SectionHiker.com Backpacking Gear Reviews and FAQs 
The Six Moon Designs Skyscape Scout (SMD Scout) is an inexpensive 40 ounce, one-person, trekking pole-supported tent. It is a great option for scouts (hence the name), kids who are ready for their own tent, and anyone who wants a little extra durability, as well as people who want to try out trekking-pole tents at an affordable price point.
Specs at a Glance
- Type of tent: trekking-pole-pitched tent
- Capacity: 1 Person
- Doors/vestibules: 2 doors/2 vestibules.
- Weight: 40 ounces (manufacturer); 36.6 ounces + 0.9 ounce stuff sack (measured)
- Material: Polyurethane-coated 190T polyester for the floor and canopy; 40D (denier) no-see-um mesh
- Packed size: 15 inches by 5 inches (manufacturer and measured)
- Dimensions (measured): The Scout’s floor is shaped like an elongated pentagon, with the apex at the head and a flat footbox.
- Floor length: 100”
- Floor width at its widest point: 45”
- Foot-end width: 30”
- Foot-end height: 10”
- Peak height: 42”
- Included: Stuff sack, pitching instructions printed on paper
- Not included: Stakes, poles, seam sealant (SMD sells fast-curing sealant for $6.95).
- Color: A nice low-impact green. On a wet autumn night, falling leaves stuck to the canopy, making it camo!
Six Moon Designs Skyscape Scout
Comfort
Ease of Setup
Weather Resistance
Durabilty
Weight
Packed Size
Construction
The Skyscape Scout is made to be more durable than many trekking-pole shelters. The mesh is 40D (ultralight shelters often use 15-20D mesh), and the canopy and floor fabric is a robust PU-coated polyester. Despite the fact that this is a lower-cost shelter, the PU fabric felt nice–not sticky or cheap in any way.
Three of the five guyouts–the head-end and both vestibules–use 1/2” webbing in ladder lock tensioners, while the two guyouts at the foot end are cords and adjusted with linelocks. You pay a weight penalty for having fabrics that are both durable and inexpensive, but the integrated design (i.e. no separate inner nest) means you still get a fully enclosed and bug-proof shelter for 2.5 pounds.
I first used the tent on a constantly-misting evening that turned into moderate rain for a while overnight. I hadn’t yet seam-sealed it for that trip, but I had no dripping or leaking. This may be due to the seam construction, in which panels of the tent are sewn together with a seam allowance which is bound with a strip of the same tent fabric. However, to be prepared for heavy rain, seam sealing the Scout is a good idea. You can purchase a fast-curing seam sealant from SMD.
Much of the shelter is double-wall, meaning it has mesh inside the tent canopy. Only the area from the peak to the footbox is single-wall, to save weight. The bathtub floor is sewn to the tent’s foot end with a 4” wide strip of mesh that connects the floor to the tent canopy and allows for ventilation, and elastic on either corner of the floor leading to the canopy provides shape to the bathtub floor. There is a single, small, triangular-shaped pocket on the right-hand side of the shelter for essentials, and a mitten hook on a grosgrain loop hanging from the middle of the ceiling strut for hanging your headlamp.
There are two doors, one behind each vestibule, to give you flexibility with the entry/ exit orientation, and to provide access to gear in either vestibule. Zippers on the vestibules and the mesh doors have metal pulls for durability and pieces of cord for use with gloves. The vestibule zippers are not waterproof, but they are reversed (with the coils facing inside the tent) and have storm flaps secured with velcro. SMD’s spec sheet lists all zippers as #3 size, but this must be a misprint. The number of a zipper refers to how wide it is in millimeters when zipped closed, and I measure the zippers to be 7 mm wide. Seven is not a common zipper number so they are likely either #5 or #8. These are not ultralight zippers.
Tent Setup
Setup instructions are included on a piece of paper with the tent, and they’re helpful the first couple of times until you internalize the order in which you need to stake out the guyouts. I found it quite easy to set up. If you use trekking poles, you insert the tips into heavily reinforced sleeves at the apex of the shelter, on either side of a ceiling strut, and the handles rest on reinforced semi-circular reinforcement patches on the tent floor.
