There are a few items that are essential when putting together your backpacking gear. There’s the hiking boots and backpack as a starting point. Then there’s the ever-important backpacking tent. There are a number of factors that are very important when choosing the best backpacking tent.
You’re going to be carrying this tent, along with all your other gear and supplies. So having an ultralight backpacking tent is a great advantage. Apart from having a low pack weight, you also want the tent to be really compact. At the same time, you want enough space to sleep comfortably and pack gear in a dry safe space. Then there’s durability and waterproofing – all these aspects are important and finally, it’s nice to have a backpacking tent that’s quick and easy to erect, take down and pack away.
Not many tents meet all the criteria that I’ve listed and to get a quality ultralight backpacking tent can be quite costly. The MSR Hubba Hubba 2 Person ultralight backpacking tent provides you with everything and is of a very high standard when it comes to the materials that they’ve used. So it’s not the cheapest, but it’s up there with the best of them. When it comes to the quality that you’re getting, I’d say that this backpacking tent offers great value. In the end, most of the other ultralight backpacking tents that provide this level of quality and convenience are going to cost substantially more.
When it comes to weight, the Hubba Hubba is a real winner with a pack weight of 3-pounds and 7-ounces for the complete tent, including poles, stakes and rainfly. If you opt to forego the inner tent or the rainfly, this weight can be reduced to a little over 2-pounds! This low weight has not compromised on the quality of the materials. By using 20-denier rip-stop nylon and 15-denier nylon mesh, they’ve managed to ensure that the tent is rugged enough to withstand backpacking conditions.
The poles are also excellent. They’re strong and clip into position in no time at all. The design of the pole structure provides an extremely ridged shell in any weather. It’s one of the easiest backpacking tents to erect and it even has color coding on the mesh corners. You can place the rainfly into position by simply matching the colors at the corners. Once erected, the tent provides ample space for you and your gear. The walls come down at a good angle and have a reasonable vertical height, so you have a good deal of usable floor space. At either end, there’s a vestibule that’s large enough for backpacks, hiking boots and then some.
The edges of the rainfly have rain gutters stitched into the material, so you don’t have water dripping onto you when you enter and exit the tent. It’s a really comfortable and convenient backpacking tent. It’s a 3-season tent, but that would be expected from an ultralight backpacking tent.
I’m suitably impressed with the high quality of this tent. In fact, I’m surprised it doesn’t cost more. Having done some extensive research into the experiences of existing customers, it seems that the Hubba Hubba 2 person backpacking tent gets and overwhelming thumbs up. Bottom line, this tent is exceptionally good value for money.
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