Second in my series of videos on tents and shelters that I like and use regularly. This time it's the Mountain Laurel Designs Trailstar, which I last used on a trip last month.
Second in my series of videos on tents and shelters that I like and use regularly. This time it's the Mountain Laurel Designs Trailstar, which I last used on a trip last month.
Thanks for this, I am going to make myself the second pole guy line just now. I got mine in the spring largely based on your blogs, and I love the versatility, and especially the space for cooking inside in poor weather. But I am not too impressed with the silpoly material. Firstly, it doesn't shed water well. On a recent trip I ended up with big condensation build on both sides of it, and it would not shake off while pitched. I managed to get lot of it off after taking it down and shaking it by the top loop, but even then when I weighed it back home, it showed there was still 0.5l water in it, that seems aweful lot. Secondly, the 3m hydrostatic rating is not enough to use it for a ground sheet -- an 80kg person kneeling on one knee creates about 8m hydrostatic pressure; the Akto ground sheet is 15m rated, which is about optimal for wet ground, so I ended up making an extra grounsheet under the MLD one from tyvek (cheap, light, durable, though a bit noisy and not best packable); both the groundsheets in your video look quite a bit thicker than the silpoly. Also the MLD mesh tent has the zipper all wrong, running in semicircle through the mesh, but not along the bottom, which means you have to fully open it to get in -- not great when the midges are bad, I will need to fix that for next summer.
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