This Saturday we set up the Alps Mountaineering Tasmanian Two Man Tent in the Kyle Canyon of Spring Mountains National Recreation Area with a quick hike to the saddle back at the end of Trail Canyon. So myself and Oklahoma Slims set out to test out his new tent just outside of Las Vegas. Oklahoma also wanted to see if he was in shape by packing 37 pounds of gear in his Gregory Baltoro pack and heading up with everything on his back. I brought along the G12 and the GoPro Hero 4 just to document a little bit of the comedy – and review, so the still pictures are done with the Canon and the video that you’ll see with a link to YouTube channel was taken with GoPro it’s kind of a long video but just be entertained with the banter that goes back and forth between us bitching at each other. Which goes on with every hike, so definitely enjoy it. From how I saw the tent being put together and the overall engineering of it, I was impressed with the Tasmanian. I have a two-man tent from Alps that I like you use, but it is a little bit bigger than my North Face tent, so in most cases it is the backup or I let someone else use it.
It was pretty good weather that day going up 1/4 of the way to Charleston Peak but the day and night before there was a decent snow fall that came through the mountain range dropping about 2 to 3 inches long that trail and probably a little bit more higher elevations. But that was one of concerns two weeks prior – the snow melt and wet ground – so we went to Death Valley instead for that flower bloom and it was a good choice because once we got up there most of the ground was completely soaked which is fine but just to set up a tent and tested it really wasn’t necessarily what we were looking for. The tent has hooks rather than the sleeves that you slide the pole through so I’m always a big fan of the hooks as is probably that everybody trying to put up a tent quickly. The one concern that I had was the multi joint part of the poles where the tent poles are connected by a 3 way junction. The initial tent build looked like there was not any problems with that hardware in the tent and it went up relatively quick especially for Oklahoma’s first time, so we’ll see what happens in two weeks in Zion and how it holds up to sleeping in it and weather.
Next week we’ll be reviewing Garmont’s Tower Trek GTX boots that I recently purchased and there aren’t any reviews out there. So I’ll probably do a pretty substantial test of the boot as well as the following week we’ll do a little bit more in-depth in the trenches in Zion’s Wildcat Canyon. Thanks for reading and enjoy.