You do have to open up the mesh doors to install the poles which can allow rain to get inside the shelter, but, with practice, installing the poles can be very quick. I’ve found it’s easier to insert the poles while they’re collapsed, and then adjust them to the recommended height of 115 cm. With the trekking poles inside your shelter, you can adjust them if need be to tighten things up without leaving your shelter. Don’t raise them too quickly or too much, though, because you can pop the stakes out, and then you definitely need to leave your shelter! Once I got a tight pitch, I didn’t find I needed to adjust the pole height further, as polyester doesn’t tend to sag like nylon.
The Scout has a relatively small footprint and is good for backcountry camping in dense forests especially because you can pitch the vestibules over rocks, roots, and baby trees. On mild, rain-free nights, you can roll up both sides of both vestibules and have a breezy mesh shelter with bug protection, views, and the ability to quickly deploy the canopy if the weather turns. A nice feature is that the shelter stands without additional guylines when the vestibules are un-staked and rolled up.
Livability
The Scout is quite a livable shelter to use. It was designed for tall hikers to have plenty of headroom when sitting up and length when lying down. I am not tall by any stretch of the imagination, so for me, the headroom is massive. The shelter floor is an elongated pentagon shape, which makes the dimensions a little harder to describe than with a square or rectangular shelter, but it’s 100” long and 45” wide at its widest point, tapering to 30” at the foot end and tapering to a point at your head-end.
This means you have triangles of space for gear around your sleeping pad on three sides, as well as a small rectangle for gear at your feet. It also means that the sleeping area is set back from the shelter walls, so your face and feet/ sleeping bag footbox don’t come close to touching them. It can easily accommodate wide sleeping pads, and the fact that the bathtub floor doesn’t have rigid corners means that there’s some extra wiggle room beyond even a wide pad, to gain width by pushing the sides of the bathtub floor out further.
Condensation
Single-wall tents will have condensation; the question is whether it is manageable, and I believe it is with the Scout. Technically, the Scout is a hybrid single-/double-wall tent. The area over your head and on the sides is double-wall, with mesh inside the tarp canopy. As with a double-wall tent, condensation moves through the mesh to the inside of the canopy, and the mesh prevents it from dripping on you. The sloped ceiling over your lower torso and feet is single-wall and will get wet with condensation if the shelter is completely battened down, but the height and shape of the shelter means that your bag isn’t rubbing up against the wet wall. It’s a good idea to bring a small cloth or piece of a sponge sheet (my preference) for wiping up the condensation first thing after waking. If it’s not storming, keeping the vestibules partially open allows for airflow that reduces condensation.
Packing
The Scout is not an ultra-compact system, packing down to 5 inches wide by 15 inches long. It is best to pack it by rolling the tent and then slipping it into the stuff sack, instead of just stuffing, due to the rigid ceiling strut. To do this, grab this strut as your starting point, and tuck in the edges of the tent as you roll it up around the strut. The guylines and guyout webbing are short enough that you don’t need to coil them and they don’t tangle up in each other. Even with the length of the stuff sack, I still wished it was bigger to make stowing the tent easier, as it felt like a tight fit, even with rolling and especially when the tent was wet and my fingers were cold. I imagine many hikers will carry the Scout in an outside pocket with compression straps, or strapped to loops at the base of their backpack, rather than trying to fit it inside the pack.
