Let’s face it, almost any tent will do the job when the weather’s playing nicely. A balmy evening, gentle breeze, a campfire and a few stars overhead. Lovely stuff. You could probably get away with sleeping under a beach umbrella, I mean, I’ve used my surfboard cover before.
But when the wind starts howling, the heavens open and your campsite begins to resemble a small inland sea, suddenly those few hundred grams you saved buying a bivy bag or ultralight tent don’t seem quite so clever. Enter Sea to Summit’s new Sentinel XP range.
Available in one, two and three-person versions, the Sentinel sits somewhere between featherweight backpacking tents and bombproof alpine expedition shelters. It’s not designed for an assault on Everest, nor is it trying to win any ultralight popularity contests. Instead, Sea to Summit has built a seriously weatherproof, rather versatile three-season tent that won’t require a team of Sherpas to carry it.
I’ve had the two-person XP2 for about a month now, including a multi-day packrafting adventure down Victoria’s Snowy River and a number of multi-night backpacking trips. And while the weather hasn’t exactly tried to kill me, I’ve had a pretty decent opportunity to see what makes this thing tick.
Design
First impressions? This thing’s built like a dug-in echidna. At 1870g minimal trail weight, and 2120g packed, the XP2 isn’t uber light, but either is it exactly a heavyweight, especially considering what’s gone into it. Premium DAC aluminium poles connect through a clever hex-hub arrangement, creating a remarkably rigid frame, while self-equalising guy-lines pair with internal Velcro tabs that attach to the poles to help keep everything where it should be when the wind decides not to play ball, and when does it ever?
Sea to Summit reckons it’ll withstand winds of up to 80km/h, thanks partly to some rather nifty zippered AirLift vents at either end. These help manage the pressure differences between the windward and leeward sides of the tent, reducing the forces that can cause conventional tents to buckle. Sounds complicated. Works rather cleverly, apparently. My XP2 hasn’t fallen down on me yet, so far so good, but I’ll wait for a proper New Zealand South Island sojourn before judging that properly.
But it’s the waterproofing that’s really impressive, I mean ‘stupidly’ impressive. The Sentinel’s deep bathtub floor uses a tough (well ‘tough for a 2kg tent) 40-denier nylon with a polycarbonate coating and an utterly ridiculous 25,000mm hydrostatic head rating. That’s around five to ten times the waterproof rating of most lightweight backpacking tent floors. In other words, you could probably pitch this thing in a swamp and still keep your bum dry. Not that I’m suggesting you try, but it worked well enough on a rainy night by a river.
Above that sits Sea to Summit’s Ultra-Sil LS flysheet, rated to 2000mm. The LS stands for Low Stretch, thanks to polyester reinforcement woven into the nylon ripstop fabric. Unlike nylon, polyester doesn’t absorb much moisture, so the fly is less likely to sag into a flapping mess when everything gets wet.
The XP2 offers a 2.86m² rectangular floor, roughly 220cm long and 130cm wide, with 109cm of headroom. Two generous vestibules add another 1.82m² of sheltered space for a 230 × 290 × 120cm overall footprint, and the whole lot packs down to a reasonably backpack-friendly 52 x 17 x 17cm. All rather impressive for a tent weighing just over two kilos.
In the field
What impressed me most about the Sentinel wasn’t necessarily the headline features. It was all the little things. The clever touches you don’t really notice until you’ve spent a few nights living with the thing.
Pitching, for starters, is ridiculously easy. Colour-coded poles make assembly pretty much idiot-proof, while the symmetrical design means there’s no mucking about trying to work out which end goes where. In fact, the airflow vents make lining up the fly sheet super easy. Slot the cross pole into its sleeves and the rest just falls into place.
And the machined aluminium HoldFast clips are brilliant. They’re strong, easy to operate, even with gloves, and a damn sight nicer than some of the fiddly plastic contraptions I’ve encountered over the years. What is brilliant about them, is that in tent mode they clip neatly to the pegged out inner, but in rain fly, or hangout mode they clip directly into the pole ends.
Even the pegs have teeth to grip the guy lines. And those guy lines themselves? Ridiculously thin, incredibly strong and rather neatly arranged to clip back to the tent tabs so you don’t end up spending half your evening untangling something resembling a bowl of spaghetti. And I finally realised why they call it paracord. The Sentinel doesn’t use the cheap nylon stuff that frays after a few weeks but instead is adorned with the real deal. Half the diameter and half the weight of what you’ll find on many other tents and seemingly twice as strong. Strong enough, you’d reckon, to clip yourself to the flysheet and jump out of a plane. Someone’s clearly thought about this stuff.
Then there’s the versatility, which is arguably the Sentinel’s cleverest trick. You can pitch it inner-first when the weather’s behaving, or fly-first when it’s bucketing down, keeping the sleeping compartment dry while you work underneath. You can even pack the inner away first when breaking camp in the rain.
You can also pitch the fly on its own, (works best with the dedicated ground sheet), or roll it back for stargazing mode, or even prop one side up with trekking poles to create what Sea to Summit calls Hangout Mode. I’ll admit, that last one initially struck me as a bit gimmicky. But it’s a rather nifty little shelter for sitting out the rain, brewing a coffee or simply watching the world go by.
Inside, things are surprisingly civilised. The near-vertical walls and rectangular floor mean there’s room for two full-sized sleeping mats without the usual wrestling match for territory. There’s decent headroom, well enough for my 188 cm frame to set up, as well as two enormous mesh pockets for stashing gear, two smaller side pockets, and plenty of little attachment points for hanging bits and pieces.
Even the pole bag doubles as a light diffuser. Stuff your head-torch inside, hang it from the ceiling and you’ve got yourself a rather pleasant little chandelier. Well, sort of. And I particularly like the pale frosty-green flysheet. It lets plenty of natural light through, so even on gloomy days you’re not sitting inside something resembling a damp cave. It does mean you will be up at first light, but isn’t that the purpose of getting out in the wilds?
There were a couple of niggles, though minor, and I had to look hard for them. The pale-coloured fly sheet, and white inner to get dirty easy so you might be wiping it down more than dark-coloured tents, and on the Snowy, we experienced a bit of condensation inside the fly. To be fair, we were camped beside a river, with high humidity, cool nights and barely a breath of wind. Every tent in our group suffered the same fate.
Gladly, I didn’t judge a book by its cover as on my other excursions I did not experience any condensation. The AirLift vents certainly help with airflow, although I do wonder whether slightly larger opening options for non-rainy nights might improve things in particularly still, humid conditions.
And while the Sentinel isn’t particularly heavy, there are obviously lighter tents available. If your idea of adventure involves counting every gram and camping exclusively in pleasant weather, you might want to look elsewhere.
The final word on the Sea to Summit Sentinel XP2
The Sentinel XP2 is one of those bits of kit that gets better the more time you spend with it. There’s very little here that feels gimmicky or unnecessarily over-engineered. Just a whole bunch of clever, well-considered features that make life in the bush that little bit easier.
It’s not the lightest tent on the market, and it is not built for snow, although theoretically it should handle snow fairly well. But for backpacking, packrafting, multi-day hiking and just about anything else where the weather might decide to throw a tantrum, it’s a pretty bloody good option.
At $899, it’s certainly not cheap. But considering the materials, build quality and versatility, I reckon there’s plenty of value here. Sea to Summit set out to build a tent that’s comfortable when the weather isn’t. And I reckon they’ve got this one right.
Go to Sea to Summit for more info on this and the rest of the brand’s tent range.
