We then rotated the tents looking for structural weaknesses, and we tested their guy lines and tabs to see which tents had the best and most intuitive design for withstanding wind. For this guide, we focused on tents that suit the most common terrains you’re likely to encounter when car-camping—grassy lawns or clearings, beaches, dirt campsites, and basic platforms—in spring, summer, and fall. We’re not looking at tents designed for such specialized activities as mountaineering, backpacking, or winter camping, though some of our recommendations have cross-over potential. An avid hiker, camper, and long-haul road-tripper, Claire Wilcox has slept in (and occasionally improvised) tents in 11 states. She covers outdoor gear for Wirecutter and worked on the most recent update of this guide, testing couples’ tents and family tents. You can also set up the tent without the fly while retaining some privacy, since the tent body has a high polyester wall on one side.
To mimic heavier rain and to test the tent’s ability to withstand soggy ground conditions, we also soaked our tents with a garden hose. A few weeks later, we brought the front-runners to a platform in an area that had higher elevation, near the Waianae Mountain Range, and camped ozark trail canopy tent out overnight in intermittent but consistent rainfall. Like most dome-style tents, the Wireless 6 withstands wind like a champ—it fared noticeably better than the Camp Creek 6 in 15-mph gusts. The continuous curve of the dome shape allows for wind to pass over and around it.
Park visitors may hear a loud report or a screaming whistle coming from Campground 3 and the hatchery during this time. The North Face Wawona 4, which we used to list in our Other Good Tents section, has been redesigned; it’s now made of polyester, not nylon. Weighing just 7 pounds, the tent is light ozark trail shower tent enough to double for backpacking trips, especially if you divide the pieces among hikers. We were surprised at first to see the Mineral King 3 come out on top because it was the smallest tent in our test group. But all our testers, including our tallest panelists, gravitated toward this tent.
Completely adjustable in height, the tent can be lengthened, with the roof and floor piece intact, to give you a shower room over 2.2m in height, simply by adjusting the tags found at the top of the tent. You can create additional height by unzipping and removing the floor piece, making this ensuite particularly useful on taller vehicles. The velcro roof piece is perfect for when using the tent as a change room, giving you total cover from rain.
When pushed, most of the reps we talked to estimated five to 10 years, though the actual lifespan will vary widely depending on care and frequency of use (for more advice, read REI’s excellent tips). In conducting research for this guide, we heard multiple tales of careful campers who had been using the same tent for 15 years or more. That mesh also keeps the tent feeling airy and cool in hot climates.
(As its name indicates, it’s meant to house six people, but we wouldn’t recommend that.) The Wireless 6 has two large doors and a full rain fly. Like our couples’ tent pick, the Wireless 6 is a dome-shaped tent with a tried and true two-pole design. It has an interior footprint of 87 square feet, which sleeps four adults on single pads, or two adults and two or three children, and can accommodate a crib.
At the first sign of rain, it took only a few seconds—and a quick hand stuck outside the tent—to unfurl the fly and secure it for a dry night’s sleep. When we awoke, we could roll back one part of the vestibule, make coffee, and watch the sky lighten even though it was still raining. To test the tents, we first opened them, splayed out their parts, and tried to put them together without consulting the instructions. We assembled and disassembled the tents on all of our testing sites multiple times. We tried the rain fly for each tent as well, one time rushing to get several of them up during an unexpected rainstorm at night. When heavy trade winds buffeted our Oahu-coast testing site, we pitched each tent in full face of the blast.
The size of the shelter was adequate for this function, and the venting made it fairly comfortable, even when the temperature outside was in the mid 90s, and the shelter was in the direct sunlight. Trust your gut, do your research on Campendium by reading past reviews and tips, and then make your decision. National forests are public lands managed by the USDA Forest Service. National forests exist in almost every state in the US, and though not all allow dispersed camping, many (especially in the western US) do.
The Base Camp also offers more privacy compared with our other picks—with or without the rain fly. The Wawona 6 is more complex to set up than a classic dome-style tent like the Wireless 6, but not by much. We recommend doing it with two people, but one person can manage in about 15 minutes. As with any free-standing tent, with this one you stake out the four corners, and then you feed the two main tent poles through the Wawona’s fabric sleeves, which go halfway down the tent’s body.
The Tungsten’s two brow poles create an especially effective awning over the tent door, so very little water gets in when someone comes or goes. Like the Mineral King 3, the Tungsten 4 has a mesh canopy, though the opaque polyester part of ozark trail shower tent its walls go higher, and provide more privacy, than the Mineral King’s. The Tungsten’s fly is not adaptable in the same way the Mineral King 3’s is, but it is treated for extra UV protection, which should help lengthen the tent’s lifespan.