I just published my Field Report for the Golite Xanadu on BackpackGearTest.org (read it here or start at the Initial Report here). This is an oddball tent and I felt I needed to say a bit more about it.The Xanadu is advertised as a four season, 2+ person tent that weighs in at well under five pounds. My measured carry weight of everything (tent, poles, stakes, stuffsacks, guylines, etc) is 4 lbs, 8.3 oz. The main body materials are Epic (the yellow in the photo) and Silnylon (the grey). Additionally, there are large no-see-um mesh walls and vents.
There are some reasons I am concerned about this tent and its marketing, but it's not all bad. In fact, it has quite a lot of good things going for it. I'm incredibly fond of its openness and space. Everyone who has ever bought a tent knows that when a manufacturer says a tent fits two people, that really means you better like your tent-mate, because you'll be squeezing into space that is, in reality, much more comfortable for one person.
This particular tent is advertised as fitting 2+ people, and when compared to industry standards I think this is a conservative designation. Many manufacturers would call this a three person tent. It's incredibly spacious and comfortable for two people, and in an emergency you could certainly squeeze in a third, but that would put it at that 'hope-you-all-used-deodorant-this-morning' level of closeness.
The Xanadu opens up into an airy palace. Beneath each silnylon vestibule (one on each side) is a mesh wall that unzips completely. In the photo to the left the vestibules are open and walls collapsed. Also, under that flap on the end is a tent-width giant mesh vent. While this mesh makes for an open and airy environment, it is exactly the reason that this shouldn't be considered a four season tent.I had the Xanadu out in Lava Beds National Monument a few weeks ago, and the wind was vicious. I secured the tent, tightly staking it in, tying out guylines, and tightening the vestibules. A short while later I poked my head in to grab a jacket and everything was covered in dust. The wind would whip up the lava rock dust and blow it through large vents on the end, as well as under the vestibule and through the large mesh walls. There was no way to close down the tent further - the mesh walls and vents were at the mercy of the wind. There isn't even a flimsy piece of velcro to hold the vent closed over the mesh. My mind immediately flashed back to a painful night in a snowstorm a couple of years back up near Carson Pass.
With ~100 mph gusts and ~3 feet of overnight snowfall, the tent we were in at the time did an incredible job protecting us from the elements. But it had a small mesh vent that was difficult to keep closed, and over the course of the night spindrift would make it through this vent and collect on our sleeping bags and gear. And if there is one thing you want to avoid on a cold, stormy winter night it is getting your insulation layers wet.
Now, take this tiny vent, make it impossible to close, widen it across both ends of the tent and make two entire walls of it. Suddenly the Xanadu is anything but a four season tent. I decided that I would not be testing the Xanadu in true four-season conditions due to safety concerns. And it turns out that my concerns are valid - see here for another tester's experiences in the snow.
My problem with this tent boils down not so much to the tent itself, but in the way that it is marketed. This is a bad, even dangerous four-season tent, but it isn't a bad tent. In fact, I see this line of tents as perfect solutions for people who want to give up their old, heavy backpacking tents but aren't ready to commit to a tarp or tarptent style. I know lots of people who just feel more comfortable in a 'real' tent and are willing to take the hit in weight, and this tent would be a decent (though expensive) stepping stone into lightweight backpacking.
In my review, I compare the Xanadu to tarptents that I have used. Essentially, it's a tarptent on steroids. It has some of the features that help save weight with tarptents, along with the corresponding issues. It is single walled (condensation) and uses a lot of mesh (dust/snow can get in on windy days). At the same time, the Xanadu provides a much more robust body, poles, and staking setup, and is therefore capable of handling conditions beyond that of a traditional tarptent.
This tent seems to fit in a weird, narrow niche between a lightweight, 3-season setup and a true, 4-season tent - too heavy and overbuilt for most conditions, but not robust enough for others. I actually have a trip coming up on the Lost Coast where it will be a great solution since I expect a lot of brutal wind but not snow. I don't entirely trust my lightweight shelters in those conditions, but the Xanadu should be nice.
I expect that most people aren't regularly taking tents out into snow storms, and those that do would recognize the limitations that the open mesh creates, but I really think Golite needs to reconsider the branding of the Xanadu as a four season tent.
