Seek Outside Twilight Hot Tent Bundle - The first hot tipi I will use more than once

The Southwest is just not a great environment for most tipi tents. Between the rocks, insects, and relentless dust, it is incredibly difficult to find the right place to pitch one, and they are noisy in the wind. I met Ryan Sapena with Seek Outside at the Western Hunting and Conservation Expo, and he walked me through the features of the Twilight. I wasn’t sold until he showed me the floor and stove system. The bathtub-style floor had the potential to keep wind from blowing under the tent, and the stove looked like something I could trust.

I didn’t even have a chance to do a test setup of the tent before my wife and I headed out for a two-night backpacking trip on the Arizona Trail. My wife might be the coldest sleeper on the entire planet, so she was seriously motivated to work through the process the first time with the carrot of a wood-burning stove hanging in the balance. It took us a good 30 minutes to figure out the nuances, but before long we were toasty warm with flickers of firelight through the plexiglass door of the stove.

Worth the Weight

Seek calls the Twilight a three-man tent, but by most tent makers' standards, it is easily a four-man tent with a width of 10 feet and a length of 14 feet. With the stove in use, there was more than enough room for the two of us, our dog, two stools, packs, sleeping bags, and a Jetboil stove. The complete tent with canopy, floor, carbon poles, and fire mat weighs in at 6 pounds, 7 ounces. The large standard stove with stove pipe adds 3 pounds, 2 ounces, pushing the entire system close to 10 pounds. I realize that doesn’t sound like a “backpacking” setup, but keep in mind that it can sleep three in warm, dry comfort!

The most unique feature of the Twilight tent is the zipperless door. That’s right, no zipper. The door slides up and down on the front guyline. This eliminates a common failure point, but it does mean that you need to crawl in and out of the tent. The country we hiked through was composed of decomposing granite, so the angular gravel did start to wear on my knees after going in an out during setup and collecting firewood.

Functional Fire 

The Large Titanium Stove (that is the actual product name, not just a description) is very easy to set up. You construct the box and insert long bolts that hold it together and serve as legs. The box is big enough to handle wood up to about 4” in diameter, so you don’t need to constantly feed it sticks. The damper serves as a spark arrestor, and with a front air intake control, it was easy to control the burn. The chimney is one piece of rolled titanium sheet metal. Rolling it the first time is tricky, and you should absolutely do this at home with at least one person to help. If you have a chance to burn the stove before you leave, it creates “memory” in the metal, and it is substantially easier to roll the next time.

Two Thumbs Up

I had given up on using hot tipi tent setups. The setups needed to be almost perfect, which I rarely find in Arizona, and they were noisy in the wind. I could stay warm just trying to gather enough sticks to keep the little stoves burning! But the Seek Outside Twilight hot tent has given me new hope. It is easy to set up, as quiet as any backpacking tent in the wind, and the stove is a dream.

Check out the Seek Outside Twilight Hot Tent Bundle at Seekoutside.com