3F UL Gear Lanshan 2 Pro Review

With an unbeatable price for the features it packs, the Lanshan 2 Pro is the tent no one else seems to be able to beat when it comes to delivering a two-person tent with all the necessary features to get you on the trail for days, weeks, or months at a time. Even with such an insanely great price, this tent still doesn't skimp on using durable, quality materials like its 20D sil-nylon rain fly and 20D solid nylon interior, both of which keep the weather outside and the dry, warm air inside. The interior is spacious enough to fit two sleepy people snuggly, and the solid interior walls facilitate stretching out your season by providing more protection from rain and snow than mesh.

Performance Comparison

Livability

We were pleasantly surprised with how livable we found the Lanshan 2 Pro, both inside and out. Manufacturers often cut costs on budget models by shrinking the tent size to save on fabric, but this isn't the case here. The interior space is fairly generous, with an internal area of almost 30 square feet and plenty of room to put two 20 x 72-inch wide sleeping pads side by side. A peak height of 47 inches running diagonally through the entire tent gives useful head space to change, eat, or play a late-night game of UNO.

A small pocket inside gives you a small storage option for nighttime necessities, like a phone and/or a battery charger. The PU-coated bathtub floor is not as slippery as sil-nylon, something you'll be thankful for when your sleeping pad stays in place.

Dual vents provide a good source of air to help keep condensation at bay. Our model's solid interior featured a mesh upper panel to let air through even when you need to keep doors closed due to foul weather outside. Dual vestibules are also generous in their usable space to store packs, cook food out of the wind, and put on your trail runners to greet the new dawn. Having dual doors means a higher chance of undisturbed sleep when someone needs to leave the tent to answer the call of nature or to check on the status of the local hungry bear population, real or imagined.

Weight

The Lanshan 2 Pro is one of the heavier tests in our ultralight lineup, coming in at a total of almost 39.2 ounces for the tent fly, sewn-in solid interior, stakes, and all of the included accessories. The fly cannot be used alone as the interior is inseparable from it. Sharing the load with your backpacking buddy will be unrealistic for this reason, so having one person carry the tent and the other carry sleeping pads or bags will help even things out.

This higher weight isn't necessarily because the fabrics themselves are overly heavy. The tent is comprised of a 20D sil-nylon fly, 15D nylon interior walls, and a 20D PU-coated nylon floor. The tent is simply generously sized, and the amount of fabric used adds up. There are more exotic fabrics that could be employed, but the retail price of this tent would rise precipitously, or long-term durability and weather resistance would suffer. Pack volume is fairly reasonable for a two-person tent at approximately 14 x 6 x 6 inches. The Lanshan 2 Pro uses your own trekking poles to set up, saving some ounces from requiring its own tent-specific poles.

Weather Resistance

When imagining being stuck in a torrential storm inside the Lanshan 2 Pro with our best hiking buddy, we ask ourselves: would we still be friends the next morning? Thankfully, yes! The sil-nylon exterior fly does an excellent job keeping rain out, and the solid exterior helps thwart any sideways blowing rain — or even snow. The bottom of the fly rests low near the ground to help with anything splashing up, and the 4-inch+ high bathtub floor keeps any water from coming up from the bottom. The solid interior can also help trap heat, especially on frigid nights when camping in the snow.

Six stakes are usually used to secure the tent. You may use two additional guy lines on the side panels to add extra stability from wind and fabric loops to attach more guy lines to the ground or neighboring trees for particularly sour conditions. Nylon does sag when it gets wet, so you may need to readjust your pitch if it rains overnight.

One very big caveat to the weather resistance of the Lanshan 2 Pro is its need to be seam-sealed before you use it, a trait shared by most any sil-nylon tent. This step is offered at the factory for a reasonable price, or you'll have to plan to take about an hour to apply a silicone-based seam sealing product to the interior seams yourself. Also, be sure to dry out the tent after a proper soaking, like hanging everything out to dry during lunchtime. The sil-nylon and PU-coated nylon will absorb water, and the PU-coated nylon can degrade and get moldy if stored wet.

Even though this wouldn't be what we would classify as a true four-season tent — something to use to climb Denali - - we would feel comfortable pushing the definition of “three-season camping” by a few weeks and camping in the first snows of the season without worry.

Adaptability

We gave high marks to the Lanshan 2 Pro for this metric. The solid exterior walls make it a good choice to utilize in all weather, save the very wintry or the very hot. If you find that the vents alone don't do the job well enough to keep condensation at bay, you'll have to play around with opening up the inner and outer doors to get the right amount of air circulating. Unfortunately, the interior cannot be separated from the exterior for areas where bugs aren't a problem.

You'll also have to be a little pickier finding a good, flat pitch spot for larger-in-area, two-person tents like the Lanshan 2 Pro compared to smaller one-person tents or tarps. Both the interior dual doors and exterior door flaps can be rolled up and stowed, giving you a ton of flexibility on how much experience of the outside you would like to allow in.

Ease of Set-Up

So long as the ground of your tent site takes a stake well, the setup of the Lanshan 2 Pro is quite easy, even if you're by yourself. Begin by staking out the four corners loosely, then prop up the tent with two trekking poles — having a pair of variable-length poles makes it much easier to get a solid pitch. Stake out the two doors and adjust the tautness of all your lines.

All of the main stakeout points have easy-adjust tensioners, which we found hold their tension quite well. You may find you'll need to adjust your pitch after the nylon relaxes a bit or if the nylon becomes wet from a passing rain storm.

Taking down the tent is even simpler: remove the lines from the stakes and take the trekking poles out. Collect the stakes and stuff the tent into the included stuff sack. Being made of nylon, you don't need to be especially carefully getting the tent into its sack.

Should You Buy the 3F UL Gear Lanshan 2 Pro?

The Lanshan 2 Pro makes a great two-person tent for those who want to dip into ultralight gear but don't want to blow their budget before they even set foot on the trail. It can also be attractive for those who need a second tent or with more space. So long as you remember to get your tent seam sealed or do the job yourself, the Lanshan Pro is a durable and reliable tent at a really hard-to-beat price. The extra ounces it comes with are really its only big downside.

What Other Ultralight Tents Should You Consider?

For the budget-minded, look into either the Durston X-Mid 1P Gen 2 or the Six Moon Designs Lunar Solo (a two-person version of both of these tents is also available). Neither will be close to the price point of the Lanshan Pro, but both would be a definite upgrade in most of the specifications we've discussed. The Kammok Kuhli UL is technically cheaper, but being a simple tarp rather than a full-featured tent, you'll give up a lot to save little. For a tent with a similar interior floor area to the Lanshan, check out either the Zpacks Duplex Flex or the Tarptent StratoSpire Ultra, though both will set you back a lot more money.