I almost forgot to post my photos from last weekend! Before it gets too hot, I wanted to visit a new East Bay park. I settled on Pleasanton Ridge and met a couple of others there for a day of hiking and geocaching. It was a good place for wildflowers, but I wouldn't want to hike there in the heat of summer - 80 degrees was warm enough. Pictures available by clicking on the photo.
I could talk for days about what I've seen and what I think, but that's not gonna happen here. I'm currently dead tired and running on fumes (cookies and beer) so this is going to be my big 'Web 2.0 Expo' post for now. I've had some pleasant interaction with Six Apart, the company that provides the blogging platform software that I use. Most of the time I'm a happy Movable Type user (when things go wrong it's usually due to my own screw-ups), but lets not focus on the software. Lets talk about the reasons that Six Apart rocks that have nothing to do with blogging. Most photos by my colleague Moya and her ever-present Treo phone.
7. They build a mean ad-hoc mini golf course in their office.
I even got a hole in one!
6. They print their T-Shirts on women's cuts too
So did the Web 2.0 expo. Who knew women used the internet?
5. Payam can fix things
Like this Movable Type wrench thingee.
4. They had the best party of the South Park Crawl
Trust me on this one - we stopped by most of them.
3. I won a bottle of wine by giving them my card and being the lucky person to have it drawn from the fish bowl.
Alden Vineyard Cabernet. Their CEO's vineyard.
2. Historical truths on their office walls.
1. Vodka, even if it was gone when we were there.
That's what they told us, anyways. Web geeks definitely do not drink as much as the Outdoor Retailer crowd, however.
Thanks to some prodding from Theresa, this weekend we decided to check out an area that's been on my to-do list for a while: Cache Creek Natural Area. Cache Creek runs through the range between the central Valley and Clear Lake, and is generally too hot for comfortable hiking in the summer and too muddy for comfortable hiking in the winter. Our timing was perfect, hitting the area while it was still cool, but sunny and dry. In addition, the wildflowers were at their peak, with purples, yellows, and blues exploding all over the green hillsides.
We were planning on hiking in the short three miles to Baton Flat, then once there we would decide whether to set up camp there and dayhike the additional four miles one-way to Wilson Valley, or continue on to camp at Wilson Valley. It turns out we had no choice - Cache Creek was high compared to normal, making the crossing at Baton Flat possibly dangerous. We set up camp and decided to spend the afternoon lounging around - napping, exploring down the creek, photographing wildflowers, reading, fishing, and wandering. Later, some other backpackers came by and were able to scout a passable route and crossed slow but successfully, but we were already comfortably settled in to our camp.
No fish were successfully caught (though enormous carp were seen), and the wildlife was surprisingly scarce. We saw a bald eagle or two soaring in the distance, a turtle struggling upstream against the current, a frog, rattlesnakes, lizards, and ducks flying up and down the creek. The highlight was the coyote I saw on the drive along highway 20.
The real highlight of the weekend (other than the company, of course), was the wildflowers. Larkspur, Chinese Houses, Lupine...everywhere we turned there was color. I spent Saturday afternoon wandering around and gleefully snapping photos of every wildflower I came across...until I startled a rattlesnake, at which time I was spooked enough to go back to the safety of my tent for an afternoon book and nap.
I'm glad to have finally visited this area. I'm not sure if I'll go back - as mentioned before, the heat is a deterrent for most of the year. I was also surprised that the majority of the other people we saw were hunters, and it makes me a bit nervous to be wandering around in the same area as people with bows and shotguns. The fishing isn't the best, with carp being the common fish (to the best of my knowledge). However, I'd definitely come back for the wildflowers!
Photos are here: Cache Creek Wildflowers
Russ, the famous winehiker, invited us for a Tax Day night hike of Mission Peak. It was a training hike for some people planning a Shasta climb over Memorial Day, so it was no slow stroll in the park - the intent was a good workout, and a good workout is what we got. I managed to snap a few photos before the sun set, leaving us hiking by moonlight and headlamp.
