This review of the Featherstone Peridot 2 Person Backpacking Tent is based on my use of this tent at Dogwood Campground in Lake Arrowhead, CA and Paradise Campground in Los Padres Forest, CA, as a solo camper, in the summer of 2022.
The manufacture’s website can be found at FeatherstoneOutdoor.com
Affiliate Link: Check the current price of the Featherstone Peridot 2P Backpacking Tent on Amazon
Summary
For the price – around $116 on Amazon at the time of writing – this is a solid backpacking or solo car camping tent.
It packs down small enough into its stuff sack, such that it easily fits into the main compartment of my Gregory Paragon 58L pack, without having to stuff poles in one pocket, and the fly and body around other pack items, as is common in backpacking. And, at a little under 5 pounds pack weight (everything included), it’s light enough to pack into back country camps, for weekend warrior type excursions.
The tent is large enough to accommodate a romantic couple, and is a generous size for the solo camper. It can handle two ‘wide’ rated sleeping pads – those 25 inches in width – as well as the ‘tall’ rated ones. The twin vestibules are large enough to keep two campers’ packs out of the rain, or perform simple backpacking stove cooking.
With a super high hydrostatic head rating for the price, and factory sealed seems in the right places, this tent is able to easily shed rain, and prevent significant water migration around the bathtub. Featherstone has sewn in inner fly ties, to affix the fly to the poles, and four guy line loops, allowing the tent to handle significantly windy conditions. It would have been nice to see some pockets for the crossbeam pole, as this looks like a potential failure point after extended use of the tent.
For a compact, and relatively lightweight backpacking tent, the Featherstone Peridot does have generous pockets and a loft to keep your headlamp, glasses, phone, etc. from being lost in the middle of the night.
Price
The price of this tent varies from time to time. On the last Amazon Prime Day, it was $105. Most of the time it stays at around $119. Currently Amazon has the price hidden as a teaser, but once you load it into your cart, you’ll see it’s $116.
I did a survey a few months ago of the best tents under $100 on Amazon that are actually waterproof, and this Featherstone 2P Peridot tent blows them all out of the water, for just $20 or $30 more. The Featherstone tent was designed in California, versus all the other tents on the survey, that were from companies based in China. Further it came with its own footprint, where as you had to make your own footprint with most of the cheaper priced tents I looked at.
The tent has a much higher hydrostatic head rating (waterproof rating) than the cheaper tents, and even a much more expensive backpacking tent – the $300 Near Zero tent – that I looked at in my article on camping at Topanga State Park. The price to waterproof rating ratio for the Featherstone is $23.20/m, versus an average of $35/m for the cheaper tents on my survey.
Features
Notable features on the tent include:
- 4 pockets on the inside corners of the tent for phones, glasses, wallets, headlamps, etc.
- 1 removable loft area spanning the ceiling for more storage of phone cords, headlamps, etc.
- 1 hook for a small hanging LED lantern in the middle of the ceiling
- one-piece aluminum grommet components on the fly, body, and footprint that are inline with the staking straps in a chain linked design, eliminating the chance of grommet hole tearing in the straps.
- single piece aluminum tent pole structure for easy set up
- freestanding design; no need for trekking poles; easy to move the assembled tent to a different spot on your site.
- Comes with footprint, stakes, guy lines
- stakes are a bit smaller than MSR Groundhogs, but this makes them easier to pound into the ground, and pull back out
- Vestibule on both sides of the tent so that each person can store their own pack or make their own backpacking stove food in the rain.
- Reflective material on fly, stake loops, guy lines to avoid unexpected trips at night.
Space and Comfort
The tent has a generous bathtub area for a small backpacking tent at 51 x 84 inches. This means it can hold two long and wide sized sleeping pads, like the Big Agnes Rapid SL Wide sleeping pads, like I use. If you’re going solo, you can definitely keep your pack in the tent with you at night, and have plenty of space left over for unpacked clothes and sandals/hiking shoes, etc. You basically have 15 square feet of dead space after you’ve put in your sleep system to do with what you want.
The cross-bar tent pole design, along with the 43 inch peak height, allows for lots of vertical volume inside the tent. Sitting up straight, inside, even when the loft is in place, is not a problem. Heck you can even stand on your knees in there, which makes urinal use, in the middle of the night, not a problem.
Because each door can roll up, and be held in place with a peg-and-loop tie, you can even cook food on a backpacking stove in the vestibule, while you sit in the tent, if it’s raining. Actually, because of the symmetrical, double vestibule design, two campers could both use their stoves simultaneously on each side of the tent. Just make sure all the vents are open to avoid carbon monoxide build up.
