Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent review
Featuring a tiny pack size and weighing less than 1 kg, the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent is an amazing option for any 3-season UL camping setup when gearing up on a budget. Roomy, easy to pitch and delivering surprisingly robust performance in changing UK conditions, there’s nothing out there we know of that delivers a better bang for your buck right now, providing you’re not looking for something stealthy.
Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent
Ideal for: 3-season wildcamping trips, fastpacking, thru-hiking, lightweight backpacking
Not suitable for: Deep-winter wildcamps, summit camping
The Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent is a packable, lightweight and surprisingly durable trekking pole tent that is available at an unbeatable price. Delivering exceptional all-round performance for the price, it’s easy to carry, does a great job in wind and rain, and comes with some solid eco-credentials.
The Good
Very small pack size
Very lightweight
Affordable
Surprisingly easy to pitch
Roomy for a one-person tent
Robust and remarkably solid
Very photographic due to the white flysheet
The Bad
Lots of mesh
White colour may take some getting used to
The Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent
The Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent is a cleverly designed and intriguing little tent designed and sold by outdoor powerhouse Decathlon. Designed and tested in the French Alps, it’s the brand’s answer to the ever-popular Lanshan, being a lightweight and packable tent for quick pitches on ultralight adventures.
In a move that makes this tent more environmentally friendly than dyed models, the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent is completely white. Everything from the inner through the bathtub floor and the strikingly bright flysheet are all toilet-bowl white, which might take some getting used to at first. But thanks to the lack of colour (only 5% of the materials are dyed), the MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent’s C02 emissions could be reduced by 58%.
Weighing in at 920 grams, the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent is also decidedly lightweight. What’s more, it packs down to barely the size of a bivy bag, making this tent an excellent choice for ultralightweight backpackers and camping minimalists alike. Naturally, however, due to the design, you do need additional trekking poles to form the tent, so those need to be considered in the shelter’s total weight, especially if you take them purely for your pitch. But if you’re the type of hiker who uses trekking poles anyway, then this tent allows you to add additional versatility to the rest of your pack — all to bring your total pack weight and size down for lightweight 3-season adventuring.
The Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent can currently be bought directly from Decathlon for an unbelievable £129.99 for the one-person version. For us at the GBAC, this represents unbeatable value for money, easily rivalling the likes of the 3FUL Lanshan or Alpkit’s equivalently priced but smaller Polestar trekking pole tent.
Our experience using the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent
To test the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent, we used this tent on dozens of wildcamps through late summer and early winter of 2023. We had it out on trips across Dartmoor National Park, camping on several of the park’s highest (and windiest) tors, we spent several relaxed nights in it on some less-than-stealthy woodland camps, and we even used it on a multi-day fastpacking trip along the Thames. What’s more, on a visit to Decathlon’s Design Centre in Charmonix, we even got to see how the brand rain tests this tent — spending 20 minutes inside during a mock tropical storm, all to see how it performs in the worst rains imaginable. All that’s to say that we have a solid idea of how this tent performs in our changing UK conditions. And we’ve been nothing but impressed with it every time we’ve used it.
Pack size and pitching
The first thing that really stands out about this tent is it’s pack size. It’s tiny. For such a roomy one-person shelter — the type you can comfortably sit up in — it packs down to the size of a bottle of wine. This means it will fit in pretty much any pack, be it a 30-litre running pack (as was the case on our fastpacking trip) or a 60-litre backpacking rucksack. Due to it’s size, we even managed to squeeze it in to the bottom compartment of our 45-litre Osprey Kestrel 48, alongside our sleeping bag.
Regarding pitching, this is also relatively easy for a trekking pole tent, though it can be tough to get right first time, especially if you’re erecting it in the wind. To pitch the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent, it’s simply a matter of pegging out all of the various corner fastenings and then sliding your poles into the side fittings. Thankfully, Forclaz have printed the pole length on the shoulders so you always know exactly how long to extend your poles: 115 cm. Once these are in, you can reposition some of the corners if the flysheet isn’t tight enough or you can play around with the guy lines to get a solid pitch in the wind.
Wind and rain performance
A regular complaint about trekking pole tents is that they tend to blow down in the wind. This is something we’ve observed ourselves, wrestling to get a stable pitch when fiddling with the likes of the Nortent Bivvuakk or the Lanshan 2. Thankfully, however, the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent stands remarkably strong in wind from practically any direction. Granted, that doesn’t mean you should go pitching this thing on top of Cadair Idris in January, but it does mean that you can treat it much like you would any other dome tent. Due to the pressure on the poles as the fly pulls these down to the ground, the flysheet becomes impressively tight, and we’ve found that this makes the MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent more than capable of butting off gusts of up to 50 km/h when pitching with the door-side facing the wind.
