Sierra Designs Tensegrity 2 Elite

Thank you. I will definitely get some pics up, probably on Sunday. I also wonder about condensation. In this pitch, the garage/vestibule sides come up by the doors, but not tight again the side of the tent, so there is some airflow. Only field testing will truly tell.

I agree with others that a zippered panel just as the doors have would have been great. Then you can easily batten down the hatches, to any degree you need, without ever leaving the tent. It would have definitely added a little weight and complexity to the build. I would have gladly carried that extra ounce for the versatility. The modified pitch however does have the benefit of better protecting your gear in the vestibule from the elements.

Finally, I must say otherwise I really do love this tent. It is huge for its weight. I am a big fan of the old school zippered windows, and the ventilation in the standard pitch seems incredible. I love the star gazing option. Again, if it had a zippered panel on that "window", you would not need to run out and repull the garage if a little drizzle came at 3am, after an evening of stargazing. However the same stakes are used in either set-up, so it is extremely quick and easy to put the garage back out. But who wants to get out of their bag when they don't need to. Again, the condensation would be a consideration.

Thanks again for the welcome, and all the great info I have already found on the site.

Here are a few pics of the modified pitch. The angle/opening can be easily adjusted to allow more or less airflow. I hope the pics upload ok.

… and here are a few pics of the garage pitched in the normal fashion for comparison.

Cool! I was going to ask how stable it was, but then I noticed you used the stargazing mode guy lines, so it should be as good as the normal pitch or better.

I own the Tensegrity 2 Elite and recently put it through some real world testing (albeit car camping) in Northern California. Since it was slatted to rain, I thought it would be good to try this tent out before taking into the backcountry. I got a bit more weather than I bargained for – here is what I learned.

Setup: This was my first experience with a non-freestanding single wall tent. I own a MSR Hubba 1 and an older REI half-dome. Compared with those tents, the setup was more challenging. It was blowing rain and near dark during the setup so that didn't help. Good stake points are key with this tent (probably true with all non-freestanding tents) so I fiddled with the stakes more than I needed to. Because I knew the weather was going to get bad, I staked out the stargazing lines in addition to the garage. This turned out to be a smart move.

Wind: Overnight the winds were strong (~30 mph gusts measured at a nearby weather station). Unfortunately, I had assumed that the storm system would blow from the northwest but it actually was blowing from southwest so I did not have the ideal orientation of the tent into the wind. There was a lot of flapping around from the garage, which I thought was pretty tight. If I had the tent better posited into the wind, it may not have been a problem. As the ground softened up with the rain, the periodic wind gusts eventually popped out one of the garage stakes. When this happened the tent stayed up but roof sagged dramatically (nothing like tent face to wake you up). Not long after heading out into the rain to restake the garage, the stake popped out again. With greater attention to detail during the setup, I probably could have prevented this issue. However, with saturated soil and blowing wind/rain, my fix came from attaching a large rock to the line at the center of the garage. This stopped the flapping and allowed the corner stakes to hold. I also used a rock to pull out the awning at the foot end of the tent. The ground was quite wet at that end on I couldn't get the stake to hold on its own.

Rain: We received more than an inch of rain overnight, much of it blowing at the side of the tent. Despite my poor set-up and several trips out into the rain to fix stakes, the interior of the tent remained remarkably dry. By the morning there was clearly some moisture seeping in from the seam where the garage attaches to the main body of the tent but that was probably the result of poor seam-sealing on my part. The floor seams stayed dry despite the very moist soil underneath. The most annoying problem was the occasional splash through the mesh at the head of the tent. It wasn't so bad to lead to a wet interior – but just enough to prevent a good night sleep. The problem was partially solved when I fixed the flapping issue, but the occasional strong gust would still give me a little spritzing. I think with better orientation into the wind – and in extreme cases the modified pitch that JJ described above – this issue can be effectively prevented.

Build quality and thoughts on durability: The silnylon is indeed very light/strong and the construction seems solid but I do have a few concerns. First, the mesh used in the doors is very prone to runs. I noticed this immediately upon taking the tent out of its packaging and I can't say that I've seen this issue with my other tents. Maybe it is a common tendency of this light weight mesh? I don't know, but I worry about the long-term durability. Second, the corner stitching at the foot end of the tent creates (what I would consider) some rather large holes when the tent is staked out. I took extra care to seal this area and it held up in one night of rain, However, I worry that this could be a source of water entry and perhaps a durability issue in the long run.

