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Great read fellas. I am going with the Go Lite Shangra-la 5 and a woodburner. Trying to stay in the 5 lb total weight range. Here is a pic of one. Ordering mine next week, then I will install a Titanium goat stove jack, and I am still researching stoves. This pic shows one with the nest(mesh full size interior, which I will only use in the midwest and Canada for warm weather skeeter/black fly protection), Out west, and in the cold, the SL 5 will be floorless and a single wall.

I have the same attitude as dryfly. I don't like tents without floors. I started camping in the early '50s and went on my first backpack trip in 1959. The options that are available today were not around then. We used military surplus shelter halfs to make pup tents. Two shelter halfs snap together and each person carried a small sectional tent pole and a few stakes. In the process you quickly discover that rain drains into the tent and rolling around in the mud is unpleasant. We eventually traded the pup tents for large open tarps hung to form an "A" frame.

Today my go-to single man shelter is a Black Diamond One Shot like the photo in dryfly's post. It weighs about the same as my old first-generation bivouac bag and has more room.

Moisture will condense on the inside of single wall tents unless you have a wood burning heater stove. Since they weigh less, you can carry a larger tipi tent which weighs the same as a smaller double-wall tent. But the weight of the stove makes the total package heavier.

The subject of which type of tent to use finally boils down to wether or not you want a wood burning heater stove.

Here's a photo of a North Face VE-25. Obviously a wood burning stove would have been useless in this situation. The VE-25 is old technology by today's standards because it weighs over nine pounds.



Here's another situation where a wood burner would have been superfluous weight.



The Hilleberg Jannu is a genuine "bombproof" mountaineering assault tent, 2-man, 4-season, double wall with a floor and it weighs less than six pounds. I costs over $700 but that's less than the total cost of a medium size Siltarp tipi tent plus a stove.

http://www.climbers-shop.com/2364167/products/Hilleberg_Jannu_Tent.aspx


Here's some photos of other camps that I have setup over the years.












KC

I love my Hubba Hubba.

I just scaled out the footprint of a Golite SL3 in my driveway with chalk. I drug a couple of sleeping bags and a parastove out there and laid them on the footprint with the stove in the middle. It would be a palace for one with gobs of firewood room. It looks adequate for two men with packs and rifles but not a huge amount of room for wood. It is smallish but that means light with a small footprint so finding a campsite might be easier in some areas. I think I'm going to order one.

KC, that photo gives me a smile... Tua skis no less!

My VE24 that I got in 1979 is still going strong (including smell!). It's definitely not "new technology" but it's still bombproof.

Brad:

My VE-25 is still as strong as ever. I use as a base camp sleeper tent now. Unless I can get someone else (like a horse) to carry it.

I still use the TUAs for back country backpack skiing. They're better than snow shoes when wearing climbing skins.

KC

How about the Vaude Scrotum?Im waiting on one at the moment but from what i have heard and seen then this could be the future.

I sat through a fairly windy storm in one a few weeks ago with no problems other than wondering if the pipe directly behind my head was going to act as a lightning rod. The cut your own poles and stakes for the super works well and saves a fair amount of weight. In the case of the cutting my own stakes, that is a much better idea for my area than commercial pegs since it always seemed they were never long enough to get through to something solid enough to hold anyway.

I prefer floorless shelters after trying them. In the past I would always wake up in a puddle of condensed breath/sweat trapped by a sealed floor, but now at least *some* of it ends up at the tarp edges. You will get a certain amount of wet from the condensation on the walls if you bump something against the walls (or during wind/rain events,) but I got that with tents anyway. If you bring a dog along the floorless is great since there is no floor for toenails to destroy and you can get in as wet and muddy as you want and you don't end up laying in it at some point. Insects seem to be taken care of by lightweight bug nets and mosquito coils. If you have a ladies/kids that will not go floorless (but you will) the ShangriLa + nest set up looks like it would be a great idea.

There's two problems with floorless tents here in north Louisiana: (1) mud, because if it isn't raining it's about to rain; and (2) snakes. The one shown below was maybe 15 feet from my tent.

We have loads of copperheads up here and that is a concern, but not sure how much safety a few thousandths of nylon will provide considering the amount of time I used to end up against the side of a smaller backpacking tent. If leaving the tarp set up for the day I do tend to roll bags and mats up and flip stuff over before getting back in though. Risk versus benefits roll of the dice kind of thing.

Then you need to be in a hammock, it doesn't have a floor either

There's a big difference between a snake forcing its way through a nylon wall and simply slipping its nose under a nylon wall. I'll stick with floors.

PS: plus, we have copperheads, rattlesnakes, water moccasins, and coral snakes.

I wasn't meaning forcing it's body through the tent wall which would be near impossible without a tear, but simply nailing you through the wall which I used to almost inevitably be rolled up against during the night.

We do have some rattlesnakes, water moccasins in western KY (some small lake/pond over there is claimed to have the highest concentration per acre in the US,) and the coral snakes are an interesting thing. Never seen one, never known anyone personally that has claimed seeing one, but a book put out by either the WPA or CCC back in the 30s-40s listed that as a snake that could be found in KY although I have never seen that listed as a possible anywhere else.