Cons

• Ventelation isn’t great with the fly down. I had a fair amount of condensation every morning so ended up packing a damp tent even on dry nights
• The supplied pocket is nice and large, but I have no idea why they didn’t put one on each side
• You need to do a bit of “tent yoga” to get dressed inside
• I would have loved about 2 more inches of length as my feet hit the bottom of the tent

Bottom Line and Vendor Relationship(s)

This is a solid solo bikepacking tent that checks all the boxes: it’s light, straightforward setup/takedown, and keeps you dry. There’s a decent amount of headroom, although the low foot area requires you to turn on your side to dress/undress. There’s good shoulder room and my 6′ 2″ mass never felt claustrophobic or cramped. The small packed size would allow storage on your bars or in the cage, and it fits horizontally in panniers. Definite buy when on frequent sale.

I have no special relationship with Sierra Designs, however I’ve owned their tents for years, and my beloved single-wall 4-person family tent started disintegrating. I contacted them and was disapointed to discover that new “environmentally friendly” coatings apparently self-destruct about about 7 years, and internet research confirmed that diagnosis. After some email back-and-forth their warranty department offered me 40% off which I used to purchase this tent.

You can buy this tent through your favorite suppliers. Sierra Designs seems to offer fairly frequent sales as do the “usual suspects” like REI and Backcountry.com I won’t provide an Amazon “affiliate link” since Amazon pricing seems much higher than others. Please do check out the bicycle trouing gear list for any shopping needs and use those links to fund water buffalo leach removal.

Detailed Review

I secretly love tents, a love that started when I setup my first Eureka Timberline at some sort of scouting function when I was 8 or 9 years old. I was fascinated by the shock-corded poles (SNAP, so cool!), and amazed by the little plastic tube with carefully oriented holes that held the three poles of the A-Frame together. Every time I get a new tent I get excited to see what tricks tent designers have come up with as they’re usually so simple yet ingenious. I remember getting my first tent with color-coded poles and corners, or my first tent with lightweight Easton poles. In some ways I’d really like to meet a tent designer, although in other ways I feel like I’d be a bit let down, like when you find out your favorite celebrity has a drinking problem or “political awakening” that triggers ham-handed twitter posts.

I was excited to get the Sierra Deigns High Side as it’s been years since I’ve owned a 1-person tent, and it was billed as being designed with bicycle travel in mind. It’s a svelte 2.5 lbs with the footprint, and has a neat “awning” feature that allows the door-side rain fly to be configured as a large vestibule, awning, or large “screen door” when rolled up.

At a list price of $280US it’s not cheap, but it goes on sale fairly regularly, and someone once suggested I think of tent prices in their “hotel night equivalent.” So on a six-night trip where OK hotels might average $75/night, the tent pays for itself on night 4. Maybe this is a silly psychological game, but I’ve also found that regardless of how many people it sleeps, you generally need to get into the $300 range to get into the “sweet spot” of water resistance, quality assembly/materials, and light weight.

Setup

Assembly is fairly easy. I purchased the matching footprint as I usually do, and once I’ve found where I want to setup, one rolls out the foot print to start. The key to remember is that the corner with the red grommet is the back non-door side. Next time I have the tent out, I’ll probably write that in silver sharpie on the footprint since it might save the 50/50 gamble of setting up on the wrong side, although adjustment only takes a few seconds.

A quick word about picking a location for your tent: obviously somewhere flat that is not the lowest spot in the area (lest you find yourself in an impromptu lake during a rain), but also avoid any large branches overhead if possible. You don’t want anything falling in a wind or due to sheer dumb luck and end up trapped, busted up, or dead.

With the footprint out, once lays out the body of the tent, matching the “red corner” to the footprint, and stakes the 4 corners. Next are the poles, both color coded and quick to affix to grommets and clip in. I liked that I could straddle the tent and work from back to front, making initial setup fairly quick.

Next is the rain fly, with similar color coding. This is where things get slightly nuanced, in that you need to Velcro the fly to the poles before attaching the corners using plastic clips. These Velcro loops are key for correctly positioning, and maintaining proper tension on the rain fly.

Fly attached, it’s important to stake out all loops on the fly. If your fly isn’t well-tensioned, water can pool in the foot area as I discovered during my first night in the rain. Nothing leaked, but there was a “divot” of water dangerously close to my feet that I avoided during future rainy nights with proper tensioning.

