Mountain Hardwear EV 2 Tent
September 12, 2009
Usually gear names are some crazy mishmash of numbers and letters that only have meaning to the geekiest of the geeky, but pretty much anyone who has been above sea level knows that the EV here stands for Ed Viesturs. Ed (he lets me call him Ed, or at least I’ll just assume I can call him Ed until he writes in and tells me otherwise) has detailed the specs for this tent for Mountain Hardwear, and it’s evident that he’s left nothing out. Wait, he’s left some stuff out, or else this high-altitude mountaineering tent wouldn’t weigh in at an insane five pounds. Okay, so he’s left the vestibule out – it’s built in. He’s left out the minibar and the espresso machine, which, let me tell you, go a long way in convincing me to go climb anything in winter. I had high hopes once I heard about this built-in vestibule thing, but no – the minibar is not similarly included. Ah well, sometimes a Geargal has to take one for the team.
Most of the Geargals have taken this tent out at one time or another. None of them, I have to point out, were doing anything particularly epic so we all feel a little sheepish about toting around the Ed Viesturs name when it’s a balmy 20 degrees out and we’re only at 300 meters. But then we realize that we only have to carry five pounds of tent even in winter, and we feel better. We do find that lots and lots of people want to borrow this tent when they do anything in winter, and the Head Geargal gets a little shifty-eyed when anyone but her takes it somewhere without her when it’s below 50 degrees. She is well known for her lack of tolerance for cold, which is pretty funny for someone who lives in Alaska and runs an outdoor gear blog, so she never likes it when she doesn’t have the warmest tent in the arsenal at her disposal. [Nice. Way to blow my gnarly persona. -HG]
We have mixed feelings about the built in vestibule thing. I suppose if you really are in some sort of desperate situation (and I find 90% of all mountaineering a desperate situation, I admit) you probably would really like having your stuff in the tent with you instead of outside getting assimilated into the snowpack by driving wind and blowing snow. I have to say that personally I don’t mind having all my gear in the tent but you can really tell that Ed is a dude by the way the built in vestibule takes up most of the doorway. It just reminds me of the way I have to step over 8 pairs of dude shoes just to get in the house – a chick would have put the gear space AWAY from the door. Now, I’m sure there is some sort of fancy mountaineering reason why it’s better to have the gear near the door, but I don’t know what it is and as you’re probably gathering from this post, I really don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to mountaineering. One thing that I understand about mountaineering is that people who do it really like each other a lot; if they didn’t there is no possible way they could tolerate being in a tent this small. For a two person tent these are some cozy accommodations. But that’s OK because I suppose if you’re in an extremely cold environment, close quarters help preserve body heat. And speaking of preservation, this tent is so windproof that it has all kinds of warnings printed on the inside about how you HAVE to open the vents or you are risking suffocation. Eeek! It feels all kinds of bizarre to be opening vents on your tent when it’s really cold out. But I follow directions and was afraid of waking up dead, so I opened the vents as ordered. The tent still stayed pretty warm and for a single wall tent didn’t frost up too badly – but even if it did, there is a cool little zipper in the floor for “frost management.” Now I am dying of curiosity – do high altitude mountaineers really bring along little brooms to help with the frost management? I must know. I mean, is that a luxury item or what? Also I have to mention that it’s hard enough to get dudes to sweep the floor in a normal house, do they really put any time into sweeping the floors of their tents? I just can’t see it.
Well, I don’t know about dudes, but my winter camping trip with the EV2 really proved that chicks don’t mind a little tent maintenance – we swept out the frost like there was no tomorrow. Though admittedly if that cool frost management zipper hadn’t been there, we probably wouldn’t have bothered. So kudos to Ed Viesturs for promoting cleanliness and making dudes think about sweeping. If only I could install a dirt management zipper in my kitchen floor. [Readers, I present to you a winter gear review written by my least winter-ish writer. Well done! Now give me back that tent. - HG]
Eureka E!nergy 9 Tent
November 26, 2008
There are few things more attractive to this Geargal than having creature comforts while in camp. Long gone are the days when I could subsist for five days in the backcountry with a tarp, a hunk of cheese, and three pounds of chocolate. Now that I’m old, I like comfy camps with lots of gourmet food; snuggly, soft beds, and these crazy things called “utilities” by which hot water and light come easily. Unfortunately, all these things are also quite heavy (especially the utilities, ever try to transport a power plant?) and as I’ve gotten older I’ve also gotten increasingly reluctant to carry heavy things. It’s one of life’s little ironies. When you’re young, you can’t be bothered to arrange a nice camp and don’t care if you forget your stove, don’t have any water, or hadn’t bothered to bring enough food; so you end up going ultralight just out of sheer thoughtlessness. When you’re old, forgetting your stove is enough to send you scurrying back to the car. Fine, it’s enough to send ME scurrying back to the car. But anyway, when you’re old enough to really want all that stuff that makes camp bearable, you are too old and decrepit to carry it. So you need to start bringing young people so they can carry all your stuff – which is the only reasonable argument I’ve ever heard for having children. I don’t have any children, so I have students instead. They must learn how to carry heavy loads, I reason, and when they see how comfortable I am in camp with all of the heavy things they’ve carried in, they will be inspired to make their own nice, comfortable camps. See, I make them carry my stuff because I CARE.
