I do not own one of these tents. But I saw one! Someone had one at Roger's just last weekend at the NRG. We were all like, whoa look at that tent! Will it survive the weekend?? Well, it survived the first night. But by the time we got back from climbing on Sunday we were all sad to see it deflated and on the ground. I'd love to know what happened to that tent! We were all sad to see it's lifeless form on Roger's grass.


EDIT: July 12, 2005

The Sako Follows the South to Utah!

When I reported a few months back that I’d been witness to a Nemo tent gone bad (I saw one of their tents at the New River Gorge in West Virginia after it had unfortunately experienced a malfunction of some sort and was flat on the ground), the owner of the company contacted me. He offered to let me borrow one of their tents if I were to write a review of it. He informed me that the tent I saw at the New was one of his older models, prior to much innovation, and that the newer models had characteristics that prevented the same malfunction from happening.

My mind was swimming. The very next week I was to leave for a 10 day climbing trip in Maple Canyon Utah. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to borrow a tent to take for the trip! I propositioned Nemo and they accepted. I eagerly awaited the arrival of the Sako tent.

Of course, the countdown to my trip moved about as quickly as a snail on hot payment. Finally, the tent came, and I opened the box in my living room, determined to know everything I needed to know before I was in the wilderness of Utah attemping to blow up the tent in darkness. I laid out the contents of the Fedex box. At first I was a little overwhelmed – thinking, how is little –dis-mechanically-inclined-me going to figure out how to use this air pump and blow up this tent? As soon as I got to work it became easy. Attach pump. Pump. Easy! As the tent took shape, I realized that staking the tent is very important for the tent to have structure and shape. So… some sand bags I use for weighted pull ups, a rocking chair and a door handle were my make shift stakes (the tent had stakes but I wasn’t about to put stakes into my wood floors!) and wha-la! A Sako tent! Sort of. But I knew what to do and went about folding the tent up nice and neat and preparing for departure!

We left for Utah on a Friday. We arrived at our campsite on a Saturday morning, with most of our fellow climbers still slumbering. Sako set up went smoothly, with half a dozen on lookers oogling at the unique tent, asking questions.

Now was the real test. Could the Sake survive the now 9 day climbing trip? Wind, rain, storms… bears… mountain lions… climber filth.

Did it? Yes! Temps varied from down-jacket-temps in the morning to climb-in-bikini-top-weather in the afternoon and the tent survived. Winds got up one night as a brief storm rolled through – and the tent survived. We climbers were in and out and up and down, clean and filthy, sweaty and freezing – and the tent survived.

We had a fantastic trip, and the Sako was a great tent to have with us. It was roomy with a ton of leg room (my almost 6 foot climbing partner appreciated the space for sure) and enough head space to sit up easily and change clothes. It fit easily into our checked baggage (the tent fit into a more compact bag since it doesn't have any poles) and made it back to North Carolina in one piece.