There is nothing in the world quite as irritating as owing a lousy tent. There's a whole chapter in the book of Murphy's Laws dictating the quantum weather generation effects of pitching a leaky tent on a sunny day (an instant thunderstorm) versus setting up the tent you've painstakingly seam-sealed, waterproofed, tuned, and maintained so it's served you well for years (a freak gust of wind knocks loose a tree branch, which spears your tent and then an instant thunderstorm).

It is thus, with some trepidation, that I bought a new tent. The drive for this is what was ostensibly a backpacking camping trip I took to Wyoming over the summer of last year, which due to my characteristic procrastination (call it extended field testing) I am only getting around to writing about just now. The trip did put all of my equipment through the wringer, though, so consider it a good test. Forget a balmy summer weekend “camping out” ten feet from your car at a pay-for-pitch campsite at the beach; We were traipsing up mountainsides and having to set up camp in all kinds of ridiculous places, complete with copious rocks, rather extreme precipitation, and in some cases ludicrous winds. Oh, and daytime temperatures topping 85 degrees, with nights hitting the mid 30's.

The important aspect of backpacking, of course, is that you have to bring all of your stuff with you. Your tent, your bedroll, and your sleeping bag as well as whatever else: Food, clothes, tools, fire, etc.

For this my current tent – which has served me well for quite some time and remains unspeared by errant pine branches – simply will not do. It's too big and hard to carry. Because your whole life has to go on your back, backpackers tend to be obsessed with the slimmest and lightest and smallest and therefore most expensive of everything. Sort of like Apple users. My old-yet-serviceable tent is one of those self-erecting numbers, made of a pair of spring loaded Pringles shaped armatures instead of using traditional poles. I have it because I've harbored a pathological dislike of pole-based tents since I was a kid, with some of my earliest and most frequent memories involving my father cussing up a storm as he struggled with figuring out how the bloody hell the family pole-tent went together, often while it was actively raining. A dangerous situation for anyone's sanity, for sure. With my spring loaded tent the main danger is not getting away fast enough after you light the fuse, and catching yourself on the chin with the frame as it deploys explosively. This tent folds into a somewhat flattish disk shape about two feet across, though (the mechanism of folding and deployment is almost exactly like those fold-up disk shaped sun shades for your car, but humongous) and it cannot  be effectively backpacked.

The Eureka(!) Apex 2 XT is not a self-erecting tent. It's not strictly a backpacking tent, either, even though I used it for one. Because it's slightly too big and slightly too heavy and costs less than an entire paycheck to buy, hardcore alpinists may snub it. It is, however, a much lighter weight and higher quality alternative to most department store tents. It's also a very versatile tent, and the experience of my mountaineering adventures reveals that it's a pretty durable one, as well.

Part of the rub is that the Apex 2 XT is a two person tent, and therefore larger than it “needs” to be for one person to traipse up a mountain with. Generally tent manufacturers play fast and loose with the number of people can a tent can “sleep,” usually by showing a little diagram on the box that involves everyone inside the tent packed in there like sardines with no room to move or to put their gear, which may be an okayish situation if the people involved all sleep with each other normally (in any respect you like), but otherwise is ridiculous. With the floor area inside the Apex 2 XT (from here on out I'm just going to call it the “Apex,” though there are multiple models in Eureka's Apex line) a less repute manufacturer may claim it to be a “three person.” But really, it's not. And I only used it as a one person tent quite successfully.

I have a couple of comparisons you may find useful. Three tents went along with us on this journey: A Marmot Aspen 2, which is a lightweight two person tent with a design very similar to my Apex; and a Eureka Backcountry 1, which is a super-lightweight one-person-only backpacking affair. Both tents ostensibly belonged to my nephew, but as he's not exactly a small guy he found the Backcountry 1 was entirely too small even to be a one-person tent for him. He lent it instead to a good friend of ours who went along on the trip, who is a small guy, and he put it through the wringer along with our other tents. The Backcountry is a very low tent in addition to being narrow, while in the Apex (and its identical cousin, the Marmot) there is actually enough room to sit up without pressing your face into the ceiling.

The Aspen and my Apex are of suspiciously identical size, and present a decent amount of floor space for you to roll over in your sleeping bag without rolling your tent over along with you. If you're using them for one person each, there's room enough to put your stuff inside. This is a big point for the Apex over Eureka's own Backcountry, as I had a lot of stuff to keep with me. Our guy in the Backcountry had little gear; He carried only clothes and bedding, and mooched most of his equipment off of the rest of us lot. For his purposes the Backcountry was peachy. For mine it was not.

The difference between the bigger tents is that the Marmot's got aluminum poles, and the Apex uses fiberglass. The Marmot's got one more pole, as well – a little short one to go with the rain fly. And it costs slightly more.