Overall, I'm happy with my purchase so far. I'll be taking it out on the Lost Coast trail very soon and there is always potential for wind and rain up there. Hopefully, I've sorted out the issues and will have some good night sleep. I'll let you know how it goes and post up some photos when I get back.

Thanks for the real world test! I wasn't crazy about the stakes supplied with the tent, and now based on your experience will definitely be swapping them out with my msr groundhogs. I will keep 2 of the original stakes though, as the fit perfectly in the hole on my tarp clips that i used for the modified pitch. I will be sealing this weekend (weather permitting) so thanks for the heads up.

Good info, man…good post.

Feel free to use rocks, sticks, whatever to stake out your shelter. Tie off to exposed roots too, they are STRONG! After doing it a few times on different types of ground, you'll start to know where the stakes need to go and be able to tell if the anchor will be strong enough. I like to put rocks on the sunken stakes to weigh them down.

does the mesh "under" the garage unzip? i guess that would give it three doors and weigh another 4oz or something… that would be cool. Awning up, front door. not worth the zipper prolly I love an awning

Nice tent, Glavin.

I still think the garage could use a mid panel tie out

In the Tensegrity 2, the center mesh panel at the head of the tent does open like a 3rd door (I'm not sure if that is true with the 1 or not). In the strong wind/rain my instinct was to enter/exit the tent this way. I didn't have any gear in the garage so that wasn't too much trouble but with a couple packs in there it would have been a different story. However, once I got over my fear of going through the side doors, I found that the awning did a pretty good job of preventing rain from blowing in (as long as the rain wasn't blowing straight into the door).

When I set the tent up, I was anticipating some issues with wet ground and actually did put rocks on top the main stakes. With the strong winds, this approach was subpar and the stakes were still able to work themselves out. Under these conditions, having a third stake or tie-out in the middle of the garage was a very good idea. Staking out the the stargazing lines at about a 45degree angle to the garage was also a huge help – that saved me from full on tent-face when the stakes started popping under high wind.

I didn't mention it in my first post, but the second night was much more calm and comfortable. I left the garage closed on account of a slight chance of rain. Without the wind to create some airflow – I did get a bit of condensation on the interior roof. It was fairly minor and had I used the stargazing pitch, I think it would have been totally dry.

While the Tensegrity is an "interesting" design I would not opt for it for any hike that could involve high winds.

I sold my TT Contrail because it flapped too much in higher winds and the Tensegrity looks like it would flap even more.

I do like it for the "dining fly" it offers but that's the main attraction for me.

Hee, hee, @ Jimmer Didn't see your "Top Ten" post 'til just now.
"6.Henry Shires accountant LOVES IT." Yeah, it's no match for TT's 2 P tents, any of them.

And that's why I'd take my Scarp 2 over it any day.

I had a chance to test out my Tensegrity this weekend. I went backpacking in Rocky Mountain National Park, and the weather forecast at 10,000 feet was a low of 27, rain and snow with up to an inch of snow accumulation and 5mph wind becoming calm. It's never calm at 10,000 feet, so I was surprised to read that in the forecast. But it sounded like reasonable conditions for the tent, with no heavy snow or heavy wind.

The forecast turned out to be reasonable accurate. All night there was a mix of rain, icy pellets, and heavy wet snow. By morning there was about two inches of new sticky snow on the ground. The forecast also said 100% humidity, and although I don't understand how humidity works below freezing, that seemed about right.

The old snowpack was at least 5 feet deep at the campsite (I know because I dug a hole to warm up, and I never reached the bottom), so I packed down a flat spot with my snowshoes and leveled it with my shovel. The nice thing about winter camping is that you can make any site perfectly level if you want to take the time.

I put the stakes in deadman style. I cut a slot in the snow with my shovel, looped the tent cord around the center of the stake, buried that about as deep as I could, maybe 4-6 inches, and packed the snow on top. The anchors were strong, and I couldn't pull them out by hand. But snow under pressure tends to deform slowly, so I had to retighten the line locks a couple times. It was difficult to get the tent pitched taught because there wasn't enough cord to bury it and to take up the slack. If I use it on snow again I'll tie on some extra length of cord. Longer sticks or proper snow anchors would have helped prevent them from shifting under load.

Since the pitch wasn't that taught, snow tended to accumulate on the roof. Several times during the night I woke up and pushed the snow off from the inside, and twice I had to reach down to the foot of the tent and push off the large piles that accumulated near the bottom that were resting on my feet through the sagging roof.

