For one, I was literally shocked at how easy it was to put up, with a two-crossed-poles layout that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has set up typical two-person backpacking tents. Now, before I get too far into the fly, I’ll acknowledge that the rest of the tent is awesome. This was a selling point for me, and since my vision sucks and my screen is tiny I just took their word for it, trusting REI's awesome reputation. To be clear, both North Face and REI explicitly advertise the Wawona 6 as a "double-wall" tent. Or, for some reason this top-of-the-line basecamp tent from one of the most prominent luxury gear brands in the world has about the same fly profile as your typical Coleman/Walmart tent. The solid lower two-thirds of the inner tent wall is left exposed even with the fly on. What this actually means is that the fly only comes partway down the walls of the tent, just enough to lap the top third of the tent wall, which is mesh. Now, both of these tents are very well reviewed, especially the Wawona: Commenters and gear reviewers alike rave about the ease of setup and extreme headroom, and these truly are great things about the Wawona line (as far as I can tell, the 4 & 6 are functionally identical except for their footprint, which is common with many bigger tents).īut every Wawona review I read failed to elaborate on one critical feature: The ‘hybrid’ fly design - which NF bizarrely markets as a plus. So I figured I would share what I learned, because I’m guessing many of you with families are looking at the same handful of top-of-the-line basecamp (aka car camping) tents, and I’d love to save you some trouble. Specifically, last week I returned my freshly bought North Face Wawona 6 (I’ll get into why in a minute) after just one trip, because of what I consider to be a fatal design flaw, obscured by very misleading advertising from REI and The North Face.Īfter re-doing my research, I replaced it with an REI Kingdom* instead. This week I ended up in an annoying situation that nonetheless might prove useful to fellow likers-of-camping: I had to return a brand new, top-of-the-line tent that had nothing wrong with it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |