Hyperlite Mountain Gear CrossPeak 2 Tent Review

I may have been slightly dismissive of the wind before coming down here. Patagonia is known for its unsettled weather, and people who talk about Patagonia talk about the wind — frequently. Which can lead some (like myself) down the path of, well, how bad can it be?

I found out just how bad. At roughly 10:30 p.m. on the first night of our 4-day Huemul trek, a tempest bleeding off the Patagonian Icefield turned its might directly down the valley. Within the span of 60 seconds, a freight train barreled from Paso del Viento — one of the many “Windy Passes” in this part of the world — and landed (of course) on my side of the tent.

Thankfully, that tent was the Hyperlite Mountain Gear CrossPeak 2, a new ultralight freestanding shelter that shouldered the wind all night without an ounce of guff. This Dyneema Composite Fabric shelter is Hyperlite’s first freestanding offering, and is still rightfully lightweight, but has much more of a spine compared to trekking pole-supported tents. 

In short: So far, 2025 is shaping up to be the year of the ultralight freestanding tent, and the CrossPeak 2 may be one of the best delivered so far. I recently used the CrossPeak on my entire Huemul trek and other parts of Argentina and Chile, where I found it to be a stellar lightweight shelter. It does come at a premium price and requires slightly cautious use, like other ultralight gear.

Looking for a new ultralight shelter? Check out how the Hyperlight CrossPeak 2 compares to the rest of the tents and tarps in GearJunkie’s Best Ultralight Tents Buyer’s Guide.

Hyperlite Mountain Gear CrossPeak 2 Tent: Review

The CrossPeak 2 is a bit of a horizon expansion for the brand. More typically churning out “light-is-right Dyneema Composite Fabric everything” kit, a freestanding tent is, by definition, not the lightest option. In typical style, however, Hyperlite aimed to create a pole-supported tent that is as light as it can be given the design.

Addressing the needs of intro-ultralighters, bikepackers, or those who don’t hike with trekking poles, the CrossPeak is more familiar and, as I learned, opens up the door to a more weather-resistant design. At 34 ounces out the door and packing up smaller than a loaf of bread, it’s also no boat anchor.

The closest Hyperlite has come to a freestanding tent has been its Unbound 2, a trekking pole shelter angled at hikers who lean on their sticks daily. The CrossPeak and the Unbound share a fair bit of DNA, but the ability to pitch the CrossPeak on less forgiving terrain (think desert slickrock) certainly gives it an edge in some circumstances.

The $950 price tag initially raised my eyebrows, but the wind beat some perspective into me that first night in Patagonia. Trusted gear doesn’t come cheap, and this is what I learned about the CrossPeak 2 after a few weeks living out of it in South America.

CrossPeak 2 Set-Up

The setup on the CrossPeak 2 is pretty cut and dry. The three-pole arrangement begins by tensioning the two long crossed poles, which occurs at the head end with webbing and ladder locks. Then, the small brow pole at the tent’s peak bumps out the headspace and tightens up the rig.

The doors need to be pinned out, and the vestibules are about what you’d expect in a UL shelter (enough space to stash your pack plus your trail runners). The doors pin back with magnets (très chic these days), and the internal doors open with an L-shaped zipper, avoiding the grungy zippers of rainbow doors. 

The internal space of the bathtub floor is tapered: 48 inches at the head and 45 inches at the foot. This will mean that 25-inch pads won’t play nicely, but the 20-inch XTherms I used run great. The angle of the walls is more generous than I’m used to in trekking pole shelters, and it provides plenty of room for sleeping bags and moving around.

Material-wise, you can’t get much more premium than the DCF5 canopy and DCF10 floor, which lend a lot of muscle but keep things as light as possible. The white color also provides a slight translucence, and while you can’t quite make out figures inside the tent, starlight can illuminate the ceiling on certain nights.

I’ll make one final small callout here because it just impressed me so much (my needs are simple): The vestibule doors all end in a single female-side buckle, to which the adjustable guyline can be clipped to either, depending on which door you’ll be using. Simple, elegant, smart.

No Carbon Poles?