And it's less yellow.

The Apex is certainly visible from a distance. It is an exceedingly simple two-pole dome tent design, with a rectangular footprint. It has a full coverage rain fly that is screaming canary yellow. With a big exclamation point on the side, to complete the effect. Unless you set up in a field packed full of dandelions you're not going to blend in with anything with this tent, which is useful if you want to spot your campsite from a distance, but less useful if you have any reason to hide out. There is also a version of the Apex that doesn't have the full coverage fly just called the “Apex 2,” no XT. Clearly it is inferior to the Apex 2 XT, as it doesn't cost much less, doesn't weigh much less, and is considerably less useful.

Much of the main body of the Apex is made of a superfine mesh. This affords it excellent ventilation but absolutely zero rain protection. Lie on your back in the Apex with the rain fly off and you're looking at a panoramic view of the sky. This is exceptional for camping out on hot summer nights where the main complaint with most enclosed tents is lousy airflow and condensation buildup. If it starts to rain, the included rain fly covers almost every inch of the tent and has a little roofed-in ventilation hatch, and extends outward to cover a portion of the ground next to the tent as well, by the doors. Eureka calls this a “gear vestibule,” but that makes it sound like a portion of the tent you can actually sit in. You can't, but it's a big enough space to fit my big fat backpack, shoes, and rifle. And you get another one on the other side by the other door, as the tent's footprint is quite symmetrical. With the rain fly attached there's about two inches of the tent's actual body sticking out of the end, which is the very corner of the bathtub-like lower wall and appears to be just as waterproof as the fly. The tent wall is solid until about a foot off the ground, so no gaps are exposed to rainwater.

Every tent's sales blurb claims it's easy as pie to set up, but in the Apex's case I actually found it to be true. I've been spoiled by my self-erecting tent for a long time, whose set up procedure is “take out of case, dodge the ensuing explosion, then stake down,” so I dreaded going back to crusty old school poles. In reality, though, the Apex is pretty quick to set up. There are only two poles, big long ones. The closed ends of the poles go in little pockets on two corners of the tent, the open ends slip over metal pins on the opposite corners, and then the roof of the tent can be erected by pulling it up and affixing a bar-and-loop arrangement over the point where the poles cross. There are a bunch of snap-on hooks sewn down the sides of the tent that clip onto the poles along down their length, then you stake it down and you're done. The tent will stand freely for positioning even without stakes, but the rain fly won't. The fly clips onto the four corners of the tent with side-buckle clasps, but it is hexagonal; The two odd corners stick out over the doors and must be staked to the ground. In a pinch they could also be tied 'round a small tree or to something heavy, but if you just tie your fly flaps to a baseball sized rock all bets are off for wind resistance.

If you want shade and quick response to rain you can leave the rain fly on but leave its “doors” zipped open, rolled up, and secured behind convenient loops on the inside edge. When the clouds open up all you have to do is zip the doors down. The flyscreen part of the tent has its own doors, so you can close those up to keep the bugs out but still let a breeze through, even with the rain fly attached.

True to its price bracket, the Apex comes with L-shaped aluminum stakes, which are very slick and very light, but also very easy to bend when you're trying to pound them into hard mountain soil. I instead replaced them with my custom made tempered spring steel stakes (life is good when you have a blowtorch and you aren't afraid to use it) and was quite successful with them. There's a little bag for your stakes included in the stuff sack, and it's big enough to carry regular rod-steel or -aluminum stakes along with a couple of spares, but the sack's not big enough for wider sand auger stakes or the fatter serrated plastic ones. That's just as well, because you would probably have to carry those types of stakes separately anyway. There's no way you're fitting more than one of them in the stuff sack along with the tent. The Apex requires six stakes (four if you don't use the rain fly) and comes with exactly as many. No extras for you.

Tearing down is a little more involved, especially if the rain fly is wet. Luckily, it's all one big contiguous piece of fabric that is fairly easy to detach and slide off without dripping half a gallon of water into your tent, and from there you can shake it out or hang it up to dry fairly easily. Using two people for this helps, but I was able to do it by myself without too much trouble.

Packing everything back into the bag is always the tricky bit, but I've found that rolling up the rain fly first while you have it inside the tent with you is the easiest way to do it if you have no clean surface around. The tent itself is square and easy to fold and roll – the goofy hexagonal rain fly takes a bit more practice.

All told the whole thing rolls up into a slender stuff sack that's maybe 18 inches long by 5 across. Not super-svelte by backpacking tent standards, but it easily fits in my backpack. I found it's slightly narrower than my bedroll, actually, so instead of packing it inside my bag I wrap my bedroll around it and lash both of them to the bottom of my pack.

