Reviewer Information

• Name: Cora Hussey
• Age: 23
• Gender: Female
• Height: 5 ft 9 in (1.75 m)
• Weight: 150 lb (70 kg)
• Email address: cahhmc "at" yahoo "dot" com
• Location: Los Angeles, California, USA
• Date: March, 2004

Basic Product Information

• Manufacturer: Marmot
• Year of Manufacture: 2001
• URL: http://www.marmot.com/
• Listed weight:
  • Minimum: 5 lb 5 oz (2.4 kg)
  • Packaged: 6 lb 7 oz (2.9 kg)
• Weight after use in this review:
  • Minimum (tent only): 4 lb 7 oz (2 kg)
  • Poles (in pole bag): 1 lb 1 oz (500 g)
  • Stuff sack: 5 oz (150 g)
  • Included repair materials: 3 oz (85 g)
  • Total packaged (excluding stakes): 6 lb (2.7 kg)
• Measured Size: (L x W x H) 93 x 52 x 40 in (2.4 x 1.3 x 1 m)

Product Description

Door

The door is a D-shaped opening through the fly and body on one of the small ends. The fly has flaps which cover the zipper in the door. Both the body and the fly have ties to hold the doors back and keep the opening open.

Setup

I pack my Up High by rolling it into its stuff sack. The stuff sack is in the form of a long pocket with a flap which tucks in and secures everything. I have found this longer side-opening to be easier to open and use than the standard smaller end-opening stuff sack. Once out of the stuff sack, the tent is set up by pushing the two poles to the (closed) end of their sleeves at the side opposite the door end. These closed ends are reinforced by thick Hypalon-like rubber. The other ends of the poles then fit into grommets. This makes setup incredibly easy since it only takes two poles to pitch the entire tent tautly. All four corners have loops for pegs or skis. The tent has guylines midway up each of the pole sleeves and in the middle of the longer edges. Additional guyline attachments exist in the middle of the bottom of each side of the fly.

Vents

The Up High has two 12 in (30 cm) zippers at the top of the tent body, and these are then mirrored by two vents in the fly outside. Additionally, the fly vents have little plastic bars on the bottom side which can be attached via hook-and-loop to the opposing top side of the fly vent to prop the vents open. The instruction manual informs the user that the best ventilation is obtained by keeping the gap between the fly and the ground open and airy. It has been my experience that keeping that bottom area snow free adds a great deal to the probability of having a dry tent in the morning.

Details

The Up High has mesh pockets everywhere. It has one double-layer pocket at each of the four corners, and one double-layer mesh ceiling pocket. The stuff sack doubles as a hanging pocket, and there are loops around the top of the ceiling to run cord through and dry socks on. The poles themselves are shock-corded aluminum, and they have rounded edges where they connect to one another to make for easier assembling.

Field Testing

I have used the Up High on ten trips in northern Colorado Rockies, the Sierras of California, and northwestern Washington in the Cascades. The trips have ranged from high-wind, brutal weather mountaineering trips to lazy and wet spring powder dumps on ski trips.

Temperatures ranged from 90 F (32 C) to -20 F (-30 C), and conditions ranged from snowy, icy and brutally windy to wet and even sunny and dry. Elevations ranged from 8,000 to 12,000 ft (2500 to 3700 m), and terrain was mostly mountainous. The Up High has been with me in the harshest weather and conditions I have been in, from 60 mi/hr (97 km/hr) winds with blowing ice, to 80 F (27 C) temperatures on blazing glaciers.

Important Usage Points:

+ Product as Advertised: Yes
Comments: The Up High was advertised as a four-season economical tent with a super-fast pitch time. I would agree with all of these points. I have certainly used it in four-season weather, and it has held up nicely. I have found that the Up High is about half the price of many other tents with similar footprints and setup configurations, although the more expensive tents are usually single wall tents. As for the super-fast pitch time, it is extremely nice to not have the whole series of a separate tent body to set up, a fly to pitch over the top, and the whole thing to then batten down. It pitches tautly with just the two poles in the fly, and two guylines. It is definitely faster or equal in setup time to any tent I've owned or seen.

+ Durability: Excellent
Comments: On one hand, I have only ever pitched this tent on the snow. On the other hand, this tent has seen much worse things than being pitched on uneven and rough ground. I've chopped out the guylines and peg loops with an ice axe. In the middle of a couple of nighttime storms, while stumbling and half asleep, I've taken to the edges of the fly and body haphazardly with a shovel to clear snow. The tent has sat out for days on end in sunshine that cooked my skin despite loads of sunscreen, and withstood blowing ice that took my nose skin off, and it still looks, well... new. The fly shows no sign of UV fading, and the tent walls and body are as clean and whole as the day I bought it.

