Review: Big Agnes Copper Spur UL1

Have you met Big Agnes? Maybe you’ve seen it perched high on a shelf at REI or lounging at a local campground. Not ringing a bell? It could be that you’re not enough of an ultralight camping nerd to have been introduced. 

The Steamboat Springs, Colorado-based company makes some of the most bleeding-edge tents in the outdoors industry, but solely at the upper end of the market, aimed at hikers and backpackers who want the lightest, highest-performing tents and have the cash to pay for them. The Copper Spur series was updated in 2020 to include a vestibule that can be propped open with a pair of trekking poles like a porch awning. The latest model comes with lighter-weight fabric and a new tent buckle system for the guylines.

I gave it a multiweek test in California’s Death Valley and Arizona’s Grand Canyon, subjecting it to temperatures that varied from near-freezing to over 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) and campsites from damp mountains and thicketed riverbanks to roasting desert floors. Keep reading to find out why, even with a couple of significant drawbacks, I recommend the Copper Spur UL1 as the best ultralight backpacking tent on the market. If you want the best, sometimes you have to pay for it.

With a trail weight of 2 pounds, 2 ounces (about 960 grams), it’s at the cutting edge of ultra-lightweight tents. The Copper Spur is a fully freestanding tent, like the rival MSR Hubba Hubba NX, which means it doesn’t rely on guyline tie-outs—lines you attach to the ground or other objects—for core structural integrity. Ties-outs on the outer wall increase outer-tarp coverage and vestibule space, but they aren’t strictly necessary. There are semi-freestanding tents, like the Sea to Summit Alto TR1, which maintain most of their structure with poles but require a few tie-outs to take full shape. Freestanding tents like the Copper Spur typically flap around less in strong winds and can be completely pitched even when the ground is too firm to drive tent pegs into.

Because this tent is made with such a lightweight nylon fabric, you’ll need to take care with it. It’ll stand up to adventures, but if you carelessly drag it around, it’ll develop holes and tears. That’s the trade-off for shaving pounds off your load. 

It’s a good idea to use a groundsheet or footprint to protect the tent floor from abrasion, and you’ll have to shell out $70 for one of those. There’s a bike-packing footprint for $80 that also covers the vestibule ground space, if you’d like a bit more coverage. While the groundsheet isn’t thick enough to resist punctures, I strongly recommend it for such a lightly built tent. It’s a lot cheaper to replace a groundsheet than to spring for an entire tent.

Setting up for a cold night at Mather Campground on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, I was gingerly flexing a pole into its grommet on the interior wall when I heard a crack in one of the aluminum DAC Featherlite poles. Ultralight tents’ poles require care during assembly and disassembly, since they’re more fragile than standard tent poles. Yet in a whole career of climbing, camping, and hiking, I’d never broken a pole. Maybe the near-freezing temperature had made them more brittle than usual, but I’m only guessing. It was but a chip in the edge of the pole, but several days later on a similarly cold night the chipped piece finally shattered entirely. 

That said, using the included pole splint, I kept the tent functional for the rest of my trip, and to its credit it survived some wickedly strong sunset wind gusts on the Boucher Trail. The tent handled high winds well in situations where other tents I've tested would’ve had me hanging on for dear life. That’s partly down to good tent design, and partly to good poles. Setting up the tent was quick and easy—certainly quicker than the Hubba Hubba NX—so even with the annoyance of the one broken pole, I was happy. 

Repairs were also simple. After I returned home, Big Agnes fixed the broken pole for $4 per segment, plus shipping both ways, which is awfully cheap. The company also sent it back to me quickly. That’s one of the best manufacturer repair programs I’ve seen, and prices for other fixes are pretty cheap too. I plan to use the Copper Spur again in chilly temperatures  in Idaho or Utah later this year. I’ll report back if my repaired poles suffer similar breakage again.

Photograph: Big Agnes

In a market segment where every manufacturer is jockeying to differentiate themselves from the competition, one of Big Agnes’ major calling cards is its TipLok Tent Buckle. It’s a fancy name for a buckle system that joins the pole tips, outer wall (rain fly), footprint, and guyline tie-out loops via grommets and buckles, like those used on backpacks. Rather than tying guylines to tent pegs, as is traditional, everything just buckles together. Adjustments are easy, and there’s no complicated flopping around to attach a groundsheet under the tent. The buckles were clever when they worked, but coarse sand had a tendency to get stuck there, disabling them until I could fish out my knife and very carefully dislodge the grains.

Worse, the Copper Spur’s buckles make it challenging to use them in terrain where you can’t drive a stake into the ground. Oftentimes, the earth is too hard-packed to get any stake into it. Even carrying a few Vargo Titanium Nail Pegs (as I always do), I couldn’t get them into the desert floor at several campsites. That’s no problem for most tents. There’s usually enough extra guyline for the tie-outs that you can scavenge a few heavy rocks to place on them and hold the tent down overnight. But with such short tie-outs for the Copper Spur’s buckles, it wasn’t possible to put this basic camping trick into practice. Twice, I nearly ended up sleeping without a tent until I was able to scavenge enough long, slim rocks to make a series of T-shaped formations that I held down with larger boulders, which sounds a lot cooler than it was in practice as I tried, at the same time, to keep my tent from blowing into a field of cacti.

Most tents include a gear storage pocket near the foot end, which is aggravating. With gear bulging out of them, they intrude on foot space, and ultralight tents are already tight. The Copper Spur instead puts its gear pocket on the ceiling. This means keeping the storage room while placing it in an unused part of the tent that keeps it out of the way. Every tent should come with a gear shelf like this. There are also a couple of small, flat pockets on the ceiling near the head that are perfect for drying socks and storing maps, as well as a ground-level pocket near the head end of the tent.

As a three-season tent, the Copper Spur isn’t meant to shrug off snow or keep you warm in sub-freezing temperatures, but it’s plenty capable on dry nights near the freezing point. The top of the inner wall is largely mesh, which helps with ventilation on balmy nights, and a vent in the roof can be opened for extra airflow. One door and vestibule are enough for a single person and help keep the Copper Spur’s bulk and weight down. The vestibule is not roomy, but it’s large enough to shelter a 70-liter pack and a pair of shoes, which is all it really needs to do. 

The Copper Spur has its faults. The buckle system, which lends so much speed and ease of use, is prone to jamming, although it’s easy to fix. More serious is the short guyline length, which makes soft ground a necessity, whether that’s deep sand or dirt. There is an aftermarket fix—a sand anchor, which is basically a fabric scoop that clips into your guylines. You fill it with sand or rocks to keep the tent secured without stakes. But that adds weight, which partially defeats the purpose of buying an ultra-lightweight tent. We hope this issue will be fixed in the next round of updates.

Overall, though, the Copper Spur’s excellent rainproofing and windproofing, impressive performance in strong winds, quality hardware, and interior gear shelf make it the best ultra-lightweight tent I’ve tried, even with fierce competition. It’s not a tent you need to consider if you pull up to the campsite in a truck and pitch camp right there; you’re paying a premium for the Copper Spur’s low weight. 

This tent is for people who backpack on foot overnight and would be happy to trim a couple of pounds off their pack weight. Take it from me: Carrying that much less weight is really noticeable after a day or two.