Since I am planning to be camping for 50 or so of the 70-some nights I will be riding, I wanted to spend some time carefully looking at what is out there in the lightweight tent world these days.  I have not had a new tent in close to a quarter-century, and that was only because The North Face company sent me a new one when the floor in the North Face two-person tent I bought at the Gart Brothers castle in Denver [linkie] in 1975 began to delaminate.  So I guess you might say I was seriously out-of-touch with the state of the art in that particular area.

The recommendation from almost all of my AT thru-hiker friends was “Big Agnes.”  Now, I had never heard of Agnes before, say, about two years ago, but it seems like she’s doing a land office business selling tents.  I looked over all the BA tents that  matched the rather short list of my needs.

• Less than five pounds inclusive of footprint
• Packs small and compact
• Durable
• As roomy as possible
• Bulletproof (no, not real bullets- just nothing going wrong for 10 weeks)

I was really close to choosing one, then I read a bike journal entry by a guy who said that he had a MSR Hubba Hubba NX tent with him on his trip that remained standing in a violent windstorm that flattened his partner’s Big Agnes and bent some of its poles.  Talk about timing.  I checked out the MSR tent in the two-person variant.  It appeared to be everything I was looking for, criteria-wise.  So I left Agnes standing at the altar, and pushed the big orange Amazon button

and now I own a Hubba Hubba NX two-person tent [linkie].

For the “gimme the specs” minded folks out there, the tent weighs 3 pounds, 11 ounces and the footprint another 7 ounces, for a total weight of 4 pounds, 2 ounces.  Its internal dimensions (length x width x height) are 84 x  50 x 39.4 inches/213 x 127 x 100 cm giving total floor space of  29 square feet/2.7 square meters.  It packs down to a nice small cylinder about 18 inches/48 cm long.  The floor is 30D ripstop nylon 3000mm Durashield polyurethane & DWR, the canopy 15D nylon micromesh and 20Dx330T high tenacity ripstop nylon and the fly 20D ripstop nylon 1200mm Durashield polyurethane & silicone.  The poles are DAC Featherlite NFL.  The footprint is 68D 100% Polyester taffeta and folds up into a rectangle 8 x 10 x 1 inches/20 x 25 x 2.5 cm.  A review with really nice photos of the tent in the wild is here [linkie].

The MSR Hubba Hubba NX is on Amazon here [linkie] for a little over $300.  I paid $299 so it might come back down.  The footprint is here [linkie] for about $30.

Oh, and don’t cry for Big Agnes.  I bought one of her sleeping bags- more on that later.

David Edgren