Big Agnes  Sarvis VST 2 Tent

This is the quickest tent to set up, it is also the quickest I ever returned one. The upside: The tent is very easy and quick to set up. Its fabric is a nice move away from the typical saggy Big Agnes silnylon. You can get in and out of the tent very easy. Door zippers work well and have a nice one-hand design. You can attach the door to the frame without breaking your fingers. It is definitely big and roomy – a real 2-person tent, wide enough for two sleeping pads, two doors, two vestibules, etc. Ventilation is good in normal weather. The tent is lightweight (UL for two). It comes with enough stakes and all guy lines attached. Whether one likes the color is a personal thing (I think it looks good), and at least it is not white. Quality: The seams are glued, not stitched. A great concept if properly executed. However, right out of the box, the seams are delaminating at a key spot were the cross bar is attached - not just a little, but almost completely separated. A day in windy conditions and there will be a quarter-size hole on the top section of the fly. There is a second delamination starting on a side panel. In addition, there are glue splatters all over the front side fabric of the tent. The quality is appalling for a tent in this price category - basically unusable right out of the box. Design: The overall design idea may be good, but putting a lot of great ideas into one tent does not automatically make a great tent. The material seems good. It sags very little, yet there are also almost no options to make the tent tauter should it sag. This tent is not built for windy conditions. Many outer first tents are less stable in wind, but this one seems outright wobbly. There are not enough places to guy out the tent. Four guy lines attached to mid-height of the poles plus the two stakes at the vestibules and front-/backside is all you get. While the design around the door and cross pole would have lent itself very easily for a trekking pole pouch similar to the Durston or Slingfin tents, it seems more like a half-baked idea that wasn’t executed. It would also have been easy to add an attachment loop for a guy line at the top of the tent as well. Testing with a garden hose, the vents will probably hold up well in normal or even strong rain as long as there is no wind. I do not believe that it will work well in stormy, rainy conditions (think coastal UK). Adding a way to close the vent would have been great, but it would have probably interrupted the airflow too much. The overhang at the door fly above the inner tent is too short. When opening in rain, water will probably come in – but I have not been able to test that. Hybrid and single wall designs don’t lend themselves to storage pockets, but for some strange reason two small pockets are added at an odd place where they touch the outside wall, in the a.m. your phone may be wet from condensation. While the tent has several points to attach an internal clothes line, they never work well in a single wall tent, at least in my opinion. Summary: The overall quality is so poor that I would not recommend this tent to anyone. Save your money and get something different. If you are only camping in good weather, REI has many good and easy to set up tents for a fraction of the price. If you are a serious hiker/camper, there are much better options for your specific requirements. If you like single wall tents, get a single wall. If you like free-standing, get one of those. Trying to be a little bit of everything, this tent ends up being nothing, except expensive.

I shared the Sarvis VST 2 with my husband on a 6-day backpacking trip through the Japanese Alps. Each night we experienced either wind, rain, or both and the Sarvis VST performed great! In the wind, the additional guylines looped around the poles added extra support. We used 2 25" pads, and there was plenty of room at the foot and head of the tent for gear storage, in addition to the vestibule space. There was some condensation, as expected in single walled tents, but the extra venting helped a lot in the humid climate. The simple setup with the single wall design was especially appreciated after long, hard days of hiking.