During this process you’ll have to decide on your “awning” configuration. There’s a large section of rain fly at the door that can be fashioned into an awning by guying the corners to a tree or bicycle. This seemed super cool when I read the marketing material for the tent, but I didn’t find myself using the awning configuration, probably because I didn’t have any rain during mealtime on my outings with the tent, which is where it would seem to be the most useful. I did appreciate the large vestibule, and the ability to roll it up and have a nice view of the universe, while also having the ability to quickly batten down the hatches, an ability I tested when my Spidey sense woke me up moments before a downpour one evening.

All in all, setup is easy and straightforward, and I never found myself wishing for a third hand or foot as I have with some other 1 or 2-person tents.

Living in the High Side

Not-a-newsflash: 1-person tents are small. However, my 6′ 2″ girth fit well, and good shoulder and torso room never made this tent feel claustrophobic or “coffin-like.” I slept fine on back and side, and could toss and turn without much worry. Getting dressed is a bit challenging, as the tent is low by your feet and mid-section. The relatively obvious (as in “d’uh, why didn’t I realize this 2 nights ago obvious) solution is to roll on your side for donning and doffing pants and socks. You’ll still get a low-grade ab workout for shirts, but the high-ish roofline near your head allows for a god degree of arm flailing. I could not however sit up, and I would imagine you’d have to be quite small to do so.

There’s good room for gear around your head, and I could stash phones, batteries, headlamps, and various junk near my face without it getting in the way. There’s a single, large pocket made of mesh materials that’s great for stashing things like lights and hats that you don’t want to hunt for, although it’s odd they only supplied one such pocket.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the vestibule space. When cycling I usually have clipless bike shoes and some camp flippy floppies, and I could stash shoes and helmet in the non-door vestibule, leaving the large door area for other gear. A full-size backpack seemed like it could even fit.

Disassembly is equally easy, and the large door makes tasks like rolling up an air mattress and stuffing a sleeping bag straightforward once the rain fly is removed, since one can squat outside the door and work on those objects as they sit inside the clean tent rather than dragging them out. I haven’t (yet) had the “pleasure” of setting up or disassembling camp in a hard rain, but in that case I’d try and rig the awning such that it would keep rain off my stuff, but allow enough access to pack.

Rather than a traditional stuff sack, SD has adapted a “burito bag” across most of their tents. Picture a traditional sack, but cut open along the long side rather than the short end. This bag presumes you’ll fold and roll your tent rather than “stuff,” and allows you to put the rolled tent easily into the bag, and then cinch it all up. It’s hard to explain, awkward to do the first time or two, and then a superior solution to the old way. It’s also nice that the stuffed package includes the poles, and it all fits nicely in a pannier, cage, or bar/seat bag.

Those steamy nights

You can’t beat physics, and in this case putting a hot, steamy, bag of bones that tends to enjoy breathing in a small space, and wrapping that space in material designed to not allow the passage of water is going to create condensation. During cool nights I’d wake up to a fairly wet rain fly each morning, although the design of the fly generally allowed any beading water to roll down the sides, keeping me dry. The bummer of course is that one then has to pack up a wet rain fly and then hang it on a line to dry a bit in the evening before attaching it to the tent. The dampness of the fly also dampens the tent (and adds a bit of weight), but setting up the tent and leaving it empty quickly cures that problem.

The tent has a couple of vents that can be propped open, but again a 4″ x 2″ vent isn’t going to get all my hot, moist air out. I did try rolling the “awning” of the fly up a couple nights, however it was usually rather humid so I’d have a layer of condensation on my sleeping bag in the AM, rather than just on my rainfly. This technique should help in a dryer climate assuming no rain.

I’m not sure how this issue could be mitigated, and it’s certainly not unique to this tent. It is designed such that you and your sleeping bag don’t get wet, and the mitigation is some air drying before the next step, so it seems a reasonably tradeoff as one must make when dealing with small tents that don’t cost a small fortune for magical fabrics.

Buy, or Pass?

Buy. This is a light, thoughtfully designed, compact tent for one, that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve been put in a sack by someone with a New Jersey accent, and are about to be tossed in the back of an ’89 Impala.

If it’s under 60F the tent WILL be wet in the morning, but a few shakes and some “air time” at the next campsite is a decent alterative to lackluster rain-proofing or a $800 tent made of space-age polymers.

I’d heard all the quips and received all the looks that come with a large dude pedaling furiously while perched upon a tiny-tired folding bike, but if I was worried about looks I’d be sitting behind a SnapChat filter. “Clown bike” or not, I couldn’t help but love the incredibly practicality and intriguing engineering that comes with a folding bicycle.