Ventilation and Breathability
Speaking of ventilation, the tent does do well, with lots of space between the fly and body of the tent, a large noseeum mesh canopy, and two vents on either side of the fly, near where your head would be, while sleeping. I haven’t had any condensation problems when sleeping in the tent. Nor has it ever felt stuffy with the fly doors shut down.
Further, I ran an experiment, where I boiled 500mL of water in a JetBoil MiniMo inside the tent’s vestibule with both vestibule doors fully zipped and shut. I monitored the vestibule area, and the inside area of the tent body for carbon monoxide, using a portable home carbon monoxide detector from Home Depot. At no point during the use of the stove did the monitor measure even a 1 part per million concentration of the gas in these areas of the tent.
Weather Resistance
Rain Resistance
The fly and bathtub of this tent have an unheard of 5000mm hydrostatic head rating for this price range. Plus the bathtub on the Peridot (versus the Featherstone Granite 2P) rides higher up, before meeting a transition wall, ensuring no splashing or wind related water migration can get to the inside of the tent, during wet weather.
All the seams on the fly are factory sealed with tape. All the seams on the bathtub are also factory sealed with tape. The only seams not sealed are where the top of the bathtub meets the transition wall on the tent body, but this is so far up on the body, the fly should be 100% stopping any water migration happening there.
Field Test at Joshua Tree
I was at Joshua Tree National Park in the early fall, and soon as I got out of my car I felt a few rain drops. I found a flat higher section of my campground (Indian Cove Campground, Site 10), quickly set up my tent and guy lines, and got everything inside. Soon as I was done the rain hit and hit hard.
The wind blew crazy, pushing one section of the rainfly against the mesh area of the body of the tent, here and there. However at no point did the fly let even a drop of rain inside the tent. The rain shed of the tent prohibited any migration of water toward the footprint or bathtub. The tent performed perfectly in the storm (yes there was a good deal of thunder).
After the rain subsided I felt around on the underside of the rainfly and nowhere did rain saturate the material and made the underside feel wet. I carefully wiped the beaded rain on the outside of the fly off with my hand. An hour later the entire outer rainfly was perfectly dry. Nice job Featherstone! It was the perfect temperature to walk around the desert and on the campsite’s adjacent nature trail afterwards.
There is also a review on Amazon, where a user successfully used the tent on the PCT, with the wet weather in the northern states, such being a satisfactory test of the tent’s weather resistance. They also reported that the tent was able to dry rapidly after getting wet.
Wind Resistance
The inside of the fly has fly ties sewn into it, so that you can tie your fly to the poles. The guy line attachments are near these ties, so that the wind load is efficiently transferred to the lines and earth. These attachment loops are neither too high nor low to the ground for efficient wind load resistance.
As stated before, the tent did well in the rain and wind at Joshua Tree. I even had to tie some of these fly ties from inside the tent while it rained! I opened the door of the tent body and reached around with one arm to the tie, then executed a couple simple knots with one hand!
Also I’ve seen an old user uploaded product video on Amazon where a man was using the tent in the tail end of a hurricane, and the tent was keeping him dry and in place.
Ease of Use
Set Up
I actually bought this tent for the easy set up. My REI Base Camp 4 tent is a great car camping tent, but it’s fairly difficult to set up, and hence I added the Peridot to my collection for solo trips.
Just stake down your footprint with 4 stakes, throw down your tent body, and put the poles up. The poles are easy to work with, since they are all part of one hubbed unit, where you just unfold everything, and they naturally click into place, creating a single structure. Place the tips in the tent body and footprint grommet tabs, then just clip the tent body to the poles. This is so much easier than trying to slide poles through long, thin sleeves; trust me.
Fly Set Up
The rainfly too has the same aluminum tab grommets as the body and footprint. But I find it a bit trickier to set up. If you’re in windy conditions, and elect to use the inner fly ties to tie the rainfly to the poles, you have to use moderate amount of strength to ultimately place the pole ends in the fly grommets, as there is no wiggle room. It will definitely feel tight, trying to pull that last fly strap down to the pole end, to get it through the rainfly’s grommet.
If there is no wind, then I would skip the internal fly ties to make things easier. Though it’s a little counter intuitive, the easiest way to get the pole ends into the fly grommets is to momentarily release one body and footprint grommet from their pole end. After doing so, place this end through the fly grommet, then once more through the body and footprint’s grommets, in a similar fashion.
One thing I would do different in designing this tent is to make the straps on the fly longer. Each strap does have a standard buckle, similar in design to the ones found on backpacking backpacks, that allows one to tension things down by pulling the strap, or release the strap tension with the lifting of the buckle end. But even with these buckles positioned at the very distal ends of all four straps, as stated before, it’s a really tight fit. A few extra inches of strap on all four ends would make installation and adjustment easier.
