Has anyone thru'd with a GG The One tent?

[maybe clem]

Pros? Cons?

[Iceaxe]

I used this tent for the PCT and CDT.
I would recommend this tent to a friend.
Thoughts about this shelter:
The spinnaker fabric, when new, is like a potato chip bag. The "crunchyness" subsides with wear.
It does take a bit of practice to get a taught pitch. The bare minimum setup requires six stakes and two poles or trekking poles. There were times when upon getting a taught pitch i realized the front doors would not be tight. thus it took a few extra minutes sometimes to move stakes and tighten things to get it right.
The reward was a solid shelter that shed heavy wind, rain, golf ball sized hail, and light snow.
The bathtub floor is still of questionable value. Although condensation was not really a problem due to the generous size of the shelter, and moisture that penetrated the floor or came of my gear tended to collect atop the spinnaker floor. it was not a fatal attribute but sometimes i considered simply cutting the floor out and leaving the bug mesh skirt.
A trekking pole with a basket will not fit through the rear tarp pull out loop. So if you use baskets you must remove them each time you set up the shelter.
Also if your trekking poles lose thier carbide tips (about every 800 miles) you will have some difficulty threading the rear pole into the grommet of the shelter. i overcame this problem by whittling a small twig to stuff into my treeking pole each night until new trekking pole tips could be procured.
The spinnaker fabric itself remained water proof through 5,600 miles of hiking. I generally stuffed the tent into the bottom of my pack without a stuff sack so it did suffer a lot of abrasion abuse.
Somewhere aound mile 4,000 i noticed moisture from rain blown wind penetrating the fabric. It nevver baceam a serious problem and i resealed the fabric using oil based silicone thinned in mineral spirits at a ratio of 6:1 (Mineral spirits:silicone).
The greatest strength of this shelter aside from it's extrememly light weight(17 ounces seam sealed) is the ventilation and front vestibule area.
I really enjoyed being able to shelter my wet pack and gear under the fly yet off my bathtub floor on rainy and snowy nights.
Probabky the most important thing i could pass on to you is that this shelter is light but demands a careful pitch if you want a quiet/wind worthy nights shelter. This is definitely not a free standing tent. There were a few time i had to use rocks and tree branches to set it up for lack of good staking soil.
My best moments in this tent were in Oregon and Wyoming when there were clouds of mosquitos and i was happily sitting upright reading the next days maps within the no-see-um mesh of the Gossamer gear one. Also this shelter withstands very high winds. I did not have a way to measure the force of the wind but from experience i would say it was equal to qhat my chouinard pyramid withstood in the Sierra.. clocked at 70 MPH gusts. it really depends on the stakes. Thsi is really important you understand that the strength of these types of shelter, The One, Tarp tents etc depends on solid staking rather than tent poles. This strategy requires more thought and set up time than free standing shelters but of course weighs a lot less. The full mesh skirt did allow decent ventialtion but i was not immune to condensation. Being able to open the whole side of the tent for views and ventilation was a great feature. In light rain it is possible to leave one door open, shift the floor rearwards and still remain dry.
I would recommend the Gossamer Gear One to anyone wanting a full coverage non-free standing shelter provided they accept the learning curve associated with setting up shelter dependant on 6 stakes.
Pay particular atttention to the "bathtub" seam around the mesh skirt and the top seam near the trekking pole reinforcements when seam sealing this shelter.

[Iceaxe]

http://postholer.com/journal/images/1100/full-568-15787-IMG_1767_1_.jpg
Gossamer Gear One Shelter in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado's CDT

[maybe clem]

Great information, Iceaxe (http://www.whiteblaze.net/forum/member.php?u=29489).

One of the things I like about the MSR Hubba (my current tent) is you can get the rainfly set up in an instant and set up the rest of the tent underneath it so if a storm hits you can keep the inside of the tent (and your gear) dry while you're setting up your tent.

I understand summer storms can come up pretty quickly on the CT. Since The One takes a little extra care did you ever have trouble finding a spot and getting set up before the rain started falling?