There was tons of condensation on the roof, huge droplets of water that would fall off at the slightest touch. By morning snow had completely blocked the foot vent, but the garage vent is always open, and I left the side windows open about 6-8 inches. But even before the foot vent was blocked condensation accumulated quickly, and that may be because of the calm winds and 100% humidity. In the morning I took a pack towel and wiped off the roof, but my sleeping bag still got quite wet. It wasn't wet enough to soak through my sleeping bag, but if i was on a multi day trip the next night would have been less comfortable. Almost all my gear got wet either from sweat or rain or melting snow.

Despite these problems I'm happy with the tent so far. Any single wall tent will have condensation in those conditions, and the only reason I bought a single wall tent is that Colorado is really dry most of the time. If I lived somewhere rainy and humid I would have looked for a double wall tent. The difficulty pitching it on snow was mainly due to my inexperience with pitching this tent, and my inexperience with making anchors in snow. It was my third time setting up this tent, and first time pitching a tent in the snow. It definitely takes some practice to set this tent up well. It's not a four season tent, so it's not designed to handle snow loading, but I would expect any tent to be able to handle some snow. With a tighter pitch and/or better snow anchors it would have been fine.

Here are some photos:

Picked up a Tensegrity Elite 2 on Gear Swap; I believe it's one which Matt used to own. Our experience with it over a few days of High Sierra summer hail, rain, sleet, and snow, (but no real wind), at about 11000 feet, is pretty much in line with other people's. The take-away is that we developed a real affection for this tent; the intangibles just seemed right.

Like other silnylon tents, the Tensegrity stretches when it gets wet. If you're using the gear storage fly (the awning) to tension the tent, as we were, and as one would in bad weather, the effect is compounded. The stretch showed up in the saddle area of the roof more or less above ones knees, where the roof flattened out to allow hail to accumulate. Kicking upward easily dislodged the hail, and we were never in danger of tent-face — but we didn't have that much hail to contend with. (Hail & snow are probably mostly outside this tent's design brief, as it is a 3 season tent).

Pitching the tent additionally with the cords parallel to the awning, supplied for good weather, & which allow the awning to be rolled up, would have reduced the sag in the body of the tent, at the expense of transferring sag to the awning — where it might not matter.

The sense of interior space was wonderful, as was the ease of managing ones gear through the the top door. One night I was awakened by a gnawing sound, and pulled our packs into the tent without bothering to find a flashlight. Mine, which I had thought was empty, felt strangely heavy at first, then lightened — it turns out something, a marmot or a ground squirrel, was trying to get into an interior wallet pouch to get at my girlfriend's leather wallet. He must not have wanted to let go at first. The pack fabric, hybrid cuben, had a very small amount taken off its outer layer, with no damage to the inner Cuben layer.

Set-up was easy; we never got a "perfect" pitch, but readily got a "good enough" pitch. Views from the tent through the fabric/mesh side doors were wonderful, and went a long way to making the time we spent hiding from the weather more pleasant. As there was no wind, the overhangs meant we never had to zip up the door fabric to keep out whatever was coming down. At night, when temps dropped, we were able to make the tent much warmer by zipping the fabric up quite a way, but at the expense of increased condensation (which froze on the ceiling, and which we were able to clean off before it started melting and dripping.) So don't think the airflow just from foot through head mesh is enough — the awning may create enough back pressure to stall the air out. But again, we had almost no wind.

Unless I someday spring for a 2 person Cuben tent, this will be our go-to 2 person; the reduced weight of the Cuben would be nice, but I suspect that I'd miss the sheer livability of the Tensegrity.

I was thinking of something similar to JJ's modification but slightly different.

Instead of adding the extra tie-outs on the "side" edge of the garage flap, what if you put extra tie-outs about 1-2 feet from the corner on the "bottom" edge. Then you could stake those out, even with the center tie-out, the triangular-shaped corners created by the remaining flap material could be clipped to the bottom of the trekking poles or to the stake on the corner of the tent body (hope this is making sense). The result would be a garage with a rectangular floor (where JJ's is triangular) and closed sides. The "sides" of the garage would follow the same inverted trapezoid profile as the tent body.

Thoughts?

Also, now that it's been a while – I'd be interested in any real experiences – or did everyone give up and sell their Tensegrity?

I took mine out on the Four Pass Loop in Colorado a couple of months ago for 3 nights. I did not really take notes for a full gear review, but I can share a couple of thoughts at least.

