Last winter I was in the market for my first lightweight backpacking tent. After a 4-5 month wait for it to be back in stock, my Paria Outdoor Products Bryce 2P tent arrived just in time for a July 3-4 campout in my own backyard. The highlights are immediately below, though you can keep reading for the detailed version.
The Highlights
- Price (June 2023): $169.99 + tax.
- Delivery: Arrived after 11 days with free shipping.
- Rain Protection: Adequate, but I wouldn’t trust it in a heavy downpour.
- Setup: Easy even for just one person, though instructions were ambiguous in places.
- Stakes: Exceeded expectations.
- First Impression: Strongly positive; I’d buy it again.
The Tent Shortage
Reviews by the redoubtable Dan Becker introduced me to the Bryce 1P/2P backpacking tent. Like Mary Poppins, the tent appeared to be “practically perfect in every way.” With a price tag around $150, it was also affordable. Alas, perhaps due to the celebrity endorsement, the tent was out-of-stock, so I signed up for the mailing list to get notified when it was available again.
Fast forward to May 25, 2023: I’m on vacation in Istanbul for a friend’s wedding and find an e-mail from Paria that the Bryce tents are back in stock! I furiously click away on my phone to order one, but to no avail. Customer support later informed me that the tents sold out again within three hours. I reluctantly signed up again to be on the notification list.
On June 22, I received the second “The wait is over!” e-mail from Paria and snatched up my 2P tent for $174.99. Since I had read other reviews in the interim and heard the stakes were sub-standard, I ordered a set of Needle Stakes to go with it for $17.99. USPS delivered my precious tent on July 3, just in time for an impromptu mid-week Independence Day backyard campout.
Packaged length is about 16 inches (41 cm).
Assembly
How long does it take a complete amateur to read the directions and put the tent together under ideal conditions? In my case it was 24:09.87; granted, two minutes of that were running to the garage to find a hatchet for hammering the stakes. The important thing is that I didn’t have any trouble assembling it by myself. The poles were idiot-proof in that they were all connected as a single unit and quickly formed a free-standing “skeleton” onto which you could clip the tent.
The stakes that came with the tent looked to be high quality. Maybe Paria upgraded them from what they offered the previous year? They were sturdy, red, metal, and went into the ground easily enough. Some of the red paint chipped off when I pounded them into the ground, but I’m not aware of anything that keeps all of its paint when you hit it with the blunt end of a hatchet. I never did use the Needle Stakes I’d bought. (They are blue and skinny).
The instructions were on a card with 13 bullet points. It was easy enough to get the tent assembled, but I couldn’t make enough sense of them to follow every step. The final step was “Stake out all guylines.” I presume the guylines were the black string things in the photo below, but my imagination could not conjure any way to attach them to something. In the end I had some leftover parts. Three corners of the rain fly had clips, but one did not. If the strap in the lower right was supposed to be attached to something, the directions did not say so.
The Experience
…was awful. I live in the great state of Georgia. It’s summer. The weather forecast was a high of 97 and a low of 73 (about 34/23 C). I didn’t even try going to bed until midnight at which point the temperature had dropped to 80, but I couldn’t fall asleep until around 5am. The inside was roomy for one adult male; two of me would have fit, albeit without much space for gear. I found a strap overhead to hang my glasses from.
To test how the rain fly would hold up, I purposely left the automatic sprinklers turned on. After the 10 minute rain simulation (attacking the tent more laterally than from above), I was still dry but a few drops had made it through. Georgia has some nasty rainstorms (so bad that the average driver slows down from 15 over the speed limit to about 20 mph) and I don’t think this would have protected me from one of those.
Lessons Learned
- Reflective material on the rain fly makes the tent extremely easy to spot in the dark.
- Georgia is far too hot in the summer for camping at low altitude.
- Getting the tent assembled into a usable state was easy for an amateur, but complete and proper setup eluded me.
- The Bryce 2P tent was worth the wait. I’m excited to use it in the outdoors next time.