So, the next time you head to the backcountry with ten teenagers, give them this tent – and its accompanying car-battery-size power pack – to carry. They might moan and complain but it will all be worth it as you zip the door shut on their whining and kick back in your fully-powered backcountry paradise. The E!nergy 9 has three regular, normal outlets and pretty blue LED lights so that you can find the outlets even in the (shudder) dark. You can charge up your iPod to ensure that you’ll always have tunes to block out the sound of your children, students, or hapless camping partners grumbling about how you won’t let them use the blow dryer you brought along.
But seriously, I don’t know whether the power pack can handle powering a blow dryer. But it can handle some lamps, charge a camera battery, and provide power for an assortment of lower-wattage type items. I wish I had more examples of what you could use the outlets for but lamps and camera batteries are the only things I can think of that I’d want to plug into my tent. Oh, wait, I forgot! The 9′ X 9′ floor space means there is plenty of room for your inflatable mattress as well, and you can plug the air pump into the tent to avoid distasteful physical labor. There you have it, the perfect camping tent.
Be warned, it’s really heavy, even without the power pack. It’s bulky, too. So you might have to reserve this one for car camping, or for when you really do have lots of people to help carry things and you’ll be out there for long enough that electric lights and recharged camera batteries seem like manna from heaven. If you have a child or significant other who feels nervous about roughing it, break them in gently by taking them camping in the E!nergy tent. If they think that’s what camping is like, you’ll be able to convince them to try longer trips. Just don’t tell them that you won’t be able to bring along the E!nergy tent because you are not Superwoman, unless of course you are, in which case please bring me camping and carry this tent when we go.
Note: Family pictured not included with tent. I will leave it up to you to decide whether this is good news or bad news.
Mountain Hardwear SkyLedge 2.1 Tent
August 16, 2008
I’m one of those idiots who thinks that taking a brand new piece of gear out in the field before even taking the tags off is a great way to test it. Sometimes that’s not the greatest idea and I’m left struggling with a water filter with no directions, finding out that my backpack has a broken zipper, or discovering that, say, the sleeping bag on which I am relying on for survival should be rated +85 degrees instead of -20. This time, though, I got lucky and was pleasantly relieved to find that the Skyledge 2.1 is fairly intuitive to set up and had all its pieces (whew).
Designed for ultralight backpacking, the Skyledge flirts with the 4 lb. mark, perfect for lazy people who don’t like to carry heavy things. One of the reasons it’s so light, though, is that it’s not roomy at all. If you’re using this for two people, the two people really better like each other a lot. I think Mountain Hardwear anticipated this, because the Skyledge has two side doors, each with its own roomy vestibule. That will go a long way towards promoting the sanity factor on tentbound days. Aside from those luxuries, this is a fairly minimal sleep center, without bells and whistles. Still, I’d personally rather not have to carry bells and whistles, so that all works out well. The tent itself, as you can see from the picture, is mostly mesh, so this is probably not the best cold-weather tent out there, but at least you won’t get a lot of condensation.
One absolutely awesome feature is the windows in the tent fly. I’ve always thought it was dumb to have a great tent made of mesh so you can see out, but then cover it up with an opaque tent fly. What’s the point of that? MHW made up for this by providing nifty see through panels in the fly. So when you’re stuck in the Skyledge, with the two vestibules providing the only buffer zone between you and annoyance sufficient to justify strangling your tentmate, you can always gaze out the window (probably at whatever weather is forcing you to stay in there) and think happy thoughts rather than focusing on the annoying way your tentmate is sipping her hot chocolate (okay, it’s been in that cup an hour and a half, do you REALLY think it’s still so hot that you can’t drink it without slurping????).
I don’t know how to spin this to make it women-specific, so how about this: the lack of color coding on the poles means it’s designed for people who might possibly be inclined to read the directions (hint: not men). But it’s so easy to set up that color coding is really not necessary, so that’s kind of moot. So let’s try: the color is described as “wasabi” rather than “green” which might appeal to a woman’s more nuanced sense of description. How’s that?
