Gear Review: REI Co-op Base Camp 4 Tent

I’ve been camping with my 3 kids for years. My girls love it! My son, not so much. But that’s a story for another post. The hardest part of getting out with them is that we needed 2 tents: my Nemo backpacking tent for me and the little one and a K-Mart Bluelight special 2 person “backpacking tent” weighing in at just shy of 6 lbs!!! Anyway, I think I have finally found the solution to having to setup 2 tents whenever we go camping. The REI Co-OP Base Camp 4.

Modeled after mountaineering tents, this one is huge and weighs in at a whopping 16lbs! At first, I was wary of such a monstrous sized tent. Fearful that it would take me hours to setup and breakdown. But it is surprisingly easy for one person to set up on their own. A review on the REI website suggests one person can setup the tent in 5 minutes with the rain fly on. I’d honestly like to see them try! Realistically, it takes a single person about 15 minutes to setup. Which isn’t bad considering my Bluelight special used to take me twice that!

From the outside, the tent looks like a castle. The front door vestibule (that’s right, there’s a front door AND a back door) has enough space to fit the entire footprint of my Nemo Hornet 2. The backdoor is only slightly smaller. They both have enough space to fit all of your gear. Or, if you have a pet, it’s the perfect little room for them to have to themselves.

Once inside, I was amazed by the amount of storage. There weren’t just 2-4 pockets lining the walls. No, this tent fit for a king…sized family…has 14! Yes, you are reading that correctly. 14 storage pockets and 17 “hangars” for lights, etc. It’s like the tent storage of my dreams! There were so many options for all of my nightly needs (like a headlamp, glasses, book, book lamp, etc.).

The other great thing about this tent is that it provides the right amount of venting without making the space cold. The nighttime temperatures while we were camping got down into the upper 30s. And we were very comfortable. Since this first trip, we’ve also taken the tent out in higher temperatures, in a very exposed site, and the tent never got stuffy. Kudos to the designers for finally figuring that out!

Tearing down the tent was just as easy as setting it up. I always hate tearing down tents that don’t have clips, but rather have the slots you have to slide the poles into because the poles always come apart as you’re trying to get them in or out of the slot. These poles are made so well though, that this was never an issue. I manged to get the entire tent deconstructed and all of it back in the stuff sack in 30 minutes doing it myself.

All in all, I am very impressed with this updated version of the REI Co-OP Base Camp 4 tent and am looking forward to many, many years of use with it!

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