[Iceaxe]

Actually I never stopped to set up camp with the intention of trying to beat the rain. Sometimes i got lucky and it started to rain shortly after my tent was set up. Mostly I hiked until dark regardless of weather. (I still don't understand what drives me out there. I passed many perfect campsites for the sake of making miles. It's the journey, the travelling part, that I like most about LD hiking.) Anyhow...
Mostly I kept my GG one in the outside mesh pocket along with stakes so i would not have to open my pack to set up the tent in the rain. Basically in Montana(Raintana) I had a long stretch where it rained everyday from 2PM on. So I kinda gave up trying to dry out my tent everyday. I concentrated on drying my bag at every opportunity instead. Sometimes while hiking.
It is hard to explaing the thunderstorms in Colorado and Idaho/Montana. They were not like the types we see in the Sierra nevada where you could see them coming and they were mostly localized.
On the CDT the whole sky would be enveloped by a thunderhead and I would walk 10 miles or more on wet ground from that single storm.
Anyhow I never lacked for a place to set up my GG One.. more likely I lacked the good sense to do so early enough.
To answer your question more directly; Yes, the inside of my GG One got wet while i set it up in the rain. Though it was not a huge problem due to the large size my bag never contacted the walls of the tent and i could sit up inside without touching the walls. That left the wet floor. I simply put my ridgerest on the wet floor after mopping up the worst of it with my bandana.
Site selection was the most important thing. Fortunately the CDT was like one Gigantic Stealth camping opportunity. There were places to camp everywhere.

[sbhikes]

Yeah, what Iceaxe said.

I have small baskets on my trekking poles and have no trouble using them to set up the tent.

I have to laugh at your idea to remove the floor. My friend designed this tent and he has since designed another version that uses only the polycro for the floor. He calls it "The Half."

[sbhikes]

Oh and the roominess is great. You have more than one place you can sit up without ever touching the wall. The zipper on mine broke after about 2000+ miles. They sent me a Squall Classic loaner while they fixed the zipper (for free, by the way.) There was almost no room to sit up in the Squall Classic. I'd get myself and my stuff wet if the tent was wet. I really missed my One on rainy days.

[Iceaxe]

It was the last morning on the CDT. I was camped with another CDT hiker at 50 mountain in Glacier National Park. It had snowed and their was frost on everything that morning.
She happened to look over at me while I was mopping up the condesation and said: "That floor looks like a pain in the ass right now."
We both had a great laugh.
She was camped under a floorless tarp and although the ground was soaked she was just curled up like a cat on her ground sheet.
http://postholer.com/journal/images/1100/full-568-18309-IMG_2462_1_

Anyhow thats my buddy Sage who just completed her triple crown in 18 months by the way! She hiked the AT this past fall and finished up Dec 24th. She is gonna kill me for posting this here but she is my hero!
Anyways i love my Gosaamer Gear One. It might still come along on the AT with me this year when bug season hits. I hope i did not give the wrong impression about this tent. I can honestly say it is the finest shelter for it's weight I have ever owned. Now I am gonna take some heat from people cause my gear list shows i am using an MEC scout tarp for the AT. This is not a reflection on the GG One. I was a tarp camper from day one and i really want to reach back to my tarp days.. thats all.

[Powder River]

Wow, I can't really improve on what Iceaxe said. I have hiked with this tent for over 500 miles. I find it very roomy, strong in the wind, and has lots of space for myself and my gear. I carry the polycro groundsheet by GG. I have the standard Leki baskets on my poles and I've never had any trouble with them being in the way. I will say that this tent is very sensitive to pole length and changes in the ground height. The pitch is tricky to master, and any change in the geometry has funny effects on the pitch of the tent.

I will say that the floor floats freely from the bug netting, and I found it often important to put a couple stakes into the corners of the floor, because if I was on even the slightest incline the floor would slide downhill, pulling at the pitch in strange places, and putting my sleeping bag up against the ceiling.

All that being said, this is the best tent I have ever owned. The weight alone makes it worth a large number of deficiencies, but as it is this tent has only a few very minor drawbacks.

[maybe clem]

if I was on even the slightest incline the floor would slide downhill, pulling at the pitch in strange places, and putting my sleeping bag up against the ceiling.

How big an issue is this on the CT? During summer months use are there plenty of flat tent sites?

[300winmag]

Reninds me of my former TarpTent Contrail, which used one or two hiking poles for support.

Now I have a TarpTent Moment which I LOVE. That tent goes up in literally a moment using two stakes, one at each end. it weighs 29 oz. with 2 MSR Groundhog stakes.

If the wind shifts much you can pull one stake, rotate the tent and put the stake back in. Simple as that.

The vestibule is big enough to store your pack and cook at in the same time.