Our Home Away From Home...

The Sylvan Go heads out towards Alaska from Glacier
National Park

We took a Sylvan GO camper with us on this trip. We could have opted for an RV or some similar road yacht but for us the Sylvan pop-down camper was a big step up from tenting which is what we've done the last 26 years. For us the major advantage of the Sylvan was about comfort on an extended trip and not sleeping on the ground. The Sylvan GO, manufactured in Brevard, North Carolina, is an unusual enough camper that I thought I'd share a little about it. We never did see another one up north, and only met one person (in Alaska) who had heard of them though he had never seen one.

Entering Alberta, overlooking Waterton Lakes

Doesn't get much more comfortable than this!

The Sylvan is a pop-down camper in that the tent is stored in the grey hardshell cover which is cranked upward, opened, and the tent comes down whereupon you put in three support poles and whoila! home away from home. Overall, we were very happy with the camper. It handled some high winds and a lot (a lot!) of rain with no problem. The trailer appears exceptionally well made and features 10" tires which handled the terrain better than my car's tires. We had a lot of practice setting up, and taking down the tent in all sorts of conditions, many of them inclement, and could get it fully set up in about 10 minutes. Our gear was carried on the trailer bed in  plastic containers and the most time-consuming thing was unloading them off the trailer so the tent bottom could rest on the trailer bed.

Inside, the GO had plenty of room for four adults - two of the human, two of the canine variety. The large windows offer the option of screens (mesh), clear plastic to zip up to keep the weather out, and a privacy shade that also zips up. It comes with two tables which can also be used as sleeping platforms. For us, we'll probably only take one table in the future as we preferred sleeping on the side 'wings' of the camper while still allowing the maximum of interior space. If I took it on another trip up north I'd try really hard to figure out a way to heat it as in Alaska it did get cold at night especially when it was raining. Wearing lots of clothing helped but one advantage of a hard-shelled camper or RV certainly is the ability to stay warm.

Balaclavas are all the rage
when camping in the great north

Sophie sports new mukluks to
stay warm in the Alaskan
'summer'

The trailer was exceptionally well-behaved when towed behind my Toyota Sienna. When camping we did buy and use plastic leveling blocks for the wheels of the trailer as the ground we camped on was not always level and flat. The GO has two clear plastic windows at either end of each side's sleeping shelf and in rainy Alaska the condensation was bad enough that it would occasionally drip on me when sleeping.

It would be nice to be able to vent, or open these windows but that's a minor nit. The GO also comes with two inflatable sleeping pads one of which our pups punctured within a couple of days but even with that it still provided decent padding underneath our sleeping bags.

The floor of the Sylvan is heavy-duty nylon but to protect it we went to the hardware store and bought those foam floor squares and cut them to fit. That worked very well. Alternatively we had thought about buying some indoor/outdoor carpet but thought that would be harder to keep clean. We also bought a broom which we used religiously to keep rocks and other debris from getting into the tent.

Ideally the GO would be set up where you were planning to stay for a couple of days and for the most part this was the case with us though we had enough travel days where we would take the camper down in the morning and put it up again at night then get up and do it all again. No big deal, but its more work than just hopping in the front seat of an RV, coffee mug in hand, and simply driving away.

Camping at the 'Mile Zero' campground at the start of the Alaska
Highway. A rare sunny day so plenty of juice for the solar panel
behind me...

We had bought separately a solar panel and battery to supply our electronics (cell phones, bike computers, Kindle, and Ipad). Of course, when I bought the solar panel I was in Colorado which boasts of 300 days of sunshine a year. Where I was going, Alaska, probably boasts of 300 days of overcast skies a year so there were times when I couldn't keep the solar-charged battery full. I guess that's why they make car chargers which worked fine in a pinch (although the engine obviously has to be running to charge anything which didn't always make sense when we were camping - the Toyota Sienna is a pretty expensive generator!). I understand that Sylvan now offers a very nice solar panel/battery option, but I only paid $250 for mine and theirs is more than a thousand although theirs is substantially more powerful.

Aah! The joy of setting up in the rain!

At least the dogs know how to
stay dry...

Rain was a reality we had to deal with many days. Whenever possible we would wait for the rain to let up before stowing the tent in order to give it a chance to dry. However, there were several times we had to put the tent away soaking wet because the rain wasn't quitting anytime soon. Just like any tent, you want to get it set up and dry as soon as you can to avoid musty odors and mildew.

As you can see from some of the pictures we had racks on the GO to carry bikes or the kayaks. There were a couple of nights I cranked up the camper with the bikes still up there but most days made the effort to remove them to save wear and tear on the cable system that raises the camper portion. That said, the GO never complained about the load on top even when in the camping setup. I also noticed that the equipment on the GO stayed cleaner behind the van which in the picture to the right is sorely in need of a wash.

The GO has a nice  green storage compartment in the front which is where we kept the solar panel/battery, Charging battery for the car just in case (I used it to jump the Toyota one time in Wasilla, AK, once in Whitehorse on a fellow camper's motorcycle, and once more on some campers car ion Dawson City), our kayak paddles, a camping toilet which we never needed, and a bicycle pump. It kept everything very dry through some horrendous rainstorms.

Its tough to get across exactly how roomy the GO tent is but there was plenty of space for sleeping and the table had loads of room for flashlights, bear spray, electronics, etc.

The GO also has an optional canopy that extends from the tent door and we used it on several occasions. It has plenty of room for a couple of chairs, two wet people, and two soggy canines to get out of the weather without going in the tent.

I wonder if they could add mosquito netting on the open sides
and fronts????

So there you have a quick tour. The Sylvan site has some good video on the manufacturing process as well as segments of the GO in action.  We'd highly recommend the GO as a great, relatively inexpensive camper that did everything we asked of it and came through like a champ. Now, where are the smores?