We had a disappointing morning. We noticed that one of the rain zippers did not close properly. Upon closer inspection, we saw that several of the zipper teeth were destroyed beyond repair. There is now a large gap in the zipper near the top and the tent is no longer waterproof. We are lucky that the weather is with us for the next few days and no rain is forecast. It has already rained on 3 of our 9 nights out. We’ll have to make do with the broken awning to Pie Town in about 7 days.
The main problem is that this tent has only been set up 9 times and already one rain zipper is broken. Otherwise, the tent is in good condition and we have set it up under normal desert conditions. This is certainly not the expected durability of this tent nor is it “normal wear and tear” as we were planning on going the entire distance of the CDT with this tent. This is not the first tent we have used in desert conditions and has not experienced any tension, force or other unusual occurrences that could damage a zipper. The rack on our Hilleburg lasted six years and over 200 releases. We emailed Durston to request a rain fly replacement due to a zipper failure within 9 casts and are awaiting his response.
Next steps
We were able to text Hairy Bagel using our T-Mobile Starlink connection and tell him the situation. He was able to ship our backup tent, the Big Agnes Copper Spur, to Pie Town. It’s a good tent, we like to sleep in it. However, the reason we bought the Durston was so we could have more space with less weight. We did a lot of research on lightweight tents before purchasing Durston and are confident that it is a quality product. We understand that even YKK zippers can produce defective zippers from time to time and we would consider this rapid failure a manufacturer defect. We will continue to wait patiently for Durston’s response.
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