Testing conditions

During the past two months, I have carried on this test in the Saguenay - Lac St Jean region in the province of Quebec (Canada). Since mid-August, the temperatures have cooled somewhat to stay in the 41°F/59°F (5°C/15°C) range at night, and the weather has often been on the wet side, with heavy rain sometimes for days at a row. For the purpose of this test , I have slept about 7 nights in the Blue Ridge Camping Hammock in the middle of the woods, but close enough to my cabin so I could withdraw to a drier bed in case the weather turned too nasty. As it is, though I had some rainy nights, I have managed to avoid the strongest showers.

Additionally, the hammock has remained hung in my yard for about 2 weeks, where it has been subject to a lot of rain and wind (top picture shows the flattened hammock after a shower, and the right picture is a zoom on water pooling in the fly).

Observations

I have already addressed many bad points of the Blue Ridge Camping Hammock in my Field Report; the major ones being: it is unsteady and difficult to get in, gives very poor protection in rainy weather but doesn't let fresh air in when it is hot, and provides no room for gear (refer to my Field Report for details and pictures).

Here are some additional issues I've become aware of since the previous report:

• given the ambient humidity and chilliness, I often woke up with a lot of condensation inside the fly; unfortunately, I could not find a way to get out of the hammock without wiping a great lot of it with my head, back and shoulders and even the sleeping gear I was taking out.



• I have never been able to set up the fly without having it rolling upwards in the corners where it is tied with shock cord to the end of the poles (see picture on the right). At the moment, it didn't seem a big issue, so I left it as it was; in retrospect, these areas seem to have made pretty good dust traps.



• the only specific wear sign I can report of is a slight discoloration of the fabric, and I even wouldn't have been aware of it but for the coloring discrepancies that show in the rolled-up corners.

Final conclusion

At the end of this test, I can see no reason to moderate the provisional conclusion I made two months ago. From my point of view, this hammock has not the qualities I would require of a backpacking hammock: it lacks sheltering abilities too much to be considered as a main sleeping apparatus without a back-up in case of bad weather.