The grand philosopher of early 90’s hip hop, in sharing his thoughts on voluptuous derrières quipped: “I like big butts and I cannot lie.” For reasons unknown, Baby Got Back was running through my head as I stared at the package on my workshop floor, although instead of the good Sir’s opener, my lizard brain had edited the lyrics to “I like folding bikes and I don’t know why.”

This was factually correct. I’d long held a strange affinity for folding bicycles, without really fitting in the market for which they were targeted, save for a brief stint as an urban commuter. I acquired my first folder, a Dahon, while living in the suburbs, to tool around in the neighborhood in addition to my road bike. When work moved my family to Paris, I grew frustrated with relying on the Metro, which was crowded when operating, and subject to not-infrequent strikes, and I acquired a Brompton folder from a Paris-based shop. This made good sense living in an apartment on the 4eme etage (the French way of saying the 5th floor) of a walk-up apartment, and it was a blast to zoom to work in La Defense, flip my folder closed, and stash it next to my desk, and slightly less wonderful but still preferred to leaving it outside, to schlep the folded package up to our apartment in the evening.

I brought the bike back from Paris, selling it several years after our return in a bit to reduce our growing bicycle fleet, although I still missed the fun of riding my red “clown bike,” although from a purely practical perspective it didn’t make much sense when my adventure bike was perfectly suited to tooling around town when not exploring further afield.

I’d assumed folders were in my rearview mirror, until perhaps I returned to some hip city and became the cool old guy on the wacky bicycle, but a desire for a tandem for my kids and I had me reach the surprising conclusion: a folder was a viable option for a tandem.

I wanted a tandem with a widely adjustable “stoker” (aka the copilot/rider in the back) that would accommodate my kids as they grew, or when we changed stokers, and also allow for the slight possibility of my wife joining me, should I catch her at a moment of weakness when she’d be willing to sit behind me and be seen in public on an odd-looking contraption.

I discovered there were essentially two out-of-the box options if you wanted this range of adjustability: the Comotion Periscope, and the Bike Friday Family Tandem or Tandem Twos’day.

My initial search was biased towards the Comotion, and I looked for used examples, which proved difficult. It seems there’s a small circulation of these family tandems and they’re quickly snapped up on the used market, with examples in good condition selling for basically new bike prices after shipping was factored in. I also began to consider how I’d transport a tandem on our family adventures that were further afield, and began examining special tandem roof racks and other options in what was becoming an increasingly complex and costly venture.

I then saw a used Bike Friday tandem pop up on one of the classifieds. It wasn’t exactly what I initially thought I wanted, but the idea of a folding tandem was intriguing. Some YouTube research indicated it was far from the 60-second fold of my old Brompton, but if I could disassemble the bike in 10 minutes or so, into a package that would fit into the back of a vehicle, that suddenly started to make a lot of sense, especially if the alternative was putting the roof rack on the car, adding a special tandem carrier, and hoisting a heavy bike above my head and then remembering not to drive the bike-laden car into the garage maiming house, bike, and car in one fell swoop. A further benefit is that the bike supposedly packs into a suitcase or two, and would allow easier transport on future potential overseas bicycle adventures.

While continuing to waffle and watch classifieds, Bike Friday announced a 20% off sale for COVID, and that seemed a low-grade omen and reason to pull the trigger. The company, based in Oregon like fellow tandem maker Comotion (what’s in the water out there that puts everyone on tandems?!?!) offers a few standard builds, as well as the option to essentially build the bike to one’s exact configuration, using most commercially available parts.

I could add racks, custom wheels, a dynamo hub, and even pick the paint and cable color. I believe these options are available for Comotion as well, although Bike Friday seems to market their bikes as primarily “made to order” versus Comotion who seems to have a more establish dealer network and “off the rack” bikes in circulation.

I exchanged emails and calls with a gent named Peter at Bike Friday, who happened to have a young family and own a tandem himself, and was able to provide some helpful advice on the bike configuration. I also was able to provide measurements so they could tweak the frame to my specifications.

Perhaps the only wrinkle in the process, like all things these days, was the source of my 20% discount: COVID. Bike Friday provided an initial delivery estimate “by August at the latest,” which ultimately slipped to mid-October, presumably due to challenges in the supply chain as well as the silver lining of COVID: humanity suddenly realizing that bikes are a helluva lot of fun and buying every example available.

After about 7 months from plopping down some funds to an overburdened FedEx driver arriving at my door, I was finally able to open the surprisingly small box.

I worked my way through the rather extensive set of bubble wrap and zip ties, gradually amassing a collection of tubes, tires, and cables. The essential elements of the bike are already assembled, with derailleurs and brakes installed and cabled, bearings pressed, etc. Basically anything that’s fit together by hand remains the province of the end user.

