LanShan 2 Tent Review

The LanShan 2 Tent is a two-person trekking pole tent that’s become very popular with campers and backpackers because it’s lightweight, inexpensive, and reasonably well made. It’s available on Amazon and sold by a number of resellers including 3F UL, Meir, Flames Creed, etc. for anywhere from $140-$180. It’s a great option if you want to reduce the weight of your current backpacking tent without breaking the bank. I don’t think it’s on par with other lower-cost trekking pole tents like the Durston X-Mid 2 ($300) or the REI Flash Air 2 ($299) but it’s still an excellent deal considering that it’s close to half the price.

Specs at a Glance

• Capacity: 2 People
• Doors: 2
• Minimum Trail Weight: 2 lbs 7 oz (measured)
  • Inner Tent: 17.4 oz
  • Rain Fly, w/ guylines attached: 21.6 oz
• Seam Sealed: Yes, although some touch-ups are recommended on all of the external guy out points (side panel and ridgeline) where needle holes are visible.
• Minimum number of stakes to pitch: 6 but you’ll probably want to carry 10 and extra guylines.
• Peak height: 46″ (h), but you can vary it depending on wind/rain conditions
• Inner Tent Dimensions
  • published: 44″(w)  x 84″ (l)
  • actual: 41″ (w) x 81″ (l)
• Full Pitched Area Requirements: 9.9′ (w) x 6.9′ (l)
• Packed dimensions: 16.9″ x 5.5″
• Seasonality: 3 season
• Materials:
  • Rain Fly: 15d ripstop nylon, Sil/Pu coated, seam-taped, HH 5000 mm
  • Inner Tent: 20d noseeum-mesh, 40 ripstop nylon, Sil/Pu coated, seam-taped floor, HH 6000 mm
• The tent includes: inner tent, rainfly, roll-top stuff sack, 9 x aluminum tent stakes, 4 accessory guylines, patches, stake bag

Design Details

The LanShan 2 is a 2-person trekking pole tent with a dual-apex design that weighs 39 oz. It is a double-wall tent with a separate rainfly that weighs 21.6 oz with guylines attached and an inner tent that weighs 17.4 oz. It is constructed with PU-coated silnylon and requires two trekking poles and a minimum of 6 tent stakes to set up. The rainfly and the inner tent floor are seam-taped but there are stitching holes on the rainfly that require a minor amount of seam sealing if you intend to use the tent in the rain.

The rainfly has two large side vestibules for gear storage. There are peak vents at the top of each vestibule that are backed by insect netting. When pitching the tent, you need to insert your trekking pole handles behind the peaks, where they are held in place with a webbing strap. Your pole tips go into elastic loops tied to the inner tent below the door zippers, so they don’t get knocked away when you enter or exit the inner tent.

The inner tent hangs underneath the rainfly with plastic hooks, so you can set the two up at the same time or separately, by hanging the inner tent inside the rainfly after setting it up. The inner tent can also be used as a standalone insect shelter and for stargazing.

The size of the inner tent is pretty average for two-person tents, with enough width for 2 x 20″ sleeping pads (41″ actual),  although the tent is lightweight enough that it can be used by a single person who wants more space to spread out.

Materials and Construction

The LanShan 2 is made with PU-coated silnylon and is seam-taped to make it waterproof. However, there are many spots on the rainfly ridgeline and the side pullouts with extra stitching that you’ll want to seam-seal to prevent rain from leaking through the needle holes. For example, you’ll want to seam seal all the places where you see this kind of sewing reinforcement (shown below).

The side doors on the inner tent have two zippers each. The doors are “handed” in that you’ll want to enter and exit the vestibule from the side with the door and use the other half for gear storage. A more flexible design would have been to use a rainbow door like those on the Zpacks Duplex, so you can get out on either side of the vestibule.

A single guyline, requiring one stake, is used to stake out the peak and the vestibule door. There are plastic tensioners on the guyline to tension the two sections to get a taut pitch. This is fairly standard in other trekking pole tents as a weight-saving tactic.

The corner guyouts on the rainfly are made with fairly-short webbing straps. I’d prefer the use of linelocs and cord in case longer guylines are needed when setting up the tent on rock or sand. The corner guylines on the inner tent do use linelocs and have elastic cordage. When pitching the tent, you can use one tent stake for each corner and attach both corner guylines to it.

The inner tent is connected to the rainfly with plastic hooks. This maintains a ventilation gap between the fly and the inner tent mesh, but also lift the inner tent’s side panels so you have more clearance above your head and feet. When packing the tent, I like to keep the inner tent and the rainfly hooked together unless one is soaking wet from overnight rain.

