REI Co-Op Flash 3 Tent Review

The REI Flash 3 is a freestanding, double-wall 3-person tent that’s lightweight and compact enough for backpacking but spacious enough for car camping. While REI rates it for 3 people, I think it’s on the small size for three full-grown adults unless your third companion is a dog or a small child. Where it really shines is as a 2-personal palace with an enormous amount of ceiling mesh for ventilation and stargazing, with plenty of extra room to spread out. In addition to its generous length, good for tall people, the near vertical side and end walls on the Flash 3 provide better livability for occupants than the sloped walls of many dome-shaped tents.

Specs at a Glance

• Best Use: Backpacking and Camping
• Type: Double Wall
• Structure: Freestanding Tent
• Doors: 2
• Number of Poles: 3
• Internal pockets: 4
• Claimed Minimum Trail Weight: 3 lbs 7.6 oz
• Actual Minimum Trail Weight: 3 lbs 11.8 oz (Inner Tent and Rainfly: 41.5 oz) (Poles (3): 18.3 oz)
• Maximum pole segment length: 18″
• Actual Inner Tent Dimensions: 85 x 68/61 (L x W head/foot) inches
• Peak Height: 42″
• Actual Packed dimensions (in stuff sack provided): 19″ x 7″
• Seam-taped: Yes
• Footprint: Not included.
• Minimum number of stakes to pitch: 6; Recommended: 8-9
• Fabric: 20D Ripstop nylon

The REI Flash 3 is a lightweight, freestanding double-wall tent with two doors and two vestibules. It has a huge expanse of mesh making it perfect for stargazing while providing excellent ventilation when used with or without its rain fly. Fully seam-taped, the partial side and end-walls provide extra privacy, wind, and dust protection while the large doors enable easy access and exit.

However, the Flash 3’s head and foot end widths of 68″/61″ inches, make it decidedly narrow for three full-grown adults. While you could fit three x twenty-inch wide sleeping pads side by side in the inner tent, it really is a tight squeeze. You’d probably be a lot more comfortable using the Flash 3 as a luxurious two-person tent with a dog or small child as a third companion.

The Flash 3 comes with three poles which slot into color-coordinated guy out points. In order to save weight and make the tent more packable, the REI chose not to connect all the poles together with multiple hubs, which is often the case with other tent manufacturers. The downside of this is that it makes the tent a little more complicated to set up and can lead to a lost pole unless you’re careful to keep track of them all when breaking down the tent.

While not difficult to pitch, it takes a practice session or two to figure out how to set up the Flash 3 and is best done in your backyard a few times before you attempt to figure it out with a partner in the field, particularly if you’re trying to impress them with your outdoor skills. There are directions included in the tent’s stuff sack, although you can figure it out with enough patience. :-)

While the inner tent is technically freestanding, it’s large enough and under enough structural tension that you have to stake out the corners when you set it up. The rainfly snaps into the corners of the inner tent, so you just need one stake in each corner for both. Still, I’d encourage you to add a few extra guylines along the fly perimeter for stability in wind and to maximize the internal volume.

Unlike a dome tent, there is a distinct directionality to the Flash 3, with a head end and a foot end. While the tent has an enormous amount of internal volume, it doesn’t have a lot of pockets inside, or where you’d expect to find them. For example, there are no pockets on the inside of the doors and no gear loft pockets in the ceiling. There are four mesh pockets on the back wall of the tent at the junction between the solid fabric and the mesh wall, but they’re a bit high up to comfortably reach if you’re lying in your sleeping bag.

There is enough internal volume, however, to store a lot of gear inside the tent, but the Flash 3 is decidedly light when it comes to the frills found on other tents of this volume like the Big Agnes Copper Spur HV UL3 or the NEMO DragonFly OSMO 3P.  The Flash 3 is less expensive for that reason, so you’ll have to decide whether the added features in those tents are worth the price difference.

While the rainfly covers the inner tent mesh, it doesn’t provide complete coverage over the ends of the inner tent but is scooped to enable better airflow inside. The exposed walls of the inner tent are as waterproof as the fly, so there’s no net loss in functionality. NEMO was really the first tent manufacturer to incorporate this scoop design widely across their product line and its been adopted by other manufacturers since. It also helps reduce the weight of the rainfly because there’s less fabric required.

As mentioned, the Flash 3 is a two-door tent with two vestibules which is a must-have for comfort when camping with two or more people. The Flash’s vestibules are large with plenty of room to stow a backpack. The doors have bi-directional zippers so you can partially unzip one from the top down or bottom up, even in bad weather, to increase ventilation through the tent in order to offset any condensation formation.

Comparable 3-Person Tents

Make / Model	Claimed Min Trail Weight	Price
REI Flash Air 3	3 lbs 7.6 oz	$499
REI Half Dome SL 3+	4 lbs 13 oz	$380
Big Agnes Copper Spur HV UL 3	3 lbs 8 oz	$600
Big Agnes Tiger Wall UL3	2 lbs 10 oz	$500
NEMO DragonFly OSMO 3P	3 Lbs 5 oz	$580
NEMO Dagger OSMO 3P	3 lbs 14 oz	$600
NEMO Hornet OSMO 3P	2 lbs 13 oz	$550
NEMO Aurora 3P	5 lbs 5 oz	$360
MSR Hubba Hubba 3	3 lbs 7 oz	$630
MSR Freelite 3	2 lbs 6 oz	$540

Recommendation

While the REI Flash 3 is sold as a three-person tent, it’s probably best considered a high volume 2+ person tent with space enough for two adults and a young child or dog. One of its main benefits is a relatively small pack size due to the fact that its poles are not packaged together in one giant multi-hubbed array, but broken apart so they take up less volume. While it doesn’t have a lot of internal pockets and features found on more expensive tents, its length, vertical side walls, and large mesh ceiling offer occupants a more spacious feeling of interior volume and star-gazing potential than most comparable dome-shaped three-person tents.

Disclosure: The author owns this tent.

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