Poler's Two Man Tent

When Justin told me that he had a tent for me to try out this weekend, I just assumed that it was the one that he had been talking about a few weeks ago. It's this fancy thing that you just throw out and it pops together itself and becomes a tent. No poles to deal with or anything. So I picked up the tent and brought it over to my buddy's new house where we were planning on getting really drunk and sleeping in the yard.



Poler's logos remind me of the Grinch's arms or Muppets and weird stuff like that. On the tent bag it shows the dimensions of the tent in a design reminiscent of the tv show LOST. Like the plane crash people found a tent that was left over from the sixties.

I got good and drunk and dumped the contents of the tent bag on the lawn. It didn't put itself together. Instead, I rolled it out and noticed that it was supposed to go together just like my MSR Hubba Hubba. Easy enough. The double-"Y", single-pole design that both tents share is quite easy to pitch. Just stake out the tent, flip the pole bundle together in like 12 seconds, put one side of the double "Y" into the holes, same for the other side, and clip the tent up onto the poles. Toss the rain fly over and attach it. Done.

While the Poler 2 Man is no lightweight, it does offer an extra ten inches in width compared to the MSR Hubba Hubba. The extra space was really nice when sharing the tent with my girlfriend. I'm pretty sure that if my game was tight enough I could have fit one of her friends in there with us.

Some of the details, like the loops that hold the doors open and the clips that attach the tent to the poles leave a little to be desired as far as design goes, but perform as they should. The rain fly is heavy. I think a good deal of the extra weight of the tent is in the difference in rain fly material. The eyeball-shaped window is nice, but if you're camping near some dirtbags, you might notice someone looking in on you while you're making the moves on your girlfriend and her friend. I'd rather have a shade for the window.

It's a proven design that has worked well for many people and as long as you're interested in a mesh-walled tent it might be for you. A comparably priced REI tent will be harder to pitch and the MSR Hubba Hubba is $60 more for less space and only 2 fewer pounds.

Pros-
Plenty of room
Easy to pitch
Relatively light weight
Cool logos / packaging

Cons-
Not super light
Peeping tom window
Mesh walls might prove drafty

Poler Two Man Tent - $240

This review comes courtesy of John Voorhess, a beard growing warehouseman from Michigan.
You can read more of John's work here.