How the Naturehike Cloud-Up 2 Changed My Weekend Trips

My first backpacking tent was a seven-pound thing I bought in the early 2000s and kept for twenty years, mostly out of stubbornness. It was fine. It was also the reason I stopped looking forward to the walk in.

Here is the shape of my life now. I am fifty-eight, I live in Ogden, Utah, and most weekdays I am taking care of my mother. That leaves a Friday afternoon and a Saturday night if the week goes well. So my trips are one or two nights, usually up the Mirror Lake Highway in the Uintas, sometimes the Wasatch above town. Short windows. No time to be fighting gear in the dark.

The old tent lost me on a September night in the Uintas. The fly sagged, the inside walls got damp, and my lower back spent the next three days complaining about a night I had chosen to spend on the ground. It was not the ground's fault. It was the tent.

In spring 2024 I bought the Naturehike Cloud-Up 2. It is a two-person, three-season freestanding tent, 4.3 pounds, and it packs to 15.7 by 5.1 by 5.1 inches. It came with a footprint, which was most of why I picked it over the cheaper options. I have used it for about three seasons now, solo on backpacking trips and shared with my wife Carla when we car camp.

The first thing I noticed is that the poles clip instead of threading through a sleeve. You lay the tent out, you clip, you lift. I had it standing in the last of the daylight at the trailhead and my pad inflated before the light was gone.

The second thing I noticed is that I slept. That sounds like a low bar. It is not, at my age.

I have been rained on twice in this tent. The second time, water was running under the footprint at dawn and the floor inside was still dry.

The Uintas will rain on you. That is not a maybe. I have been caught twice, once by a storm that came over the ridge fast enough that I was still holding a cup of coffee, and once overnight, steady, about nine hours of it. The fly is 210T polyester with a 3000mm coating, and it does what it claims. There is also a small vent above the front door. On a still night, if I leave that closed, I get condensation on the walls. Open, mostly not.

The floor is 82.7 inches long, 49.2 wide, with 41.3 inches of height at the peak. I am 5 feet 11 and about 190 pounds, and I can sit up to pull my socks on, which matters more to me than the weight does. Solo, my pack goes at my feet and there is room left. With Carla it is a two-person tent the way a hotel room with one bed is a two-person room. You fit. You are not spreading out.

It is freestanding, which is the part I did not know I wanted. Last July I set it up on a spot that looked level, sat on it, and found out it was not. I picked the whole thing up and moved it four feet without pulling a stake. My old tent would have meant starting over.

The other use is car camping. Carla does not backpack, but she will drive up and meet me, and we sleep in it. Two adults, one night, the truck twenty feet away with the cooler in it. That is the version of camping we actually do now, and the tent handles it without any drama.

What bugs me. It is 4.3 pounds, and people who count grams will tell you that is not light, and they are correct, and I don't care. The packed size, 15.7 by 5.1 by 5.1 inches, takes a real slice out of a 50-liter pack. And the two-person rating is honest but snug. If you and a friend are both over six feet, get something bigger.

My routine is boring. I dry the Naturehike in the garage when I get home, I store it loose in a plastic bin instead of stuffed back in the sack, and I check the stakes before every trip. Three seasons in, the zippers still run clean and the fly has not needed any re-treatment.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

Buy the version that includes the footprint. Not because a footprint is magic, but because it takes the wear that would otherwise go into the tent floor, and a footprint is easier to replace than a tent. Set the thing up once in your yard, in daylight, before you take it anywhere. Clip the poles, look at how the fly sits, take it down. Ten minutes of practice saves you twenty at a trailhead with the light going.

Second: do not buy any two-person tent expecting two people to be comfortable in it until you have both laid down in one. Third: ignore anyone who tells you a tent has to be under two pounds to be worth carrying. I am fifty-eight, my back is not what it was, and 4.3 pounds of Naturehike I sleep well in beats 2 pounds of tent I fight all night. That trade is the whole thing.