For consistent quality and a solid investment, I’ve long been a fan of Big Agnes tents. The Big Agnes Fly Creek HV UL 2 person is in their award-winning Fly Creek line, redesigned this year. Each of their Fly Creek tents now feature steeper wall architecture and a vertical door, so you get more head space and don’t feel like you’re crawling into your tent. Even though you’re not increasing your footprint, you feel like the tent is larger, having that extra vertical coverage. What hasn’t changed in the redesign: you still get all of the weatherproof and technical features of a Fly Creek three-season tent, with the ultralight materials that keeps this tent line in my top favorites for backpacking trips.
The Fly Creek uses DAC tent poles, which incorporates DAC’s new Green Anodizing™ process into the poles and aluminum J Stakes. What is this? It’s a material that’s safer for the environment and significantly reduces waste water by recycling water throughout the manufacturing process. They’re extremely lightweight.
The two-person Fly Creek features a vestibule to help you keep the interior of your tent dry, and a vertical door with storm flaps on the vestibule zipper. There’s only one door, which is one way they keep the weight down, but this is my only slight disappointment: personally, I’d rather carry a few more ounces and have two doors. We tried it out in the Sky Lakes Wilderness in Southern Oregon in fall, and the lack of a second door was the only inconvenience we encountered.
You get velcro tabs that connect the fly to the poles, which makes it easy to have stability, and reflective guylines and webbing stops you from tripping on your stakes if you have to go outside the tent at night. There are three interior pockets, and the tent is gear loft-ready, with loops built in, but you’ll need to buy a triangle gear loft separately if you want to add that. The footprint is also sold separately, but this isn’t a problem in my book. In the summer, we don’t use a footprint typically, and in winter, we use an oversized tarpaulin so we can have an added area to wipe our feet and store our shoes.
For the nitty gritty, the trail weight of the two-person Fly Creek is one pound, 15 ounces and the packed weight is 2 pounds, five ounces. The floor area is 28 square feet, so yes, it’s a snug two-person tent (or roomy one-person + pack tent). The Fly Creek 2-person is $349, and as noted above, a solid investment for a tent that will last you many seasons (and you can always utilize Big Agnes’ return policy if not). They do have Fly Creek one-person and Fly Creek three-person tent option, as well.