The Trip the Mosquitoes Won, Before We Bought a Screen House

Some trips you remember for the views. The one I remember most from last summer I remember for the bugs. Ray and I drove to the Mogollon Rim in late June, the 4Runner packed the way it always is, bins of gear in the back, our six-person tent on top. We had a perfect campsite, a view through the pines, a cool evening coming. We had forgotten one thing.

The mosquitoes arrived before dinner. Not a few, the kind you wave off. A cloud, the kind that follows you from the car to the fire ring to the tent. We had talked for two seasons about buying a screen house, and the Alvantor pop up was the one I kept showing Ray. By the time he got the stove lit, I was in long sleeves in 80-degree heat, half the spray gone. We ate inside the tent that night, hunched over our plates, the only place the bugs could not follow.

The next morning I counted the bites. Seventeen on my legs alone. Ray had a row across his forehead where the hat slipped. We packed up a day early, a full day of camping gone. On the drive home I told him we were done losing weekends to bugs. That was the trip that settled it.

Ray has a rule about gear, and it is a fair one. It has to earn its place in the bins. He is not hauling anything that gets used once and then sits in the garage for three seasons. So instead of buying on faith, I asked around and found a neighbor with a screen house we could borrow for a weekend.

We used it all three nights. It rained one afternoon and we sat dry under the netting, reading, while the bugs threw themselves at the mesh outside. That weekend sold Ray. He was the one who brought up ordering our own on the drive home.

It rained one afternoon and we sat dry under the netting, reading, while the bugs threw themselves at the mesh outside.

We have now taken the Alvantor on every trip since. That is nine weekends this year, from the high desert to the eastern Sierra, and it has not spent a single one in the garage. The pop up frame goes up in a few minutes. I can do it alone, which matters to me because my right knee, the one I messed up on the Kachina Trail a few years back, does not love crouching and fussing with poles. This one you unfold and it springs into place.

Packing it is not a chore. It folds back into its carry bag in about the same time it takes to set it up, and it rides flat in the back of the 4Runner between the bins. That matters more than it sounds like. The gear that gets left behind is the gear that is hard to pack, and this one has never once been left behind.

The netting does the job we bought it for. Mosquitoes, gnats, the little biting flies that show up at dusk, they all stay outside. The UPF 50+ fabric keeps the sun off the table at lunch. We have eaten every meal under it since July, played cards under it when the evening turned cold, and sat under it during one thunderstorm that would have sent us into the tent otherwise.

My favorite memory of it is not a dramatic one. It is a late afternoon in September, up on the Colorado Plateau, when the light went gold and the wind died and the mosquitoes came out right on schedule. We were sitting in camp chairs under the Alvantor, cups of coffee going cold, not a single bug inside the mesh. Ray looked over and said we should have bought this thing years ago. That is the whole review, really.

Is it perfect? No, and I would not tell you it is. It is not a backpacking shelter, and it is not trying to be. It is a car-camping shelter, the kind you set up once and leave standing for the weekend. You have to stake it down if the wind gets serious, and it is one more thing to pack. But the trade has been worth it. We have not cut a trip short for bugs since the weekend we bought it, and that was the whole point.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If we were sitting at my kitchen table with coffee, this is what I would say. You do not need the fanciest shelter on the market. You need one that sets up without a fight, that you will actually pack, that keeps the bugs off the food and off your neck. The Alvantor has done that for us all season, and it has done it without ever making me wish we had brought something else. If you camp out of the back of a vehicle like we do, and you are tired of eating dinner in the tent, this is the thing I would buy again. I plan to have mine for years.