"Back from that trip" - Review of Mountain Hardwear Lightpath 3 Tent 3-Person 3-Season

OK, so we had howling gales and days on end of rain, followed by about 3 days of sunshine - perfect testing weather! You'll be glad to hear that the Lightpath kept us perfectly dry throughout, as advertised. We managed to figure a way to erect the tent fly-first (basically do the quick pitch then one of you gets wet re-pegging stuff down while the other sorts out the inner), though actually we ended up packing the inner first more often than the other way around. It took a few days to work out precisely the best way to put up the tent, but it proved robust enough to cope with such amateurishness - it just wasn't as big inside when we got it wrong. Once we had our act together, I was proved wrong about the cooking space - the angle of the door makes it perfectly possible to sit in the dry while cooking outside. We liked having the choice of sides for our storage/the door - it made a big difference when the wind/rain direction changed. The only 'flapping' we encountered was in that situation - we simply unpegged everything and shuffled the tent (and everything in it) around so that the rear faced the wind, and it never so much as fluttered thereafter. Took all of 2 minutes. The mesh is fine enough to keep out the infamous Highland midge, which was a big bonus where we were. We need to replace a small patch of it following an invasion by a rodent or rodents unknown. (Niece left food loose in the tent, sigh.) One other slight mishap wasn't our fault - one of the pole clips came away from the fly - but didn't cause us any real problems. We compensated by pegging out that side slightly differently (no repair kit to hand.) Hopefully I can either fix that or get it fixed easily now I'm home. Pegs - we needed an extra 4 for the guylines, no more no less. It's worth using the guys, particularly in rough weather - it definitely helps the tent keep its shape better, with or without a missing clip. For getting around, we split the tent between two 8-litre dry bags and carried them tied outside our (tiny) packs. That worked well, except when we packed wet... drybags work both ways of course, d'oh. But the inner was never even damp, and the bags gave us extra space to tuck odd items into. Short version? I love this tent. It takes a little getting used to after a dome, but it's way lighter than the last tent I lugged around Scotland, and much drier to boot.
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