First family trip

[simon hackett]

It was the kind people of the BPL forums who helped me to choose the Hogback as our family tent. I got it a while back, but for various reasons have only managed to get it out now. The trip wasn't the wildest adventure (The Blorenge is 1841 feet high!), but I intend it to be the first of many. So thanks Henry Shires and the BPL community!

The full report is on my blog:
http://minimalgear.blogspot.com/2010/06/solomons-first-trip.html

[Rod Lawlor]

Simon, I'll check out the blog tonight, but I know there are people here screaming out for a review of the Hogback. Care to help out?

[simon hackett]

I'm in the process of getting together a full review, but in short, it does everything that it claims to do. The weight is as stated on the site (around an amazing 1800g although I forget specifics) Internal space is huge and all useable. We're all pretty small but I reckon you could get four fully grown men in there although it might be tight and there'd be little room for gear. I need to get some fully grown men to lie in it I think! For two adults and two children it would be great- for three adults there would masses of room. The materials are certainly ultralight as you'd expect for the weight and we found the storm flap kept getting caught in the fly zip-but that's just a case of taking a little bit of care and it's in the nature of the fabrics used.Solomon ran around a fair bit in there and I wasn't worried about damage. I can pitch it in five minutes, taking my time and it's a solid pitch. How it would fare in strong winds I don't know, but there are optional guying points on the fly. The main criticism I would have is that the vestibules are tiny- I could just about fit my shoes in there side by side, but there's so much room inside for us, we just stored everything inside. For cooking inside, just peg back the inner a little to create more space.

[Amy Lauterbach]

Thanks for posting. I enjoyed reading the blog entry and seeing the photos

[Tom Clark]

Simon,
With three young children, I smiled at your story.

I must say that I was smarter than you when I first took my kids backpacking…I didn't record the problems we had on a blog, so I can't recall the runny eggs, numerous stops to climb on rocks when I wanted to get to camp before dark, the battle at bedtime, or the kicks in the head during the night!

I hope you can learn from this and allow your memory to filter out the problems and recall just the wonderful bonding moments. ;)

Tom

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