Of course, in the grand tradition of tent mechanics you also need a ground cloth, and no tent ever comes with one. The Apex sure doesn't. Most people use a regular household tarp for this and find that the folded up tarp takes up five times the volume of their entire tent. I discovered that a standard household shower curtain is the perfect size to use for an Apex ground cloth, and has the added advantage of folding up nice and small and being totally disposable if you poke through it with a couple of rocks during your trip.

Of our troupe of tents, the Marmot Aspen I mentioned above is slightly, slightly lighter than the Apex due to its aluminum poles. I prefer fiberglass, though, because the weight difference isn't much to write home about (maybe a pound and change on the outside, about the same as a can of Campbell's tomato soup) and fiberglass poles are way more durable. Durability is an important factor with my usual ham-fisted approach to things, so I took the extra weight. Fiberglass poles can be bent quite severely before they break. They can also be lashed successfully for expedient field repairs if you still manage to snap one. Meanwhile, aluminum poles are lighter and very space-age, but do not resist bending nearly as well. An aluminum tent pole bent not much beyond how far it is normally meant to go often will not return straight. For additional fun, hollow aluminum poles are quite difficult to bend back, and can often be dented or crimped such that they won't actually fit together anymore. Some would argue that if you manage to apply enough force to do that to your tent you have bigger problems, and handwave the issue away. I don't argue that squishing your tent while it's assembled enough to bend your poles is a seriously bad idea, but that your aluminum poles can certainly get munged when they're all rolled up in your tent bag if you happen to, say, accidentally whang it against a rock or someone accidentally steps on it.

The Eureka Backcountry is, of course, smaller and lighter than either the Aspen or the Apex. Its bundle is narrower than either, as well: Maybe 3.5 to 4 inches. But it isn't any shorter, and once again I'll take the marginal weight increase for the privilege of having a tent larger than a shoebox.

Inside you get a generous degree of space, considering how small the Apex can be rolled up. As usual, the Apex 2 “sleeps two” if those two are pretty intimate with each other already, or don't have a habit of flopping out of their sleeping bags in the middle of the night. If you're all on your lonesome you get enough space for yourself and plenty of your stuff; With two people you'd probably have to keep the larger bits of your gear out in the vestibules. For your convenience you get not one but two fairly large pockets near the head of the tent, on the inside, that are made out of the flyscreen material and are excellent for keeping your small and indispensable objects you might not want in your pockets while you sleep, like your flashlight, knife, and radio. (Well, that's what I used mine for, anyway.) The Apex also apparently features what Eureka puzzlingly calls a “gear loft,” which insofar as I can determine consists of a small nylon loop dangling from the peak of the tent, to which I affixed my small, battery powered lantern. I would not dare try to hang a gas powered lantern from it, or indeed anything much heavier than my little lantern that runs from just three batteries.

On the durability front, we experienced a bit of extreme weather on our trip and the Apex handled it all perfectly. Nighttime sustained winds got as high as 30 MPH on a couple of occasions, and gusts up to 45 or 50 were pretty common. The wide stance of the Apex and the rakish angle of its rain fly flaps let the wind glide right over it, and I had no problems. If you have the fly off you'll be exposed to quite a bit of the breeze, but most of it should sail through the screen and leave the tent itself undisturbed. The rain fly authoritatively shields you from the wind while you're inside, and doesn't even flap around as long as you have it secured properly.

We hit some pretty heavy rain as well. The Apex weathered one night of constant soaking rain and a couple of violent summertime thunderstorms quite well (note also that fiberglass poles are nonconductive, for you lightningaphones). I didn't get dripped on once. Nothing came through the walls of the tent at all, as a matter of fact, though I did my obligatory ritual of Camp Dry and seam sealer over the whole tent before we set out, as you're supposed to. Still, I've encountered plenty of tents whose rain fly designs just don't work at all, so this is welcome news for me. It's possible for accumulated water to eventually seep through the “bathtub” at its base if you pitch the tent in a really dumb location where water is allowed to pool up underneath of it, so don't do that. The rain-resistant parts of the Apex are made of the usual ripstop nylon stuff, so they're not bulletproof. The usual advice about not putting anything capable of wicking moisture (like your sleeping bag) pressing up against the walls when they're wet applies. Luckily, the tent's big enough that this is trivial.

The Apex is billed as a “three season” tent. Those seasons are spring, summer, and fall; It's not designed as an arctic tent and has very little insulative value. In essence, the big flyscreen doors are open to the outside air and its frigid temperatures even under the rain fly, because the fly stops short a couple of inches off the ground where the vestibule wings are staked out.  We successfully weathered rather low temperatures on our trip with myself in the Apex – The mid and low 30's are pretty damn nippy by anyone's standards when all you have to protect yourself is two sheets of ripstop nylon and a sleeping bag – but most of that's down to my sleeping back and bedroll, which are rated to 20 and 15 degrees, respectively. I also don't know how the Apex would handle having snow actively accumulating on it. I'm not eager to try, and if I were you I wouldn't, either.

