Nemo Equipment Kunai 3-4 Season Backpacking Tent Review

I’m surprised that a 4 season tent has such a high hem on the flysheet. That could be a real problem in a Scottish storm, which is a shame as the rest of the tent looks very good.

Ive owned my Kunai for 3 or4 years now. Its an excellent tent. Ive had it in the Sierra and Mt Shasta in the winter. It has yet to fail me.

Hang inner tent from poles, then throw fly over the top.
In a storm.
Nope.
Sorry.

Would have been great to compare this tent with the Locus Gear Djedi.

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Thank you so much for the detailed instructions and pictures from every corner, in and out!

thanks for the detailed review

I do have to point out your MSRP on the Access 2 is off by a lot AND they are usually available at lower than MSRP- not $749, but $599

I don’t own the Access 2, but do the Access 1- it’s rock solid as 3+-4 season tent

Looks like a two pole wedge pop up tent with a third pole to push out the vestibule. Perhaps that kind of construction is OK for a three seasons plus tent.

Ahem…the high hem. If this is a 4 season tent, then I have some swampland to sell you.

I always thought that a 1200mm hh fly was woefully inadequate in prolonged steady rain, and a 3000 floor pretty dicey on soggy ground. Have I got that wrong?

Let’s just say that those figures are a bit marginal today. One can get much better fabrics.
Cheers

Well I’d say a big part of the answer really depends on your skill on selecting and setting up a tent site. Technically, most of the time, you can (and should) choose sites that don’t put you in a soggier situation than necessary. If you are intentionally (or accidentally) choosing bad tent sites, you are gonna hate pretty much every tent you try at some point.

When using this tent as a true four-season option I’d say soggy is a bit of a non-issue. True four-season use to me means dry snow pack footing under the tent. If its not dry snow with temps at or below about -2F (-15C) I would call that a three-season experience not a four-season. I’ve had 5 inches of wet soggy snow in August at about -3C and that is a different game altogether than mid-January verging on -19C with the same humidity index as the Gobi Desert. Without about 4-6 inches of snow though, not much precip accumulated on this tent which is pretty ideal. It’s very steep sided (which is a downfall as far as the footprint width) but a solid win in keeping precipitation from pooling and wetting out the tent.

In a soggy situation, say somewhere coastal, staying dry in any tent is as much about where you pitch it and what footing you pitch it on, as it is about the tent itself. Even in tundra conditions, like in Canada’s far North, where you choose to pitch your tent means a world of difference for your comfort level in all conditions. I have seen some really bad site selection and then heard people complain about their equipment, when really it was their tent site selection skill that was lacking.

The other thing to remember with the floor is you should probably be using a ground sheet that prevents the need for a heavier fabric floor. The heavier the fabric the tent is made of the harder it is to pack up. I’d rather have three lighter pieces of tent (body, fly, footprint) than two heavier ones (fly, body). Three pieces (that weigh about the same as two), pack better than two bulkier ones. I like my equipment to last long term and always use a ground sheet. That said, I almost always have highly abrasive footing of one type or another.

After some really nasty storms this year, I’d say my reservations about many initial design preferences were more or less quieted. Some people don’t like the high hem, but it didn’t leak or cause issues with heavy use over 24 months so I can’t give it a ding there. I wasn’t crazy about how high the fly was off the ground at first, but ended up liking the ventilation if it was hot out when conditions were volatile switching from +30C to -2C. My job as a reviewer is to take gear and drop my preconceived notions and test the gear on its merits, how it performed vs my design preferences. What worked in practice and what didn’t.

Can’t argue about soggy sites! I avoid them like the plague. Mind you, there was one time when the groundsheet was sort of floating …

On the other hand, with a good HH for the floor it does not have to be all that heavy. I am using 49 gsm silnylon for my floors, and it lasts very well. More modern silnylon with a higher HH would be even better.

The high hem – imho that makes the tent suitable ONLY for sheltered places. If you (anyone) haven’t experienced spindrift, then you might not understand. Unless the fly is sealed to the ground at least at the windward end, your tent can fill up with snow.

