4 - 6 Birth
Outwell Utah 6 Review - rrp £400
Firstly let me start by saying, this is one hell of a big 6 man tent.
This tent took about 30-40 minutes to pitch in mild conditions (and trust me, even though I put up a fair few tents, i'm not the quickest tent pitcher). I think if you are really good at pitching tents you could possibly do this on your own; on this occasion though, it took two. Sadly, during the pitching I was tightening up the guy ropes when one torn, not a bad enough tear to hinder the performance of the tent, but nevertheless it still ripped. I spotted a thermometer and a compass on one of the guy ropes, which I thought was really good.
Tent up, time to explore. It has steel poles which could hold up a house, and two fibreglass poles that keep the roof nice and tort; the wind wasn't strong when I put up, but I've used these poles before with other Outwell tents in extreme winds and they are really good for taking a beating. Like I said earlier, this tent is a really great size, with a generous head height for the giantsamongst us; the only problem with a big tent is heating it up in cold weathers (unfortunately for me, the nights dropped f-f-f-freezing temperatures, and I had sleeping bag problems, that's a whole new review/blog). The (detachable) bedrooms don't suffer at all but the fly sheet obviously suffers with large amounts of condensation. Needs airing a bit.
Remember the thermometer I mentioned earlier, yeah, well I thought wrong about it, it stated in the daytime it was below zero degrees, when in fact, according to my Jeep it was 67 degrees farenheight. Great idea, just executed poorly; the compass worked as well as expected though.
The amount of windows this tent has is great too, from skylights to full length windows all the way around. Finally, the bathtub groundsheet is strong enough to hold in two lunatic Labradors, so no complaints there then.
Apart from the hiccups with the guy ropes and thermometer etc, I would definitely recommend this: 8/10. I have my eye on the Indian Lake model now though.