Given that the Apex is a good deal more expensive than off-brand department store offerings (where you can get yourself into a two-person dome tent about the same size as the Apex for 30 or 40 dollars) I'm happy to report that I found absolutely no quality issues with my tent whatsoever. The flyscreen is flawless, the stitching is perfect, there are no loose threads, no holes, nothing coming unsewn, even with the bar-and-loop deals that hold up the roof and rolled up doors. There are no sticky zippers, and no zippers came off their tracks despite getting rolled up all kinds of different ways as I packed and unpacked the tent a bunch of times. I wasn't able to even pop the seams out of the stuff sack, which is usually the first thing to go on a tent kit, nor poke through anything stuffing my custom stakes in the bag.

I would say that the lack of problems almost makes the Apex disappointingly characterless, but the bright yellow rain fly more than makes up for it.

The only niggle I really have is the rain fly, as a matter of fact. Even though the tent body is symmetrical the windows on the tent and the scallops on the rain fly are not. It only goes on properly one way. It's easy enough when you figure out that the exclamation point on the fly and the matching exclamation point on the tent go on the same end, but when you're holding the fly up in the middle of a rainstorm trying to find the bloody exclamation point it becomes a bit more of a bother. It's a little tricky to get the rain fly folded up such that you can roll it to fit in the stuff sack, as well. I tried a couple of experimental folding patterns over the course of days and still haven't settled on any one in particular. I suppose I could have paid attention to how the thing unrolled when I first used it, but I didn't. I found plenty of folding techniques that worked, but also a fair few that didn't. If origami is not your strong point you may find some irritation there.

The other main wrinkle, at least for me, is due to the bathtub design of the Apex's floor. Very keen it is, for keeping water out and your stuff in, but since the bottom edge of the doors are a good foot off the ground it's quite difficult to sit inside your tent and dangle your feet out, as we are occasionally wont to do. Also, the full coverage of the rain fly makes it sort of tough to sit in your tent and look out at the world, as is sometimes nice to do on a warm afternoon when it's to late to start a hike and too early to get the campfire going; The winglike portion of the rain fly that doesn't zip away really cramps your panoramic view. You could take the fly off, of course, but then you'd lose most of your shade.

The zippers on the rain fly come back towards the inside of the tent to unzip, and go forward and down almost all the way to the ground to seal up. This is quite tricky to do without hanging out of the tent, which is fine as you've got the rest of the rain fly over yourself. Reaching down there to get the zipper back to unzip it is a little more tricky. Most of the problem is finding the silly thing, and once you do that you'd better hope your fly stakes are in good so you don't pull them out yanking on the zipper, or use two hands.

So it goes.

The fact that these are the worst things wrong with it speaks volumes for the Apex. There are plenty of points about it that I like better than my old exploding-deployment tent, like the fact that it fits – though only just -- my queen sized air mattress if I use it on a less wild excursion at a campsite much closer to the car. (Even deflated air mattresses ain't small or light, so I'm not going to carry mine very far.)

There are, of course, a myriad of options available to you especially if you don't have to carry your tent far. Even just in the backpacking world there are a bevy of options; If you're really dead set on aluminum poles you can have the Marmot Aspen mentioned above, which is carried at many of the same retailers as the Apex. It is remarkably similar to the Apex to the point that you could just as well consider it the “aluminum version” of the Apex, despite being made by a completely different manufacturer. The abovementioned Eureka Backcountry 1 is the more portable alternative, despite being tiny. If being tiny is not a detriment to you there is the smaller still Eureka Solitaire, which is a hoop tent that's scarcely big enough for you and your sleeping bag, and you can forget about storing any of your gear in it. A trip to Eastern Mountain Sports could net you a bewildering array of other alternatives I haven't the time or motivation to describe here, and may well leave a considerable hole in your wallet.

The one place you won't find an Apex is set up in the display section of your local sporting goods store. It's carried by the usual big box retailers in the United States, but its relatively low dazzle value (despite the incredibly yellow rain fly) means it loses out on floor space to the wildly impractical multi-room, fifty pound, ten-pole monsters that please crowds but are for a totally different market. Likewise, you may not find it hanging up on the wall with the super-flashy, all aluminum, backpacker's only line, because the Apex commits the cardinal sin of being larger than a breadbox.

But if you need a generously sized tent of decent quality that you could take backpacking but don't necessarily have to the Apex 2 XT just might be your ticket. I just hope yellow is your color.

Recommended: Yes