Coming with a 2,000 mm hydrostatic head, the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent is also more than capable of fending off sustained 3-season showers. With fully taped seams, the tent has never leaked in our experience, nor have we ever been concerned with any water ingress — even when camping it in a mock tropical storm inside a giant water testing chamber over in Decathlon’s Design Centre. In our experience, it’s as waterproof as many other premium models, such as the Robens Chaser 1 or the Big Agnes Fly Creek HV UL; two tents that pack down to a similar size as the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent yet cost more than twice as much.
Internal space and vestibule
One thing we particularly appreciate about the MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent is the space you get inside. When you compare this to other tents with a similar pack size and weight, it’s a palace. With a head height of around 110 cm, you can comfortably sit up in the Trekking Tarp Tent, and there’s more than enough room for a bed mat and sleeping bag. What’s more, due to the corners at the foot end of the tent being raised about 30 cm from the floor, the internal space feels much more livable than the likes of the Lanshan or the Alpkit Polestar. These also add some additional structural integrity to the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent, and ensure that your sleeping bag doesn’t go scraping against the mesh inner (of the polyester flysheet) through the night.
Naturally, being a one-person tent, however, there isn’t much room for more than a pad, a bag and a body. Instead, you can store additional kit in the adjoining vestibule, as well as use the space for cooking and spreading out various bits of kit you’ll need through the night. Unfortunately, however, there is only one zip on the door. This means that you have to have the door either fully opened or fully closed, which makes cooking in inclement weather a little tricky. To improve the versatility of this tent, we’d love to see Decathlon add a two-way zip here, which would really round out the utility of this shelter.
Ventilation and condensation
The Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent comes with one singular vent which is positioned on the rear shoulder of the tent if looking at it from the front. And though this does a reasonable job of providing some airflow, we never woke up to a dry tent. Thankfully, due to the large door, we were always able to air it out in the morning (providing it wasn’t raining) and never found that condensation became an issue, even when using it over multiple days.
The colour
Finally, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: The toilet bowl white colour. Before the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent, we’d never used a white tent before, and we weren’t really sure what to make of it. But having tested it extensively, we can unreservedly state that we love it: It doesn’t get as dirty as you expect it might, nor does it look odd or out of place in any way when pitched out in the wild. And while it’s certainly not a good choice for stealth camps or for pitching in areas where you need to be subtle, we actually found that the vibrant white flysheet makes this shelter incredibly photogenic: When snapped with a lantern inside, it really stands out on the landscape and looks incredible pitched beneath a blanket of equally bright stars.
In fact, the only drawback we observed during our months of testing was that the white flysheet seemed to attract more bugs. Whether this is down to how bright it lights up when you’ve got a lantern on inside or whether bugs just like white tents, we can’t say for sure. But we definitely noticed that there were more creepy crawlies buzzing around the flysheet through the night, which was a bit annoying when cooking at night.
Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent FAQs
-
The Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent is an excellent three-season shelter. It’s airy and comfortable and performs surprisingly well in a summer storm, holding up well to wind and rain.
-
The Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent isn’t designed for winter use. It’s a proper 3-season shelter with an inner that’s made 100% out of mesh. This means that it will hold comparably less heat than an inner comprising solid panels, and it’s not designed to hold up against challenging winter storms. That being said, it performs remarkably well for it’s weight and pack size - easily standing up to strong gusts of wind and sustained rain. Just be careful: If you were to pitch this thing in the snow, you might struggle to find it again!
-
The Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent performs very well in the wind. As long as it’s pitched correctly, it can easily cope with regular gusts and sustained wind. If you can’t properly peg out the corners, however, it’s strengths drastically drops — so you should still be considerate when choosing your pitch for the night.
-
Pitching the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent is surprisingly easy. As with all trekking pole tents, however, it’s important that you create enough tension down over the trekking poles, and that you ensure they’re set to the right height. To pitch the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent, all you need to do is peg out the four corners of the tent, add the additional corner poles and then slide in the trekking poles to establish the shelter’s structural integrity.
-
Absolutely. Costing £129.99 when bought directly through Decathlon, we don’t think there are many better-value options out there on the market right now
Conclusion
Overall, we really rate the Forclaz MT900 Trekking Tarp Tent. It offers plenty of livable space, performs well in the wind, packs down to a tiny size and (thanks to the undyed fabric) is 58% less harmful to the environment. All in, for £129.99, we think you’ll struggle to find a better value shelter out there right now — especially if you’re the type of hiker who uses trekking poles already.
