Shahram
I ain't got herpes no more.
I needed a new base camp tent for camping with my family (me, wife, infant son). My tent needs were: ease of setup, free standing, aluminum poles, full coverage rain fly, and it must be big enough to fit a pack-and-play (portable baby crib), beds, and gear, and be tall enough to stand up in.
I found the Kelty Green River 4 Tent on sale at a local sporting goods store. Although it does not have aluminum poles, the fiberglas ones were very stout, and so I sprang for it. It looked like a simple free-standing dome with a full fly, and at $200.00 ($50.00 discount), and having a reputable name, I bought it with confidence.
I should have set it up before I went camping.
We arrived at our destination, a beach camp, in the middle of the night, cool temps (50º), a light wind (5 mph), and misty.
Setup was a bitch. The poles were very stout, but the sleeves on the tent were very tight, and the poles snagged at every joint during setup, requiring us to have multiple hands pushing, untangling, and then pushing again. Got the tent together, and noticed it had open windows, with no zippered flaps. The windows were open screens, which constituted the top 1/4 of the tent, the top half of the front door, and two side windows which stretched from the middle of each corner to a few inches off the ground. None of these screens had closable flaps. Without the rainfly, the tent itself had all the privacy and weather protection of a g-string bikini. The only zipper on the whole tent was the door...which itself was only a mesh screen!
The rain fly was a very complex cover with a large vestibule that needed guying and staking in order to just access the door. The vestibule, however, did not seal either, but had a series of loose curtains that hung in front of screens.
I closed the tent as best I could, and set up inside. The rain fly covered the entire tent, but as the wind kicked up, cold, wet air creeped up under the rain fly and into the open screens, which were just inches from the ground. I could feel a draft going through the tent, and our bed and gear were dewing up and getting wetter by the second. Leaving my son alone in his crib was not an option, so my wife and I huddled together for warmth and kept him between us. We froze our asses off, and it was only in the 50ºs, with a 5 mile an hour wind! I can only imagine what a really cold, windy night would have felt like! We barely slept the whoe night, and were moist and clammy in our beds by morning.
If you want a tent for hot, still nights, that will only provide fresh air and bug protection, this is the tent for you. If you may encounter any weather at all, especially wind, cold, dew, or dust, I'd say skip this model altogether.
