Marmot Crane Creek 2P UltraLight Tent

TLDR: Expect to replace the stakes with something better. It doesn't come with enough to be functional. Expect to buy guy line tensioners and make your own guy lines. Expect to make your own ground sheet. Expect to spend at least $50 more after your purchase to have a proper, usable light tent. Expect the tent to weigh around 5lbs when ready for the trail. Aside from that, it's well designed and very well constructed. See update at the end. Long Review: I have been buying and using tents for a long time. While there are many good things here, let's cover the bad first. The listing for this tent is wrong about the weight and fails to mention that it is missing accessories which must be bought before the tent is ready to go on a real hike. The kit weighs 4 lbs, 5.6 oz as I received it. That's almost a whole pound heavier than the listed weight. Cut off all tags and chunk the plastic trash in the package and you shave maybe an ounce. But it gets worse. Once you get enough stakes and guy lines set up to make it functional, it will weigh more, and that's still without a ground sheet. Listed as 3lbs, 8 oz, you'll be looking realistically at 5+ lbs in the end with a ground sheet and at least 4.4lbs without. Still not bad for the size, but why lie about it? There are only 6 decent aluminum shepherd's hook stakes included when 12 are required to properly stake everything out. Even the cheapest tents come with enough stakes for any configuration and usually with one or two to spare. There are stakes for the tent corners and the two points of the vestibules, but none for 4 guy lines or for the middles of the 2 ends of the fly. This will add around $10-$40 and probably 3-5 ounces. I am replacing all of the stakes with MSR groundhog minis, around $33 for 12. This is a good balance in the price/weight/usefulness spectrum. Add something like that to the listed price for reference. This is terrible customer service from Marmot for a product which they list at $299 on the tag in the package. (I paid $150, normal amazon price is $200.) There are no guy lines on the tent, but rather a hank of 4 guy line cords rolled up in the stake bag with 2 plastic guy line tensioners. 2 tensioners will get you ventilation, but you need 4 to 6 to guy out for storm or wind. So you can also expect to buy yourself a set of guy line tensioners. I decided to go with an ultralight kit which includes extras and a length of ultralight dynema-and-something cordage for around $16 in order to keep the weight reasonable. In order to fit the guy line string in the stake bag, they made the stake bag massively oversized, meaning true ultralighters need to make a new stake bag or go without one. This is disappointing from a tent with so much attention to weight in every detail of its construction. Now let's talk about the good: The tent itself is designed well. The main poles are connected at the apex with a swivel-thing. It makes it easier to assemble, harder to get things tangled, and adds a tiny bit of weight. I'm not sure if I like it yet. I could do without it, but it may add stability to the tent. There is a "spreader" pole with 2 sections which widens the roof of the tent at the top. This is very nice, and gives a bit more headroom by fully stretching the material and creating extra volume inside. The poles clip to the tent with nice, ultralight clips. They are aluminum and light, but not too fragile. There is a pole splint sleeve in the stake bag for temporary fixes to the poles. I broke a pole at the joints and had to fix it with another method. The corners of the tent have simple metal grommets for the poles and simple, light cordage loops for stakes and rainfly attachments. The ultralight mindset really shows here, but everything is sturdy as well. The tent body is mostly mesh. It is a fine mesh which feels more like looking through a pair of pantyhose than looking through the mesh of cheaper tents. It makes things look a bit blurry and doesn't offer quite the same visuals as looking out of a cheaper tent. I'm OK with this. The material seems lighter and sturdy enough. The doors are large and very well designed. The zippers seem to end early for weight savings, preventing the door from opening fully when unzipped (though they open adequately this way), but the doors stretch open wider when locked into the ultralight holders, leaving tons of room to work with, and they zip very easily. The side walls are nearly vertical and the end walls have only a minor slope for the first 12 inches, making it very roomy inside considering the dimensions. It is easy to sit up, move around, sit on your knees, or change clothes inside. The floor is thin but sturdy enough if you use a ground sheet. The seams are all well sealed. It has 4 small seams, one