Field Note 011 — The Instant A-Frame Tent
At some point in the middle of the night, the side of the tent slapped me in the face again.
The wind had been going for hours. Not normal desert wind, either. Not the kind that rattles the tent for twenty minutes and gives you something to complain about in the morning. We had already been dealing with sustained heavy wind for most of the night, and somewhere deep into the dark it had turned completely fucking ridiculous.
We were camped at my desert property just north of El Mirage. The Chevy was parked upwind, and by that point the guy lines were literally tied to the truck.
I know we were dealing with winds over 45 mph. My memory says some of the worst gusts may have pushed closer to 60, but I’m not going to pretend I had an anemometer sitting outside the tent. What I do know is that the wind was strong enough to start pulling stakes out of the ground and keep doing it for hours.
The tent itself was still standing.
That part is important.
The structure wasn't collapsing. The poles weren't folding. The fabric hadn't torn apart. The problem was a pair of exterior ventilation flaps on the sides of the tent.
The lower portion of the wall is solid fabric, with mesh above it. Outside of that is another flap that can be pulled out to create ventilation while still giving you some weather protection. There's a little bungee in the middle so you can tie the thing off when the wind picks up, which normally works fine.
The problem with bungees is that they stretch, and the problem with stakes is that eventually enough wind can decide they don't belong in the ground anymore.
The flaps would get loose, start whipping around, and eventually one would find my face. I'd wake up, deal with it, roll over, and go back to sleep.
Then we'd do the whole thing again.
The wind lasted more than ten hours. Four, maybe six of those were at its absolute worst. Neither of us ever seriously discussed leaving.
Every once in a while I'd wake up for one reason or another, roll over, and look toward my buddy. He always seemed to be facing the other direction. No eye contact. No conversation. No grand declaration that we were going to stick it out.
Just two stubborn assholes independently deciding that we weren't going anywhere.
At a certain point the attitude became pretty simple: screw this. Hold fast. At least it'll be a funny story when it's over.
We wouldn't let the night beat us.
And it didn't.
I Bought It Because It Was Cheap
I don't remember exactly when I bought this tent. I believe I was already living in Upland, which would put it somewhere around eight to ten years ago.
I do remember where it came from.
Walmart.
And I remember why I bought it.
It was about thirty bucks.
That's pretty much the whole story. I didn't need another tent, and I wasn't shopping for an A-frame. As far as I can remember, we were actually on our way out for a shooting trip when I saw the thing.
Thirty dollars for an instant tent just seemed too good to pass up, so into the cart it went.
I'd never even used an A-frame before. There was no nostalgia involved, no childhood memories of camping in one, and certainly no carefully researched decision about the architectural advantages of an A-frame shelter.
It was cheap. It looked useful.
That turned out to be one of the better accidental gear purchases I've made.
About a Minute
The tent is an Ozark Trail Instant A-Frame, and the entire structure is built around five poles.
When you pull it out of the bag and unroll it, the four outside poles are folded against the main ridge pole. Fold those four legs outward and the frame looks a little like a stick figure without a head.
Each pole has a locking section with a push button. Extend the top pole until it clicks, then extend the four outside poles until they click.
Congratulations. You have a tent.
Obviously, you can stake it down and guy it out depending on the conditions. That's player's choice. Structurally, though, you're basically finished.
I always put a tarp underneath my tents, so my actual setup looks something like this: open the bag, pull out the tarp, lay it down, put the rolled tent in the middle, unroll it, swing out the legs, and extend five poles.
Call it about a minute.
I'm sure somebody with a stopwatch could shave seconds off that or argue about whether laying down the tarp technically counts as setting up the tent. I don't care.
The point is that I can go from a bag sitting on the ground to having shelter over my head in roughly the amount of time it takes somebody else to figure out which bundle of tent poles they're holding.
That is the entire reason this thing has survived in my gear collection.
Four People, My Ass
Ozark Trail calls it a four-person tent.
Sure.
Maybe if the four people have recently become very close friends and nobody brought anything with them.
In actual use, this is a two-person tent. Two people and their gear fit just fine. Two people and a puppy? Also fine.
Four adults?
Get the fuck out of here.
The A-frame shape means you lose some usable space as the walls slope inward. That's not really a criticism as much as geometry doing what geometry does.
For two people, though, it works. And because the thing goes up so quickly, I don't care that it isn't some cavernous family shelter.
It's enough.
That's a recurring theme with gear I keep for a long time.
Enough is enough.
The Bag Is Bigger Than You'd Expect
There is one obvious downside: it isn't particularly small when packed.
I'd estimate the whole bundle is somewhere around seventy percent of the packed size of an EZ-Up canopy, give or take. It's nowhere near as heavy as an EZ-Up, but if you're imagining some little backpacking-tent bundle you can tuck into a corner, this isn't that.
It's long, noticeable, and it takes up space.
For truck camping, I don't care.
The oversized bag actually gives me one advantage I really like: there's enough room in there for a dedicated ground tarp. When I break camp, I can either roll the tarp around the tent bundle or fold it separately and stuff it into the bag after the tent is already inside.
Either works.
One bag comes out of the truck, and the tent and groundsheet are both there.
That's a system, and I like systems that keep me from having to think.
The Night at El Mirage
That brings me back to the wind.
The tent had no business making that night as uneventful as it did. We were dealing with winds comfortably into the 45+ mph range, with gusts that felt significantly worse. Stakes were being pulled out of the ground, and the side ventilation flaps were the only part of the tent that really became a pain in the ass.
Their bungee tie-outs allowed enough movement for the wind to keep working on them, but the structure itself stayed solid. We had the Chevy positioned upwind, the guy lines were tied directly to it, and for hours the tent just sat there and took it.