As one would expect in the 21st century, a card directs you to an online installation manual and associated YouTube video. The YouTube link didn’t work directly, but I’m old school so I started with the manual and began fitting things together.

As I assembled the parts I noticed the paint was a little “rough,” and looked like it might have been the last job on Friday before happy hour. A couple of emails with Bike Friday and they agreed to repaint the bike once things had normalized a bit, which seemed like a satisfactory solution.

Assembly was fairly straightforward, and required nothing more than a 4mm, 5mm, 6mm Allen wrench, and a pedal wrench (or use your 6mm if your pedals have a 6mm socket on the spindle). Apparently Bike Friday will supply these tools if you purchase the travel case, but if you’re buying a folder I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect one would have these tools.

There was one basic potential area to mess up, which was installing the bottom mid-tube, which I installed backwards, only to realize the error of my ways when the cables were flopping in the breeze as the cable mount meant to provide tension was on the wrong side of the bike, a 5 minute fix (you can see the tube is backwards in the image below).

The rest of the assembly consists of mounting seat posts, bars, seats, and pedals. Again nothing too difficult. With the bike assembled, I took a maiden solo voyage around the block, just to get a basic feel for the bike before adding my copilot.

After 300+ miles on my loaded tourer, the bike felt “different,” with more sensitive steering and that indescribable but neither good nor bad “folder” feel. If you’ve never ridden a folder, there’s a slight strange feeling of not having anything in front of you as you’re missing the front triangle and steerer tube that’s usually between your legs, and the expance of wheel. I’d equate it to taking a ride in my grandfather’s 1970’s Cadillac where there were miles of hood in front of the driver, and then switching to a modern compact car, where it suddenly felt like your face was on the pavement.

The other big surprise was that the bike felt nimble and almost too “normal.” It didn’t feel like I was towing another set of bars, saddle, pedals, etc.

 Satisfied I’d performed assembly correctly enough that the bike wasn’t going to catastrophically disassemble, I added my daughter to the mix. We planned which foot we’d “launch” from, called out a countdown, and shoved off. Once again, the bike felt fairly normal. There was an additional heaviness with the added passenger, and I’d occasionally feel a bit of extra push or drag on the pedals, but as we both giggled in glee while riding around in a circle everything seemed rather normal, and interestingly after our first lap naturally figured out how to balance in conjunction with each other rather than acting independently. I could finally see why “tandem nerds” referred to themselves as “teams.”

We embarked on a full tour of the neighborhood, each time completing a loop and glancing at each other and nodding “again” as a question and statement.

After several laps and bemused glances from the neighbors, I swapped stokers for my older son, who had been waiting as patiently as a 10-year old can. It was there I discovered my first wrinkle to tandem life. My son launched from a stop much like he would on his mountain bike, using the handlebars as a lever to swing himself onto the saddle.

I’d not tightened the quick release for my saddle to Hulk-level, and his force twisted my seat post several degrees off center. This created the wildly strange sensation of my saddle shifting as I sat down, unbeknownst to me, while the bike was simultaneously going from a stop. This created a unique and unexpected situation as I sat and faced the direction my body intuitively thought it should go, but instead the bike started going in a slightly different one. My natural reaction was to slow my pedaling and “debug” the situation, but my son was in full mash mode, so the pedals kept turning, sending my mind reeling as everything 3+ decades of bicycling told it should be happening was seemingly not occurring. Assuming something was horribly wrong so I called a stop, and was somewhat relieved a fairly mundane issue like a slightly loose quick release had created that unsettling feeling.

The obvious next stage of the game was to add my smallest child to the mix, and hook up our Chariot trailer. I strapped in the 5-year old, had my daughter return to stoker, and pushed off around the neighborhood to more laughs and funny looks, again rather surprised how normal and stable it all felt. The only clue that I had a whole bunch of additional bike, a trailer, and two other humans occured when I went to slow down, and double the force seemed to be required to achieve an expected amount of braking force. I’ve long been sold on disc brakes, and in this case they almost seem mandatory.

Aside from the paint and a minor cross-thread in a pedal, the bike seems incredibly stable and strong. I also received racks and fenders that I’ve not yet installed, so I fully expect that this bike will live up to Bike Friday’s claim that it will quite happily serve as a trusty steed for loaded touring, and I’ve seen several trip journals and photos attesting that I’m not the first to make such an assumption.

I’m planning to take this crazy contraption on a slightly more significant ride than just around the block, and also need to try to folding function, but so far it feels like this clown will fit right into our circus.