at each corner, for reinforcement. The floor is not a bathtub style, but has a seam around the entire edge as well. This seems fine and the stitching all over the tent seems great. There is a plastic clip/ring thing hanging from the apex of the inside to hang lights or other things from. There is also a small, opaque white triangular pocket near the apex which can be used for small gear or a headlight. The white color acts as a diffuser, turning the headlamp into a lantern. I love this, but I bring my own ultralight diffuser for a microstream USB. This is the only portion of the tent which isn't transparent mesh other than a 6-inch section around the base. There are also 4 loops around the tent ceiling which can be used for hanging a gear loft. Weirdly, the tent does not come with a loft and I don't think one is available for it, but you could make one if you like. There are 2 small gear pockets inside. They are well designed and they will rest partly on the ground instead of causing the tent walls to sag, which is awesome. They are just large enough for a large phone and some other bits of small gear. The tent is perfect for one hiker plus gear. It can hold two with only the most necessary gear in an emergency. For a couple, the rainfly would always be needed to store gear in vestibules. I'm 5'8 and have plenty of room beneath my feet for gear when laying down, plus ample room along my side for spreading wet things to dry and spreading out phones/drinks/snacks, etc while sleeping. The rain fly is also very nice. The color is nice while in the tent with it on. It has 2 vestibules, one larger than the other. I like this, as it saves weight and only one large vestibule is needed. It only looks slightly lopsided when set up. The fly door Velcro and zippers are great, and the holders for the flap are ultralight and nicely made. There is one ventilation hole at the top of the fly which has a Velcro closure and a small built-in pole for holding it open. It works great, but is not large. The fly also ends a few inches above the ground in order to improve ventilation, which I believe will work nicely and still block rain when staked out properly. There are two places for small guy lines at the middles of the ends, which holds the fly away from the body to help in rain and improve ventilation. There are also 4 loops for guy lines along the corners of the fly. These seem sturdy but light. Overall I love the design of the tent and the ultralight mindset used in the details of its construction. I think it will serve me well for a long time, but I am disappointed in Marmot for shady amazon listings and for the lack of needed accessories in the package. They could and should do better as a company. I'm sure their only excuse for not including these things is to make the tent's weight closer to the imaginary weight on this amazon listing. If they want to lie about it, why bother also skimping on the required extra bits? Stop lying to us, Marmot. If you don't mind spending extra money and making your own extras, it's a 5-star item. update: This tent was destroyed. I survived Hurricane Laura and the eye came right over my house. I spent two weeks living in this tent afterward because it was more comfortable and bug-free than trying to stay in a sweltering house without electricity and full of mosquitos. The tent worked great through most of this, but one of the main poles mysteriously got broken while I was away from home one day. I was able to make it work with some bailing wire and duct tape to reinforce the broken area of the pole, but I was a bit disappointed with this. After this, I went to Colorado for a few weeks to get away from the Fallout universe which my neighborhood had become. I had no plans nor friends in the area, only traveled around various mountains and camped wherever I could drop the tent. It worked great for a while, but I had to travel with my dogs as well, as this was not a camping trip, but a refugee trip. Eventually, my anxious Pitt ripped his way out of the tent when I had walked away to use the bathroom and ruined it fully. Thankfully, there were no bugs in the Colorado mountains and I was able to stay for the rest of the trip comfortably enough, but it would take some major repairs to fix the massive rips in the material of this tent, and considering the state of the poles, it's just not worth it anymore. I have not touched this tent since coming home from that trip. This was my dream hiking tent. I'm disappointed that it got torn up, but it's not the end of the world. It served me well and got me through some very rough times in much more comfort than many had at the time. I am currently saving up to buy another or something very similar to this. Overall, I would buy again. I recommend it, but it isn't a good dog kennel.