Comparable 1 Person Trekking Pole Tents Under $250
| Make / Model | Doors | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Six Moon Designs Skyscape Scout | 2 | 40 oz |
| Six Moon Designs Skyscape Trekker | 2 | 28 oz |
| Six Moon Designs Lunar Solo | 1 | 26 oz |
| Dan Durston X-Mid 1x | 2 | 27.9 oz |
| 3F UL Lanshan 1 | 1 | 26.2 oz |
| 3F UL LanShan 1 Pro | 1 | 24.4 oz |
| REI Flash Air 1 | 1 | 20 oz |
| Tarptent Protrail | 1 | 26 oz |
Recommendation
The Six Moon Designs Skyscape Scout is a winner when you consider the combination of durable materials, inexpensive price, and ease of setup of this tent. The all-in-one integrated nature of the Scout will appeal to users who would otherwise bring bug protection on the majority of their trips and so don’t need modularity, and folks who want a simple-to-pitch, one-piece, no-fuss shelter. Forty ounces for a single-person, fully-enclosed shelter with lots of headroom and plenty of length for tall users may not be ultralight, but it is respectably lightweight–and even more so given that my Scout came in under spec at 36.6 ounces. I appreciated that I didn’t need to attach extra guylines to the peak when pitching the Scout as a net tent. My only quibbles with the Scout are the tight-fitting stuff sack, but it’s easy to use another stuff sack, or just stuff it freely in your backpack. Highly recommended!
Disclosure: The author owns this tent.
Wow! Those are some long trekking poles. ;-)
I’ll bet you meant 115 cm.
Ha! Right you are, Doug! Thanks for catching that.
Do you know how this compares in quality to the 3F UL Lanshan Pro?
It’s a completely different tent. I think you’re confusing it with the Six Moons Lunar Solo with is very similar to the 3F UL Lanshan Pro 1. Or maybe you’re not.
My first tent was the sil nylon version of this tent. I replaced it for a few reasons. I did not like the single wall flat panel on my feet. The bathtub floor would not stand up high enough, the door was a pain to pin open, and with only one door, one vestibule was useless. This was some time ago and it is possible some of these deficiencies have been addressed. I moved on to a Tarp Tent Notch which I like better.
It does seem like many of those issues have been addressed. There are two doors in the mesh behind the vestibules. The elastic out to the canopy helps the bathtub floor take its shape. There’s mesh at the foot end between the floor and the single-wall panel. I find with this style of vestibule the best way to roll is to have the entire length of the zipper be the starting edge and then roll up diagonally (this keeps the whole roll tight), as opposed to starting with the tiny end point of the triangle and rolling up to include more and more fabric with each roll (which always ends up floppy). Happy you found a tent that works for you!
I have a 2013 skytrekker that i have used often and put many miles on. My question is the pull out sections for the vestibule still up against the mesh or can they be pulled out completely to allow better ventalation. Mine, no matter, what I do rest partially against the mesh. I would adjust the height of the poles and that does not help. There are many quirks in setting up this tent. Any comments are welcome.
7 years old….
I’ve owned a Skyscape scout for years (along with a Zpacks Twin) and still use it depending on the trip.
Pros – Easy to set up. Easy to fit into tight spots. Lots of space for gear inside the tent (this is NOT a one person sarcophagus.) Great visibility from the tent with the sides up which can be quickly deployed if the weather changes. Lastly the incredibly low price.
Cons – A bit heavy and bulky (this one stays at home for high mileage trips.) Requires seam sealing. The floor is exposed to rain when entering and exiting the tent.
For me it’s hard to imagine a better tent for the money.
Phillip,
I do not understand you comment. I get that there is 7 years between these models. But I hope I was clear in asking the question that I did. If not I apologize. Just asking a question comparing what I have experienced, and what Greg found on the review. That’s all.
Thanks
Hiker8, I find there to be plenty of space between the vestibules and the mesh. At least 90% of the vestibule doesn’t touch the mesh at all. It only touches at the very top of the tent. The picture above of my backpack in the vestibule gives a little bit of a sense of the space between the two. Hope that’s helpful?
Greg,
Thank you for answering my question.
I was asking because as Phil commented, my tent is 7 years old, and I was thinking about getting a new one with all the improvements that they have made. My biggest concern was the one I asked you about. I have enjoyed using it for all the reasons you have touched on. Once again thanks and keep up the good work!!
Hiker8, you want to loosen the tie-outs at the foot and tighten the tie-out at the head so that the “frame” formed by the poles and crossbar tilts a bit more toward the head. (You’ll need to reposition the vestibule stakes.) That will lift the fly material away from the netting. I have a 2013 Trekker — same tent, lighter materials — recently replaced with a new Trekker after 4000 miles. Best tent I’ve found this side of Dyneema.