First off, I really enjoyed the tent a lot. I’m a serial gear churner but I’m keeping this one. Super “livable” on the interior as advertised, the drop doors were fantastic (my first tent with drop doors and I never want to go back), and like Jim mentioned above I also really liked the ease of managing the gear through the head door. After a couple of practices in the front yard pitching was a breeze. I experienced very little condensation, but I was able to keep the doors all the way down for two of the three nights (which I thought was cool. Just seemed more “out in the wild”). On the third night, I did get a fair amount of condensation in a rainstorm (not nearly enough to drip and pool), but it was nothing that wasn’t manageable with a small pack towel. So I guess jury is still out on the condensation issue. I probably could have cracked the doors more that last night to help but was too out of it when the storm blew in and just instinctively zipped them all the way up.

As for the few things I jotted down to remember for next time:

I think it’s important to make sure you orient the tent properly (this is probably no different than any other tent but with slightly different consequences). On the first night we camped on a pretty exposed flat spot above tree line and the wind was gusting hard (I would guess 30 to 35 mph but who knows. It was really blowing). I thought I had the tent pitched correctly (for me that meant head end into the wind) but I was slightly off and you could definitely see the impact on your livable space. To be clear I was never worried about a collapse, I pitched the tent with both the vestibule and the spare stargazing line (it was REALLY blowing), but at that 45 degree angle with that much wind I was definitely paying the price for having no vestibule to push in instead of my living space. It was a pretty quick fix to re-orient the tent before I went to bed, but mildly irritating. This was the only night this was a problem.

Tent needs a slightly larger pitch area, at least at the head end, than my other tents. This was never a problem, but just something to note for future site selection.

Someone mentioned that the mesh seems a little fragile and I agree. I’ve already got a couple of runs in mine and I had to repair a small hole where the zipper caught (to be fair, I probably was not being as careful as I should have been). I do not have enough experience to know whether or not this is par for the course for this kind of mesh, but I certainly need to exercise a little more caution.

The door opens on the opposite side of my sleeping bag which is INCREDIBLY annoying. New quilt fixes this issue.

That’s really all I have. Some of the other things that I can imagine people asking based on this and other threads:
1. I never got wet from the open head end although it only rained that one night
2. I also didn’t get a chance to test how my gear would fare under the tarp in the weather. We were having porcupine issues and so I slept with my gear in the tent every night (probably worth noting as a big positive that I slept in the one person with everything and was comfortable. I’m only 5’7” though)
3. Really it’s easy to pitch with just a little practice

If anybody has any particular questions happy to try and address.

Another just went through gear swap. The more I look at and think about this design, the more impressed I am. Parked tail into the wind, they're very robust, provided they're well staked. I'd be using a couple of 8" stakes on each of the garage corners, crossed so that nothing pulls out if the wind switches direction. The way the poles cantilever to lift the ridge higher, rather than collapsing under heavy wind is neat design.

The open vestibule is a horrid concept in my opinion.

Don't say vestibule.

Gear Shedibule?

Plenty of overhang to protect gear from rain. How much stuff do you have to put under there?

Where I trek, wind exists. Often with rain. So the blowing rain gets everything soaked. If you close it up, then you have little rearward ventilation. If they would have dumped the foot pole to save 6 oz and then added the option of small side panels to clip into place should you encounter blowing rain, that would be a better design. Really though – why choose this over the Tarptent Notch? Or Mid with an inner? Or…. (PS. the Elite version comes with an added feature. Stupid pricing). ; )

In those conditions, everything that needed to stay dry would be inside or tied up in a trash bag. That's how I keep stuff dry anyway. I guess if you don't dig tarps, it's not the tent for you.

I took my T2E out this past weekend for a Scout outing. It was in Eastern AL near GA line and endured the persistent 'relatively calm' rain from Fri eve to Sun am from remnants of Hurricane Joaquin. It wasn't vicious thunderstorm type rain/wind but that monsoon type constant drizzle/steady rain/stops for a bit, repeat. Started raining about 6pm EST on Fri and continued until about 0530EST Sun am. It was a rather damp weekend. I checked weather station data when I got home and best I can tell was only 2" of rain during that period (sure seemed like more being out in it…). Some wind, but nothing like a severe T-Storm or micro burst. I did NOT seam seal the tent before I took it out, I wanted to test it in rain conditions as is. I know dumb on my part, but I'm curious that way. As of Sunday am when I woke up, noticed 12 very small drops (6 under each side door, maybe a teaspoon total of liquid) on the floor of the tent along each door. I attribute that to the wind pushing tent and moisture pushed through lower seams. My pack (and gear within) was dry underneath the rear tent tarp i had staked to the ground. All in all I was extremely impressed as of one of about 70 tents in the camp area, I know several had leaks, soaked, etc. So I'm not complaining. I am going to seam seal it this week however now that I know what it is capable of and to preclude any issues with some very heavy storms.