Lack of Pockets For the Cross Beam On the Fly
Sometimes when you’ve put your fly on, you’ll notice that the reinforced areas, where the pole’s cross beam ends are supposed to sit, are not perfectly symmetrically on these beams. Then you have to try to pull the fly into place an inch or so, when it’s already taught, or worse, undo the fly grommets from the poles to do so. Having pockets for the cross beams would solve not only this problem, but make it easier to get the fly on in the first place.
Zippers
The door and fly zippers work credibly well. Generally I can unzip the door zippers with one hand, without any snags, stoppage or resistance. Same deal on the fly’s vestibules.
Door and Vestibule Tie Backs
The vestibule doors can rolled back and tied to the tent body with loop and toggle-peg style ties. The doors also have this same feature. Nothing remarkable here; they just work as they’re supposed to.
Cooking With a Backpacking Stove In the Vestibule
I’ve run an experiment and boiled water with my Jetboil MiniMo in the closed vestibule area. The full report is on the Featherstone Field Notes page. The short version is that you can successfully cook in this vestibule, if need be.
2 Person Compatibility
Generally when a tent has the 2P, or 2 person moniker, that means it’s really a 1 and 1/2 person tent. This holds true were you to want to store your backpacking gear in the tent, or have the contents of your backpack unpacked on the side of your sleep system, for ease of access.
But this tent will work for a romantic couple that doesn’t mind sleeping close to one another. The width of the tent is a few inches shy of that of a full sized bed. And if you’re using 72 inch long sleeping pads, then you have a good 12 inches of dead space at your feet for personal items, a small dog bed, or extra blankets and such.
Because the tent has two doors and two symmetrical vestibules, it really is a 2 person tent. No crawling over one another to go to the bathroom at night. And again the small vestibules do allow for packs to stay out of the rain at night on both sides, or allow for small backpacking stoves on both sides to be used, while it rains.
Weight and Pack Size
Weight
Not including the footprint, the Featherstone Peridot tent weighs around 4.8 pounds, according to the Amazon product page. I’ve captured the weight at 4.5 pounds on a bathroom scale, but I believe it’s rounding to the nearest 0.5 pound, meaning likely the tent weighs somewhere under 4.75 pounds. I’ve weighed the footprint, and its stuff sack, on my kitchen scale at 9 ounces. So the total weight is in the lower 5 pound range. Yes, it’s a little heavier than the $700 ultralight tents on the market, but the thicker fabric will likely make up for it in terms of longevity.
You can also elect to use the lightweight option of just the rainfly, poles and footprint, if you want to shave the weight down to 3 pounds. But then you could be stuck dealing with a mosquito net or bivvy.
Pack Size
The stuff sack the tent comes in is around 16 by 7 inches when it ships to your door. But my method of re-rolling the tent to put it back in the sack makes it smaller. I can pack it down to 15 by 6.5 inches with a circumference of 22 inches. Based on the height and circumference, the tent takes up 9.42 liters of space inside a backpack when in its stuff sack. At any rate, it is a backpacking tent size, and the entire stuff sack easily fits in my Gregory 58L Paragon pack, without taking up too much space. I do store the footprint stuff sack separately though.
I’ve made a list of my gear that I use for simple, walk-in trail camp camping on my Gregory Paragon article. New backpackers might be wondering if this tent will fit in their pack, with all their other gear. Well if you replicate my set up, which is nothing unique, it does!
Quality and Durability
The bathtub floor is made of 40 denier Ripstop Sil-Nylon infused with enough polyurethane to give it a 5,000mm hydrostatic head rating. The rainfly is made of 20 denier Ripstop Sil-Nylon, also with the same, 5000mm hydrostatic head rating. Generally speaking, silicone coated nylon is stronger, more stretchy, and lighter than its polyester counterpart; it’s just not as waterproof, hence the generous portion of polyurethane on the tent’s fly and tub.
After camping on soft dirt, as well as hard, jagged pebbled dirt with this tent, so far I haven’t seen any weak, stretched or otherwise compromised spots on the body, footprint or fly. However, I know at some point I will have to re-waterproof the fly with Nikwax, as is required by all tents, along their life’s journeys.
Accessories Replacements
Featherstone is pretty awesome in that they sell replacement parts for the Peridot, including new poles, a new fly, a new footprint, and new aluminum stakes. I wish my REI Base Camp 4 would have these type of replacement parts for it.
Further Reading
Thanks for checking out my Featherstone 2P Peridot backpacking tent review. I’m covering gear I use or want to use on my main gear pages for hiking and camping. Check ’em out!