tents uh these ones in particular now we're going to talk a little bit about another freestanding tent but it's also a four season tent all of these tents and more can be purchased at backcountry.com when you go to their website you click on hike camp find the tents go all the way down to filters then you can even select three season or four season tents so you know exactly what you're getting and then you go to more and you can sort them by lowest price so you can actually find yourself a budget three season or four season tent what is up with this wind now if you're still stuck you can ask one of the gear heads for help they're former olympians former athletes former trail guides so you can at least have a website and a real person help you pick the actual tent you want to use also backcountry was nice enough to give me a coupon code to help you guys it's dan 15 where you can get 15 off of some of their stuff some exclusions do apply try it out see if it saves you a couple bucks and if you don't know what the difference is between a three season and a four season intent it's really just don't think of it as seasons think about it as conditions so a four season tent is just gonna have more rigidity structure it'll handle more weight it'll be able to handle uh the elements higher winds whereas a three season tent is just going to be like for your general backpacking most backpacking that people are doing out there is what a three season tent is going to do so it's going to handle the vast majority of people's situations but if you're in a situation where like you're camping on higher cliffs or mountains or maybe the bald of a a location and you're going to experience a lot of high winds frequently you're going to want to have a four season tent even in the middle of summer this is the nemo kunai two person tent and this is also a freestanding tent so i can pick it up and i can move it around wherever i want to but it's a four season tent so if you as you'll notice it's got a lot more pole structure to it it's gonna be able to handle a lot more weight the materials are thicker it's a much thicker denier nylon and this one still technically requires two stakes for the front end and because it's a four season tent even though it is freestanding and that you can move it around you're really going to want to stake this one down anyway especially if you're going to experience like um extreme weather which is why you buy a four season tent you don't want this thing blowing around and even if you're using the three season tents i would recommend you stake those down because right before we even started filming today the wind came and blew them halfway across my yard this particular tent has the door it's a single door on the front so um it's gonna stake out like this and then you can open up the front end now this tent is a little bit different even though it's a double wall is that this inner wall is an actual solid wall well i mean it does have ventilation here where you can unzip it and on the top there's ventilation on the inside but it's a true double wall tent so what that's going to do is it's really going to help maybe keep in a little bit more heat not much more heat but it will keep in more heat than your standard no seeing mesh now we're going to talk about another type of a tent which is a trekking pole tent this is a trekking pole tent most trekking pole tents are going to be a single wall tent so it's literally just one piece of material holding this up now there are double wall trekking pole tents but um they're kind of rare most people are sticking with these and that's what this particular one is now this one isn't set up with trekking poles i actually have carbon fiber uh poles here that i bought online that are setting up this particular tent to make my situation even lighter weight and that way i don't have to take trekking poles with me if i don't want to take trekking poles with me the benefit of a tent like this is that it's automatically just going to be super lightweight out of the box because it doesn't come with poles and that's going to be a big portion of the weight on your tent another benefit of this particular tent is that it's super easy to set up in the rain so when i'm setting up this tent i don't have to have a mesh tent that i'm quickly setting up first and then quickly get my rain fly over that while the inner tent is getting wet i can just set this thing up but not have to worry about anything on the inside getting wet whatsoever the downside to a trekking pole tent is is that it absolutely a hundred percent has to be completely staked out so you can't like pick it up and remove it and you know if you don't like where your spot was at and then the other downside is is that it typically requires more uh floor space because you're pulling out stakes here farther than you would if you had a semi freestanding or a freestanding tent now this particular tent is actually really really easy to set up it's probably easier well it's not necessarily easier but it's quicker for me anyway to set up than some of the freestanding options that i've got but um it's just the matter of not having uh amount of space sometimes when i'm in the backcountry okay the last tent that we're gonna talk about today is this one here and this is i think probably the last tent of all the ones we talked about that you would probably take backpacking but it serves a specific purpose and that's the tp tent this is actually a three and a four season tent in that it's super lightweight this thing weighs just over a pound and the shape of the tent makes it a four season tent because in the winter time the snow is just gonna hit and it's just gonna slide right off and it's able to withstand weight around the sides of it which is actually a good thing when snow comes up around the sides of it because you're not gonna get those giraffes underneath you most tp style tents aren't going to come with any type of an inside to them at all you can get interiors to some of them but a lot of guys like to just sort of cowboy camp essentially or you know almost use it like a tarp as they're camping in here or maybe lay down some sort of a ground cloth but you can get bug nets that go inside of these ones now the biggest downside to a tent like this is it's massive i mean this one i think it's like nine feet by almost eight feet which means that you're going to have to find a huge area to set this tent up in and you're definitely not going to take this tent if you're like hiking through let's say the forest or something and you're going to try to be stealth camping somewhere because you're never going to find a spot big enough for this in most situations so this is for the guy who's gonna be in open scenarios or uh they're absolutely certain that they're gonna have a large enough spot for a tent like this but it does have a ton of room especially for two people one person it's like a kingdom uh but it's an awesome tent right so those are the different types of tents that you could potentially take backpacking um put down in the comments what tent you guys use for your backpacking trips or what tent you would prefer or if there's anything that you saw here that maybe you would do totally different if you guys like this video make sure you hit the like button subscribe for more i'll put my instagram right here and i will see you on the next one

Channel: Dan Becker

Views: 249,194

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Id: FQuQIBldhWM

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 26 2020