Types of Camping Tents

Pup Tents

Also known as 'A' tents, these tiny tents have no walls - the roof comes straight down to the ground.

This makes the A-tent lighter and cheaper than a wall tent, but it means the tent is too small to even sit up in your sleeping bag without your head touching the roof. Not recommended, except for children to play in, or very close friends to sleep in.

(If you expect to make whoopee in a tent, get a bigger tent. But remember, the noise of your activity will carry a long way. That's why amorous couples often play a transistor radio.)

Wall Tents

These are traditional type tents which have a vertical 'wall' making up the sides below the over-hanging roof. A small hike tent might have a 9-inch or 1-foot high wall, whereas a tent built for a standing camp (for a week or longer in one place) might have 3 or 4-foot high walls.

The walls give you much more room inside to move around inside the tent. Only the largest wall tents allow you to stand up inside.

Ridge Tents

These are wall tents, but have been designed to have a special 'ridge pole' running horizontally between the front and rear tent-poles. The ridge pole stops the roof from sagging in the middle, and makes the tent very much stronger in high winds. The ridge-pole also help support an optional fly-sheet or tarp. This is a second roofing layer which keeps the sun and rain off the first layer of tent roof. The flysheet or tarp is rigged so there is an air gap of a few inches between the tent roof and it's covering tarp. This allows the air to circulate, which makes things much cooler in the summer sun. And yet it doesn't make the winter nights any colder.

Cottage Tents

These are ridge tents with tall walls, which allow daytime use, not just for sleeping. You can use a cottage tent as a cook-house, a portable work site office or a meeting-room during the day. Cottage tents can also work well as spacious family tents.

Marquee Tents

These are great big catering type party tents, such as 20 foot by 20 or 30 feet. You are very unlikely to be using them for camping, except maybe as a tent dining room area. However most experienced camping groups will make do with a dining area fly sheet, poles and guy lines (ropes) to cover the dining table and seating -- so you can eat out of the rain, and shaded from the hot sun.

Disadvantages of traditional canvas tents: heavy, higher priced, often have many ropes (guy lines) which people can trip over, and can take a lot of skill to set up. And if you have only one layer of canvas roofing, don't touch the inside while it's raining, or it could start dripping on you! (This doesn't happen if you have a flysheet over the tent.)

Advantages of canvas tents: Tough, they can last for decades, the cotton material 'breathes', which means sweated or exhaled moisture will pass through and escape to the outside... This avoids moisture condensing inside. Scout troops, pro hunters and trappers, and the military know the value of canvas tents and still use them.

Dome Tents

Dome tents are the modern computer-designed tents that give you maximum inside room while using the minimum of actual tent fabric. They all come with built in waterproof floors (groundsheet) and with insect-proof mesh to keep the biting insects outside while you get a good night's sleep inside.

Now there are cheap dome tents and there are good dome tents. A good quality dome tent will probably cost ten or twenty times the price of a Walmart or K-Mart 'cheapie', but the quality will be ten times better as well.

The cheapie tent will last for a few camp outs, if you're lucky. The good quality tent should last you a decade or more. And what's more, it won't let you down when you're out in the boonies somewhere.