However, it isn’t meant as a place to sleep; for that you should choose a regular car-camping tent. We love this feature because it won’t nip at your fingers and you can do one leg at a time. With the constant movement of the sun throughout the day, it’s nice to know that you can easily ozark trail canopy adapt the height to maintain shade underneath. You’re also getting 3 height options, so you’re not limited in the elevation that you need. It’s constructed with heavy-duty 210-denier poly oxford walls and the heftiest bug-blocking no-see-um mesh we’ve encountered in any tent.
If we were camping somewhere infested with mosquitoes or no-see-ums and could fit the Clam in our vehicle, we’d prefer it over any of our other picks. In early March, we took our second trip to the oceanside Sycamore Canyon Campground (PDF) near Oxnard, California. A later check of the weather at nearby Point Mugu Naval Air Station confirmed top recorded wind gusts of 40 miles per hour. We later used the shelters on group trips at Wheeler Gorge Campground near Ojai, California, and at the La Jolla group campsite at Point Mugu, as well as on a trip to the El Mirage Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert. A canopy tent is a purchase most regular car campers consider after stocking up on the basics. After all, you can find plenty of smaller and less-expensive items to help you fight bugs, guard against the sun, and shrug off rain.
A couple of elements make it standout from a regular shelter, like the upper vents in the roof and the upgraded all-steel structure. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) ozark trail canopy over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).
The frame is that of a pyramid structure, which are generally found in all value brand canopy tents as they require less material to manufacture vs. that of a full truss system and as a result can keep the price lower. Fellow campers and sun-baked spectators consistently gravitated toward the REI shelter over the L.L.Bean. Though the two tents have the same footprint, the REI’s roof is 6 inches taller; we found that ozark trail chair the higher ceiling made the REI shelter feel significantly roomier inside. In our tests one camper took less than 10 minutes to put it up on the first try. Two shorter aluminum poles cross to support the roof while four longer poles join to the roof poles at the top of the tent and slide into pegs at the ground. The tent roof is made of polyester taffeta treated with a DWR (durable water repellent) coating.
The shelter has a 10-by-10-foot footprint—the most common size for tents of this type—and a peak height of 7 feet. It will shelter a standard-size picnic table, but with little room to spare. In between trips, we turned a neighbor’s large, flat yard into an ad hoc camping-gazebo testing ground. We erected our shelters just in advance of a 24-hour rain and checked for leaking and rainy-day ambience midstorm. We also timed setup and breakdown times for each shelter, and we repeatedly zipped and unzipped doors and windows, looking for annoying snags. Our favorite of the eight canopy tents we tested, the REI Co-op Screen House Shelter ticks all those boxes.