You expected carbon poles, right? I know I did. It’d make sense for a brand like Hyperlite to go high-tech and use carbon fiber tent poles, but instead, it specs the CrossPeak 2 out with aluminum DAC 8.7mm Featherlite NFL poles, and the reason is simple: durability.

Big Agnes has experimented with using Easton Syclone carbon fiber poles in a few of its more niche (and spendy) versions of the Fly Creek, and MSR currently offers the same poles for its line of lightweight mountaineering shelters. That said, I’ve seen far too many of the busted MSR poles come through the door of the mountaineering shop I used to manage to feel overwhelming confidence.

The 8.7mm DAC poles, alternatively, are negligibly heavier, but you get much more confidence in knowing they won’t give up the ghost mid-trip (even Samaya — the French ultralight mountaineering tent brand — uses the same DAC poles in its silly-light shelters). The poles on the CrossPeak collapse down to just over 14 inches, making them ideal for running on space-strapped locations such as bikepacking rigs. 

Batten Down the Hatches

Night two on the Huemul was (somehow) even windier than the first. We made camp in the lee of one of the huge moraines of boulders pushed aside by the Icefield, which might have been a savvy idea if regular weather rules were in play. They were not.

This night required pulling out all the stops to get the CrossPeak ready for wind, but thankfully, there are several things you can do. Guying out your shelter is classic, and this tent is no different, with eight webbing loops that encapsulate the tent poles. Some head- and foot-end wall tie-outs can also be secured to bump up the internal space and lessen flapping. 

If that’s not enough, the CrossPeak has another trick up its sleeve. By placing your trekking poles into the two peaks of the tent (in the same way that many non-freestanding tents are supported), you can add a surprising amount of support to the shelter. With this setup, I could press down on the peaks of the tent with considerable force.

One final dial to twist here when things are nasty, and that’s hemming the sides of the bathtub floor up at the head and foot end of the tent. This is accomplished by a simple elastic and cord lock, and can help keep the wind from sneaking in. This worked well to snug the windward side and open the lee side for ventilation.

What Could Be Better?

As a single-wall shelter, condensation is simply a factor to be accounted for with this tent. Some nights, it’s nonexistent — the persistent wind helped in this account — and some nights, it’s heavy. The two small peak vents on the CrossPeak aren’t large, so any night you can leave a vestibule door or two open, so much the better.

The pole sleeves on the CrossPeak 2 are 20D silnylon, which is supremely slippery and ideal for passing pole ends through, but a bit on the lighter side, and you’ll need to exercise caution to avoid accidentally tearing it. The one way I could see improving the tent would be to sub in a tougher ripstop material, such as Dimension Polyant’s X-Pac. 

Finally, as I lay listening to the wind some nights, my eyes caught a few instances of some loose thread ends on the tent’s interior. It’s easy to chalk this up to preproduction issues, but for the dough you’ll drop on this tent, hopefully, these will be ironed out in the real deal.

Hyperlite Mountain Gear CrossPeak 2: Conclusion

On the last night of the Huemul, we camped alongside Lago Veidma on a rough cobble beach. All afternoon and all night, the shore before us was a landing zone for a succession of blue ice that calved off the Patagonian Icefield.

Grounded in the shallows, these abstracts would rumble, capsize, and cleave in two, sink and flip on end, rush forth and retreat. Water that had fallen as snow thousands of years prior returned again to water.

You probably thought the wind went away for this picture-perfect ending. Nope — full-on whipping. Wind shuttled off the tongue of ice and ripped spray off the whitecaps. Waterspouts spun out of nowhere and would hit the beach with a 50mph wallop. It was chaos. But the CrossPeak 2 kept up the good fight all night.

Hyperlite Mountain Gear will only take preorders on the CrossPeak 2 during its initial launch. According to the brand, you’ll get your hands on it in early May. But given my experiences with the tent in Patagonia, I’d say it’s worth the wait. 

This tent is another in the arsenal of the weight-conscious backpacker, more primed to shoulder seasons or rugged environments. The next trip I’ve planned for it will be a bikepacking trip, where its light weight, small packed size, and use of separate poles will all be a boon. 

If all this is on your shelter tick-list (and you can scrounge the bills together), the CrossPeak 2 is certainly one of the lightest freestanding tents out there, and one worthy of consideration.