Testing Out New Gear - Solo Motorcycle Camp

Hey everyone, it's me Tim and today I'm on my way to go motorcycle camping out by Barlett Lake in Arizona. The reason for this trip, number one is because I haven't been camping in a little while so I just wanted to go, but also I'm out here testing out a new tent. The tent I'm testing out is the Big Agnes Copper Spur HV-UL2 tent, HV being high volume and UL being ultra light. This tent is coming in at 550 US dollars and its most attractive feature is its lightweight and extreme packability. Coming in at three pounds eight ounces and all packed up the dimensions are seven by thirteen inches. So I'm pretty excited to test this tent out. There's some features on it that I was really quite excited about. Packability being one of them. It is just such a small packable tent. It fit right in my side case with plenty of room to spare for the rest of my gear. It's ultra lightweight, super super light tent. So the one downside to that is that its durability is probably going to be lessened as it's probably going to have thinner materials that make it ultra lightweight. So I've never set this tent up. This is the first time I'm heading out here now to go hopefully find a campsite. It is a weekend, it's Friday. Hopefully I can find a place to camp out here. There's quite a few campgrounds in the area so if I can't find one here I do have other options. But this is my top choice obviously the one I'm heading to now. It's a pretty good ride too. It's nice and twisty. Like I said we're out by Bartlett Lake. We're actually where I'm heading now is Horseshoe Dam. Horseshoe Lake and Horseshoe Dam. There's a campground just at the bottom of the hill out there. I really like that one. The campsites are nice and secluded. There's pit toilets and it's usually pretty quiet over there. So yeah I'm super excited to be out on the bike. Beautiful weather today. I'm really excited to be camping. Definitely looking forward to seeing the stars tonight. Okay so that campground was actually pretty full so I'm going to try a different spot. This other campsite is pretty nice too. A little bit of a dirt road to get out there. You get a really nice view of Bartlett Dam which is pretty cool to see off in the distance. It's a pretty big dam. So we're going to go head over there now instead and hopefully find a place to camp over there. Before I jump any further into this video I want to give a huge shout out to Ben at motocampnerd.com. He hooked me up with this tent so I could test it out and let you guys know how it works out. If you haven't been to motocampnerd.com it's basically a collection of camping gear that works really well for motorcycle travel and camping. It's a great selection of gear and it's definitely worth a look if you're in the market for any new camping equipment. It also helps narrow down your search as everything on his site works well for motorcycle camping. I'll leave a link to the website down below in the description as well as a link to this tent. Alright I've decided to take a quick detour. I like this little stretch of road here. It's nice and twisty and we'll be able to get a good view of Bartlett Lake from over here. So I'm going to scoot on over to here to the end of this road and then I'll turn around and head to the campsite from there. This is a really fun road. I really like it and it's very scenic too. It's pretty short. It's only about maybe four miles at the most. So anyways this is Bartlett Lake. It's a water reservoir. It's pretty cool. I like to go swimming out here in the summer sometimes and really love riding my bike out here. If you're ever in Arizona it's definitely worth checking out and stopping in the town of Cave Creek that you kind of go through to get here. Anyways I don't want to stay here too long. I got to still set up camp and well I have to find a place to camp first. So there it is. I just think it's so impressive coming at it from this angle. It just looks so big and kind of majestic off in the distance there. Unfortunately you can't go up to it. The road going to it is closed. Would be cool if you could get up there and stand on it see it from the top. Anyways we're almost at the campsite now. It looks pretty quiet here. There are some people camping but it doesn't look too crowded. My favorite spot's actually outside of this area closer to the exit of this camping area. It's a little more secluded and private. So I'm gonna head over there and hopefully that site is available. Damn someone took my spot. That's a bummer. Let's see this might be a spot right here. Yep this will work. A little bit further from the bathroom but uh this will definitely work. Yeah this looks pretty good. So as far as setup goes this tent was pretty easy to set up. I like that the poles are color coordinated with the tent fabric. There's silver on one side and orange on the other side. That definitely helped out because the poles do it does matter which way the poles go. One thing I did notice once the tent was set up is that the doorway is a little bit smaller than my last tent and also it seems like it might be an issue in the rain getting in and out of the tent without getting water in inside. I'll definitely test that out and let you guys know but that's sort of my initial thought on that part of the tent. The fabric feels pretty good. Like I said earlier it is ultra lightweight so it's going to be a little more on the sensitive side but with a little finesse this tent should last plenty long. Many many seasons of riding. So I'm going to make some dinner and go to sleep and then in the morning I will give you my first impression of this tent. How it works out camping in it overnight. I'm pretty excited to test this tent out. I really like the way it looks and I like how ultra lightweight it is. So for dinner I decided to be a little bit lazy and I'm going to have my favorite mountain house meal which is the lasagna with meat sauce. These things are really great when you don't feel like getting out all the cooking gear and going to the supermarket and all of that. Alright so I was going to do this around camp but my neighbor has his generator running and it was pretty loud so I'm just going to do the rest of this video on the bike. The tent was great. It worked out really well. I was definitely happy with the space inside. Plenty of room for me and my gear. If you're one up with gear this is a perfect size tent. If you're traveling two up you probably want to go with the three person version but the space was good. It was easy to set up, easy to tear down. Actually so packing it back up into the bag I probably should have recorded that. It went really well actually. Everything fit back in nicely. I wasn't fighting with it so that was good. So it was easy to set up, plenty of space inside for me and my gear. The packability of this tent is just incredible and one thing that I like about it is a lot of really ultra lightweight tents will actually not be freestanding. They end up being semi-freestanding which there's some downsides to that. So I do like that this is a freestanding ultra light tent. That's not super common. So that was pretty cool. Overall I'm really just digging this tent. I'm looking forward to putting it to some more good use. Got a couple more camping trips planned out coming up and that's about it. So that's like my first impression of this tent and a little camp out. Look at that dam that is so cool. Anyways huge thanks to motocampnerd.com. Ben over there is a super cool dude. He's got a really great selection of camping gear that just works perfectly for motorcycle camping and motorcycle travel. If it's on his website you can trust that it's good for motorcycle camping. Got a really great selection. So definitely go check out his website motocampnerd.com. Anyways that's it for today. Thanks for watching this video and I'll see you guys on the next one. Ride safe!