Thanks for this tip. I have the original Trekker model as well. Biggest issue for me is the foot sagging as often there isn’t a way to guy out the panel to raise it, especially above tree line. Of course, getting a perfect pitch with trekking pole tents can be a challenge when there is a root or rock right where you need to place one of the stakes. I replaced the original ridge pole with pex. Tent has gone through some hard wind and sleet just fine.
Looked hard at the newest, most popular X-Mid 1 and Dipole 1 double wall models. The interior of those are just too narrow for me at ca. 32″. The Trekker (if staked optimally) keeps the net far enough away that I’m not feeling claustrophobic or sleeping in a coffin.
While I’d like a bit more space and not have to be concerned about the foot collapsing, I’ve yet to find a good alternative in a trekking pole design.
The Scout is a great tent for those who are taller or longer in the trunk. The great ceiling offers plenty of room to complete many task (organizing pack, clothing changes and more) while inside the tent away from weather.
When set up properly, the Scout endured rough weather and although I experience some condensation, I always stayed dry.
To set up, one must basically be inside the partially erected tent to ensure proper extension of the trekking poles and the full spread of the (bathtub) floor. Needless to say, this can be awkard and problematic if setting up in rain.
I used my Scout for a couple years before transitioning to the Lunar Solo.
I would like to add the Scout is not the end “all of tents” but it is a great tent for the newer hiker who has been gaining experience/wisdom, has been dropping pack/equipment weight, improving general quality of gear, all without placing a huge financial investment on themselves.
Fwiw, I have the scout’s lighter twin sister the skytrekker. First unless the scout is different not sure how you could insert poles with inner net closed? Next the skytrekker being made of lighter material has virtually no problem fitting into it’s stuff sack. Actually, as for setting up, it is so fast, easily less than 5 minutes. I have 4 mini groundhogs permanently tied to the foot corners and two on the vestibule ties outs and a regular groundhog in it’s front point which speeds things. This tent is up before my buddies has his copper spur barely unpacked. I used to do like was stated about packing it up by starting with top bar, and admittedly it was a bit clumsy as well confusing. But now packing it up is just as fast. After poles are out, I take out all the stakes except one in front. Then taking and laying vestibule stakes next to top bar folding rain fly into center (so folding whole length up about same width as foot). Next pulling the two corner foot stakes then placing them facing each other and rolling up foot over them and continuing rolling it up past center top bar and stakes finishing up at front stake. Pull out front stake and slip it in stuff sack. Actually I appreciate this tent each time I go out. Works well in rain and wind, but I would disagree if someone would brag about vestibule area, and as I’ve said before, learn how to fix the vestibule zippers
Thanks for sharing your experience and packing method!
To answer where you wrote, “First unless the scout is different not sure how you could insert poles with inner net closed?”
In the article under “Tent Setup” I say, “You do have to open up the mesh doors to install the poles.” I’m realizing the syntax of that is more conversational than clear, and on a quick read could look like “you do not have to….” I probably should have written, “You have to…”
I just returned from a trip to High Sierra backcountry where we got rained on. We had to camp in designated camp sites and due to the pleasant weather we both chose the most level ground possible which was a mistake once a storm rolled in. My Skyscape Scout was in the middle of a the “drainage pond” for the site – all the water flowed straight to and under my tent. The floor of the tent was like a loose waterbed – but even with me sitting in the middle of it, no moisture came through the floor of the tent. The pond around my tent came up about an inch and half on the bathtub floor but never came in. I also had no water from the roof of the tent either. I can’t believe how well the tent performed. The outside was a muddy mess, but everything inside was clean and dry.
I’m very satisfied with the Scout, it has proven itself for me.
I curious if the lighter fabric of the Trekker would have been as water tight.
I’d be more concerned about the seam tape holding up than the fabric. You’re lucky you didn’t get flooded out. When people talk about site selection, you probably have a better appreciation now about what they mean.