I wouldn't recommend intentionally taking a cheap Walmart tent into extreme wind to see what happens.
That's not the lesson.
The lesson is that after years of use, I learned exactly what this tent could tolerate.
That's worth more to me than a spec sheet.
There are shelters I own now that are better in specific ways. I have more tents than any reasonable person needs. I've slept in bivy shelters, used hot tents, and I own a damn thirteen-foot yurt.
There are tents with smaller packed sizes. There are tents designed for nastier weather. There are tents that give you more room.
None of that has made this little A-frame irrelevant, because gear doesn't exist in a vacuum.
It exists inside the way you actually camp.
And I am, fundamentally, a lazy asshole.
I mean that sincerely.
I'm also extremely pragmatic. If there is a way to accomplish the same job without dealing with unnecessary nonsense, I'm probably going to choose that way.
I don't want to spend fifteen minutes assembling a shelter if I can spend one.
I'd rather be doing literally anything else.
Then There Was Johnson Valley
The El Mirage night proved that the A-frame could stay standing when conditions got ugly.
Johnson Valley taught me something different.
Sometimes the best tent isn't the one that stands up to the wind.
Sometimes it's the one you can make disappear before the wind gets a chance.
We were on a multi-day trip with four families.
And me.
That sentence alone pretty accurately describes my camping setup compared with everybody else's.
One family had an RV. Another had a toy hauler. The other two had giant multi-room family tents. There were RZRs and all the usual equipment that comes along when a bunch of families set up for several days in the desert.
I had a backpack, my sleeping bag, and the A-frame.
At some point, a violent burst of wind came through camp and everything went sideways.
Not metaphorically.
Things were actually going sideways.
Gear started flying. People were running after things. The big family tents were getting ripped up and torn apart. Everybody was grabbing fabric, poles, awnings, whatever they could get their hands on.
One of the awnings on the RV actually ripped off.
That was the level of wind we're talking about.
I ran to my tent, pushed the release, collapsed the top pole, and the whole tent went flat.
Done.
Safe.
It probably took half a second.
One of my buddies was in the middle of wrestling with the RV awning when he looked over at me. He saw my entire shelter problem disappear instantly, and while still fighting for his life with this fucking awning, he looked at me and said:
"Ohh fuck you."
Fair.
Then I went and helped everybody else, because my stuff was fine.
That moment probably explains the A-frame better than anything I could write about pole construction or fabric.
Simple gear gives you options.
Sometimes simplicity means you get camp set up faster. Sometimes it means you break camp faster. And sometimes it means a sudden windstorm arrives, everybody around you enters crisis-management mode, and you press one button before walking over to help somebody else.
That's useful.
Taking It Down Is Almost as Easy
Normal takedown isn't much more complicated than the Johnson Valley emergency procedure.
Push the buttons, collapse the poles, swing the four outside legs back against the ridge pole, fold one half of the tent over the now-collapsed frame, then roll the whole thing up.
I've learned that tying the bundle once it's rolled makes getting it back into the bag considerably easier. Then deal with the tarp however you want—roll it around the tent or fold it separately.
Player's choice.
That's it.
I've done that process dozens and dozens of times. At this point, probably more than fifty trips.
And the tent is still here.
Somehow, It Still Isn't Dead
There have been the occasional zipper issues. Every tent eventually seems to have a zipper that decides it needs your full attention for thirty seconds.
Beyond that?
No major failures.
The poles still work. The structure still works. The fabric is still doing its job.
After all these years and all those trips, the original cheap Walmart impulse purchase is still in service.
And at some point, my lady decided she wanted one too.
Not a different tent.
Not an upgraded version.
The same damn tent.
She had used mine enough and seen how easy it was to deal with that she wanted one of her own. By then, though, the price had climbed closer to sixty dollars.
Which would have been fine.
Except we couldn't find one.
Anywhere.
I don't know for certain that Ozark Trail discontinued it. Maybe distribution changed. Maybe inventory dried up. Maybe we were just looking at the wrong time.
All I know is that we couldn't find one online.
Pucker factor four engaged.
Because suddenly I had to consider something I hadn't really thought about before:
What the hell was I going to replace mine with when it finally died?
Eventually she found one. She says she ordered it; I honestly don't remember from where.
When it arrived?
Same tent.
Literally.
A couple colors were slightly different. That's about it.
She had wanted another one before we lost the chance to get one at all.
I completely understood.
That's the Review
Normally, this is the part where a gear review is supposed to become nuanced.
Here's what I like. Here's what I don't. Here's who should buy it. Here's who shouldn't.
Fine.
It packs larger than many tents. The four-person capacity claim is hilarious. The side ventilation flaps can become annoying in enough wind. Sometimes the zipper behaves like a zipper.
There are newer shelters with better materials, smaller packed sizes, different layouts, and all kinds of improvements.
Great.
My original Ozark Trail Instant A-Frame cost me around thirty bucks. I've probably used it more than fifty times. It survived a night of insane wind at El Mirage and disappeared flat onto the ground in seconds while Johnson Valley was trying to redistribute everybody else's campsite across the desert.
It takes me about a minute to set up with the ground tarp. It holds two people and their stuff.
And after somewhere around eight to ten years, I still own it.
So if you stumble across one of these things somewhere?
Buy it.
Don't think twice.
If it's on sale, get two.
If you find one from another brand that does the same thing... give it a go.
Some gear earns its place because it's technically impressive. Some earns its place because it's beautiful. Some earns its place because everybody on the internet agrees that it's the thing you're supposed to own.
Five poles.
Five clicks.
Shelter.
That's good enough for me.
Buy less. Go more.
— Dane Justus
Founder, Weekend Route
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