The funniest part of the hike was a group of turkeys harassing a cow. The turkeys would sneak up behind the cow and start tapping at her back legs. The cow would then turn around and chase the turkeys, who would respond with a loud 'gobble gobble gobble'. Satisfied that the turkeys had been taught a lesson, the cow would go back to nibbling on the grass, unaware of them wandering back into her space, starting the process all over again. Entertainment like that on the trail is hard to come by!
It came to my attention a while back that the comment submission procedure on Movable Type 4 (and specifically this blog) was less than elegant. So I turned off the default registration-required settings and set it to allow for anonymous Captcha-filtered comments. But it turns out that this was even a worse idea because the Captcha didn't even show up on the comment submission form, leading to unpredictable errors when a comment was submitted. It went something like this:
Step 1: Comment Submission: "Hello, I'm submitting this comment on an entry and there is no spam checking - wow! There isn't even a Captcha image! I'm going to tell all of my pharmaceutical distributor friends!"
Step 2: User clicks submit, with evil spam plots brewing in the back of his or her mind.
Step 3: Movable Type processes the comment and checks whether the entered text matched the generated Captcha. Here's the problem - the end user never saw a Captcha image.
Result: End user gets an ugly message and runs around in circles in frustration, their evil plans to spam-bomb me having been defeated.
Meanwhile, I'm pleased that I'm not getting any comment spam, but I'm feeling a little rejected because I'm not getting any valid comments either. I'm thinking that I might welcome some spam. I know people are reading - I get several emails a week asking follow up questions. I keep thinking to myself, why don't they just enter a comment - maybe someone else can help?
The Five Minute Solution: Take out all of the screwy if/else statements from the Comment Form template so that the Captcha will display no matter what. Since I took out all of the other authentication methods these statements aren't needed anyways. This seems to work, so comments are working (for now...)
I'm still tweaking some CSS (the fonts don't want to play very nice) and I've also added a link to my new wildflowers page in the top navigation (also a work in progress). There will likely be a few more changes since I'm not entirely happy with what I've done in a short period of time, but at least I am now unique and no longer using a default Movable Type template.
"What wonders lie ahead?"
This is how Dave started us off on the trail every day of our six day trip into the Grand Canyon. Our group, (me, Paige, John, Dave (Paige's Dave), and David (my Dave)), spent an incredible week exploring some remote corners of the Clear Creek canyon, while also enjoying some civilization at the Phantom Ranch down along the Colorado River.
View the extended entry for the trip report and links to pictures. It's a long one, but I decided to keep everything in a single entry instead of posting a separate entry for each of the six days on the trail.
Anyone from the Bay Area is familiar with that cone-shaped peak just outside of Morgan Hill. You know - that one just west of 101. As a hiker, this peak has been calling to me for years, just asking for me to stand on top of it. Unfortunately, this peak (El Toro) is on private property and the only legal way to climb it is to participate in the once-annual Morgan Hill Historical Society sponsored hike. At 1,420.3 feet, it's a Bay Area 'Fourteener'.
We met Tom and Russ, fellow hiking bloggers, before 8 am and joined the throng of people just itching to summit El Toro. After a brief lecture from a geologist the hike began, and hundreds of people swarmed towards the peak.
Gaining about 1000 feet in a mile, this isn't an easy hike by most people's standards. It's steep, gravelly, and has poison oak just waiting for you to make a mistake. There's no warm up stretch - it's just straight up and then straight down, no time for breathers unless you stop. I'm glad I just got back from a good strenuous backpacking trip - made this hike seem a lot easier than it would have been if I was in my normal sluggish winter form. They even have ropes up for the last gravelly stretch to assist people on the slick gravel.
My pictures here: El Toro, Morgan Hill
Tom's report of the harrowing El Toro Ascent here: The Fourteener of Morgan Hill
We headed up to Lava Beds for the cold easter weekend with Paige and Dave and their kids. It was a fun and simple trip - car camping in the cold (17 degrees on Friday night) which kept the park quiet and uncrowded. We pretty much had the caves and the park to ourselves.
Time was spent playing tourist - we've seen so much of the park and so many of the caves, it's fun to pick and choose from our favorites to make a nice short weekend of it.
The itinerary included:
- Cox Ice Cave
- Golden Dome Cave
- Sentinel Cave
- Skull Cave
- Captain Jack's Stronghold
- Petroglyph Point
- Valentine Cave
