As much as I love a huge family, multi-room, house like tent – you’ve got to love a small, compact tent. It’s brilliant to have a lightweight tent that can easily be carried on the trail and packed in your backpack.
The Wild Country Zephyros 2 Tent has some great light weight credentials: on the scales it comes in at just 1.9kg, this makes the tent really easy to carry when backpacking. With the measuring stick, when the tent is packed in its sack it is a mere 30 x 19cm.
When you take the tent out of the stuff sack and unroll it you find the usual contents a small pouch with pegs and a slightly longer one with poles. The materials that Wild Country have constructed the Zephros 2 with are really high quality. The fly is made from their Stormtex polyester P4000mm. This is a really waterproof fabric and this along with the tent’s intelligent design is sure to keep you safe and dry in even stormy weather. The groundsheet is made from the surprisingly lightweight but also durable Aqua Stop P6000mm.
The tent is super easy to pitch. It literally took us less than ten minutes to pitch it for the very first time, without reading any instructions. It has three poles and the pole sleeve is nicely colour coded to the blue 8.5mm superflex alloy poles. However saying that, the blue pole is at least 2 metres and the other two are about 30cm so it may not be absolutely necessary! I really like how the tent pitches both flysheet and inner together which makes it so quick and simple to put up.
Wild Country’s Zephyros 2 Compact Tent comes with alloy V angle pegs. I really, really like these. Firstly, they’re an awesome red colour which not only looks cool but also makes them easy to spot and pick up when you’re packing the tent away. Secondly, The V angle on the peg gives it really good hold in hard and soft ground. The extra width of the peg is really great in soft ground and really does a good job of stopping the peg pulling back through the soil. Finally, these pegs have a really wide top. This means that you can push down with your foot or even thumb and it works really well at getting through the ground using the same principle as a push pin.
The smart features don’t end there and each guy rope has reflective guy lines with glow in the dark tensioners. These nice, clever touches are going to stop you going head over heel when walking around after dark! Another nice feature is two small tent poles which keep the tent high at both ends. These don’t look like much but give you much more room inside the tent.
As you can see the tent has a low tunnel shape design. Although it’s specified as a two man tent I’d say like most tents this size it’s much better as one man and his gear tent unless you are really familiar with the other person you are sharing with or have little kit! Saying that when weight is really important it can happily accommodate two. With a door on either side and porch space for your kit.
Inside the fly door there is an inner door which is half midge proof mesh. This is awesome as it keeps the tent really nicely ventilated and makes it a great place to sleep.
With the door open you can see the sleeping space. This is 92cm wide and 230cm in length making the size quite substantial for sleeping, as well as allows room for storage above your head and below your feet. At its highest point the tent has 92cm of headroom and at it’s lowest it has 50cm, this gives you a nice area to sit up in in the centre of the tent as well as a nice amount of space at the outer edges.
There are additional vents on the outer fly, these can be opened or closed to allow for extra ventilation or closed off to possibly keep some warmth in. All of these vents have a midgy proof mesh which is brilliant for those wetter seasons.
In conclusion, the Wild Country Zephyros 2 Tent is an awesome three season backpacking tent. It packs down really small at under 30cm in length which makes it really handy when loading into a rucksack. It’s light weight also makes it brilliant for carrying when every gram counts.
The attention to detail in the design from the intelligently created pegs to the shaping of the tent to create maximum usable space is brilliant. The Zephyros 2 strikes a really good balance between affordability, technicality and smart design making it very easy to recommend.