In this case the gap at ground level was very small, but the wind eroded the protection away several times during the night.

My job as a reviewer is to take gear and drop my preconceived notions and test the gear on its merits, how it performed vs my design preferences. What worked in practice and what didn’t.
Absolutely.
But the reader should be careful about extrapolating beyond the conditions of the test.

Yeah, I know: I am biased!

(Snow was horizontal at this stage.)

Cheers

Thanks for the comments Roger and Emylene!

I hike in the forests and above the treeline in New Zealand. It can be very wet, especially the further south we go, and we can’t always avoid a wet site. That’s just a given for us. I certainly don’t hate my tent – it’s a Vaude with a 10,000hh floor and no moisture has ever come through it yet – and I don’t use a groundsheet.

I personally don’t hike in the winter snow conditions the article is geared to and was looking at it more from how the tent would handle heavy rain, as we can get storms like the one described on any trip, any time of the year.

It has always surprised me that UK and European manufacturers generally seem to use materials with much higher hydrostatic head than many US ones. And I’ve wondered why, and if those US tents with lesser hh would really handle prolonged rainstorms like we can get. Being stuck in our tent for 24 hours while a front passes through is something we have to be prepared for on every extended trip we do. I’d kind of figured 5000 for the fly would be a minimum in our conditions, but as you say Roger that assumption is probably (well) out of date by now. As evidenced by this tent with a 1200 hh fly handling a several hour deluge no problems.

Time to do some reading and update my assumptions I think.

Haha Yeah, been there Roger!!! I have seen and experienced that, it left me with a distinct skill of making some unique campsites that were a bit more like snow caves not tent sites. Which is a pretty ultralight and warm situation compared to a tent anyway. I do not recommend the snow cave route though unless you take appropriate training, its also a good way to have a snowy mountain collapse on you if you build it wrong. Many of the 3+season tents are designed for use with a modified snow trench, not just an open pitch. I have found, that sometimes I’ve looked at conditions and decided the extra digging of a snow trench wasn’t worth the trouble and regretted it a few hours in.

As to New Zealand travel, I have done a fair bit over the years and I would tend to say you get similar conditions  as many of the east coast areas in North America. Heavy wet snow, cold nasty wind and you have the added entertainment of Western North American altitude (without Canadian Rocky usual temps). I would say hh levels are a bit of a, how far do you go? Because most of North America has some balance of hot daytime temps and frigid overnights, our standards are going to be more tailored to that. That said, North America has such a wide range of conditions unlike anywhere else in the world, I would say gear manufacturers here try to find the best balance for all North American conditions. A little desert, a little alpine, a little woodland, a little coastal. Which is very much what the Kunai is, a balanced tent. Not a bad balance either, but if you are testing limits on certain aspects, it may not perform as well as a purpose built tent for a specific condition.

For instance, if I knew I was headed to more coastal mountains mid-summer, I’d probably pick a different tent. The Kunai might not have enough ventilation for sustained coastal downpours during muggy warm conditions. Plus knowing the coast can leave you socked in for a few days of deluge, I might bring a bigger tent because I know I could be trapped in there for hours at a time mid-day.

A bit like rain coats, if its more hydrophobic, it vents poorly which leads to internal condensation and is usually a much heavier fabric and takes up a great deal of pack space. If it vents well and prevents internal condensation, it packs small but it may mean you sit out a major deluge under cover.

One of the big differences could be the winds. 100 kph is quite common in bad weather here, and we do get lot of bad weather. It’s the geography of our mountains: the main mountain area is at the mouth of a huge funnel (500 km long say) so the mild winds of the lowlands get a bit souped up when they hit the mountains. That is why we really do not like long poles or long unsupported stretches of fabric: they collapse under our winds.

We don’t do much in the way of snow trenches here. The wind scour can be a bit fierce at times, and very few people ever carry a spade.

I have seen snow block walls disappear in a few hours under the wind. Very sad: I had to rebuild the wall several times one night.

Cheers