+ Ease of Setup: Excellent
Comments: The setup is super quick and easy, and the tent has set up fine on some pretty steep terrain because of the small and efficient footprint. I feel that if I can find a place for two people to sleep side by side, I can find a place for this tent. The setup, as mentioned above, simply involves the two poles being pushed to the end of the sleeves and then fixed in grommets. I have done it in under two minutes myself, from having the tent packed to having the poles inserted and the tent basically pitched. I especially like the large peg loops at the four corners, since they also allow me to use my skis to stake the tent out. I have also successfully used snow stakes and ice axes. The sides of the Up High have a guyline in the middle of the long side of the fly which also attaches to the bottom of the fly. This adds to the tension a great deal, pulls the fly away from the body which increases ventilation, and is super easy for me to use because I can just shove a ski or ice axe in the loop and plunge it into the ground.

+ Space and Livability: Good
Comments: Always a tradeoff, the ease of locating the tent as discussed above limits this space to a typical two person alpine tent. With big winter sleeping bags, booties, water bottles, pairs of hanging and drying gloves and underwear, and countless other mounds of stuff, the tent is really limited to two and a comfy two at that. I slept three tightly in it on two occasions, and that worked fine since it was in the spring. I personally think that the ceiling space (when a drying line is set up in the loops and the provided stuff-sack-come-attic is hung up) is too small for anything else, including cooking. Thus, I usually have to count on some other way to cook outside, be it a tarp or a snow hole. On that note, the tent also does not have a vestibule. On some trips I miss having one, but on others I do not. I do wish there was an option for one though, especially on the trips where I have to dig around in two feet of powder to find my pack, or to make sure everything is securely anchored or inside in high winds. Other than that, the tent is pretty liveable. The double wall keeps it warm, the yellow color keeps it bright inside (though it also makes it hard to sleep during the day or early evening), and the drying line attachments and multiple pockets and hanging points make it nice to organize my things while living in it for a few days.

+ Weatherproofness: Excellent
Comments: For a four season tent, weatherproofness is much more than whether it keeps the rain out, which it does just fine. The Up High has earned its designation as a four season tent, in my opinion. It has handled impressively large and wet snow loads, it has buffeted and stood strong against winds coming from both broadside and across the small side, and it generally pitches taut and stays that way. I have been most impressed with how little the fly stretches and sags when wet. After a heavy near-rain snowfall, I exited to find my skis still holding out the guyline as tautly as before going to bed. I have never really had a reason to use all the guylines, but the one in the back and the two on the side I use almost always. The only problem I have with the weatherproofness of the design is that the inner tent is not connected anywhere in the middle of the long side to the fly -- it is connected only at the edges. I imagine that if someday I have a swirling blizzard in a camp where I was too lazy to build some snow walls that this might be a real problem, but on past trips I have either had snow walls around the Up High to catch the blowing snow before it entered between the fly and the tent, or the wind was not really blowing all that hard. In both cases, snow build-up was minimal, and the only problem was the occasional billowing of the tent inward from the fly with strong gusts. I have had some of my other tents billow inward and collect snow as well though, so this problem is not necessarily specific to the Up High. One final thing that impressed me is that the Up High is surprisingly warm. The solid fabric walls and dead air space between the body and fly must do something extraordinary to insulate the interior, because I have found (on the one time I measured it) the inside of the tent to be 40 F (5 C) when it is about 10 F (-12 C) outside.

+ Ventilation: Great
Comments: For a four-season tent, the Up High ventilates very well. The body has no mesh whatsoever on it, and it vents via the slits described above and the area between the fly and the ground. The only issue is that so much of the ventilation depends on the bottom of the fly being open and aired. In a few storms, once that bottom became clogged with snow and the tent walls became wet and icy, there was no solution until the storm cleared. It certainly snowed inside the tent, but not as badly as other single-walls I have been in. The Up High dries very quickly, however, and on the two occasions where it was very wet inside after a heavy and wet storm, the tent dried within an hour of direct sunshine.

Summary

The Up High is an all-weather double wall tent with an efficient footprint. I have found it to be durable, easy to set up, and very dependable.

Upsides for me:

• Lightweight for a double wall four season tent
• Sturdy and dependable
• Super easy to set up

• No vestibule
• Top vents are inadequate in wet storms
• Snow collects between tent and fly on the broadsides

Read more reviews of Marmot gear
Read more gear reviews by Cora Hussey

Reviews > Shelters > Tents > Marmot Up High > Owner Review by Cora Hussey