The bottom of the LanShan 2 rain fly does not reach the ground but is curved like many other lightweight tents with catenary cut rain flies. While this reduces the amount of material required for the fly and lowers the weight of the tent, its main benefit is facilitating better airflow to help reduce internal condensation. With the exception of pelting rain or freezing cold wind, my preference is to keep half of the vestibule open for airflow and to keep the other half of the door closed for gear storage and to support the tent.

Pitching the Tent

During setup, I stake out the rainfly corners first, insert the poles and stake out the vestibules, and then attach the inner tent’s elastic guylines to the rainfly’s corner stakes. After that, you’ll want to walk around the tent, tighten the guylines, and potentially re-stake the corners and doors. Keep the doors zipped closed during this process. The process is fairly straightforward with practice.

You’ll also want to also guyout the side panels in order to create more internal clearance for your head and feet. Sitting up in the middle, peak portion of the tent isn’t a problem, but the sloping ends are more confining. It’s not terrible, but you may experience some condensation transfer to the foot box of your sleeping bag or quilt.

When pitching the tent, you don’t want to put your trekking pole handles into vestibule beaks, but behind them. There’s a webbing loop there to capture your trekking pole handles and reinforced fabric above it. Make sure your trekking poles handles are on top with the pole tips closest to the ground to avoid tearing the rainfly. There are elastic loops attached to the floor of the inner tent that you can loop around your pole tips to secure the poles and fully extend the width of the bathtub floor.

Livability

If you intend to use the LanShan 2 for two people, there isn’t a whole lot of interior room for gear storage. While there are two pockets in the interior, they’re at the ends of the tent as opposed to the sidewalls, which isn’t exactly convenient if you like to sleep head-to-head with your tent mate. Still, the tent has large side vestibules that can be used for gear storage and are large enough for cooking with a canister stove, although you still have to be careful not to set the tent on fire.

Ventilation is quite good, especially with the vestibules half open, and the tent doesn’t get overly warm when pitched in direct sun. I would caution you to avoid getting the tent in yellow since it seems to attract insects (including big hairy spiders that eat them) that gather along the underside of the rainfly ridgeline.

Packability

The LanShan 2 packs up incredibly small for a two-person tent. It comes in a handy compression sack, in addition to 9 quite good tent stakes that are quite similar in size and shape to MSR Mini-groundhog tent stakes.

Caveats

If you’re thinking, “Hey this isn’t bad for $148-$178 bucks”, I’d have to agree with you. It’s a pretty decent tent for the money and can be perfectly adequate for car camping and backpacking in good weather. While I don’t think that the inner tent and the rainfly are that well-matched dimensionally, resulting in some billowing in the wind, the LanShan 2 is a perfectly acceptable tent, as long as you’re willing to do a little seam-sealing.

Comparable 2-Person, 2 Door Trekking Pole Tents

Recommendation

I’ve resisted reviewing LanShan 2 for several years because it looked like it was an exact copy of several American-made tents, including the Zpacks Duplex Tent, the Six Moon Designs Haven Bundle, and the Gossamer Gear “The Two”. But this year, I decided it was important to buy a LanShan 2 so I could see for myself.  Having used the tent now for multiple trips, I don’t think it’s a copy.  This style of tent has been around for years so it’s not surprising that it looks like tents made by other manufacturers. I can’t say that about all of the LanShan variants, not yet at least.

While it’s not as high-quality or weather-worthy as other low-cost trekking pole tents like the Durston X-Mid-2 or the Six Moon Designs Lunar Duo, you really can’t beat the LanShan 2’s price point. I’d still recommend those two tents over the LanShan 2, but if the added cost is too much of an issue, the LanShan 2 is a good alternative option. While I think the LanShan 2 can still be improved substantially (no guarantee that it will be), it’s a decent choice if you want a lightweight, trekking pole tent that won’t break the bank.

Purchase Advice: There are many variants of the LanShan 2 now available so you need to be a little careful in what you select when you purchase one. Some of these vendors’ product pages can be very confusing. The version reviewed here is the 3 season LanShan 2 without a footprint. This means that the inner tent is primarily made with insect netting. A 4-season version is also available, which means that the inner tent is made with solid fabric to block the wind instead of insect netting. There’s also a variant called the LanShan 2 Pro, which is a single-wall tent and not a double-wall tent. The Lanshan 2 Pro is made with silnylon instead of PU-coated silnylon, which requires much more seam sealing. Of the Lanshan resellers, 3F UL and Mier are the most reputable and reliable.

Disclosure: The author purchased this tent.