A week after this picture was taken, Ben's tent was still holding strong despite seven straight days of torrential rain in the Northwest Territories.
The storm won’t stop, the water’s rising in your tent’s aptly named “bathtub floor,” and it’s only a matter of time before a pole snaps or a stake rips out of the ground, and you find yourself in serous trouble. If you would have taken the time to rig your tent properly, you would be enjoying your 178th card game in a row. Instead, you slacked. And now you’re scrambling to hold things together.
The world’s strongest tent is just an expensive kite if it’s pitched poorly. I’ve seen tents full of gear flung into crevasses, tossed into trees, and blown out of sight across desert plateaus. I’ve also seen a tent ripped to shreds in a mountain storm while the one next to it was unharmed. How you pitch your tent determines whether you sleep peacefully or spend all night hoping your shelter doesn’t disintegrate.
Pre-rigging your tent:
Pre-rig your tent at home with 2- or 3mm-thick accessory cord. Thirty feet will do for a basic car-camping model, but a big expedition tent may take 100 feet or more. Reflective cord makes midnight bathroom trips safer. Each anchor point on the tent’s fly needs a cord long enough to reach the ground at a 45-degree angle, loop around a large anchor point (think logs and rocks), and make it back to the tent.
Anchors:
Most tents come with pathetic stakes that resemble bent coat hangers. Throw these away, and get some that’ll take abuse. A good stake can be driven into a gravel parking lot with a framing hammer and not bend. Sand and snow call for deadman-style anchors that resemble miniature parachutes, which can be buried to create solid anchors. If you’re camping around a lot of trees or rocks you can save weight by using natural anchors. On winter trips use skis, poles, ice axes, ice screws, or pickets to anchor your tent. It won’t cost you any extra weight since you’re already carrying them. You also need something to drive the stakes, but you should not carry something that only serves this purpose. Use your ice axe or find a rock.
Pitching your tent:
First, make sure you put your tent in a logical place. You obviously want a flat spot, but you also want wind protection. Face the front door away from the wind for a nice sheltered entrance. If rain is likely, make sure the tent is not in a low spot or natural drainage. Campers have woken up floating on their inflatable sleeping pads because their tent was in a too-low campsite.
Most good tents have clips that attach the fly directly to the poles near the anchor points—don’t neglect these. They drastically strengthen your tent, especially since you’ll want to tie down your tent primarily from the fly.
Begin by staking out the corners of your tent as well as your vestibule (if your tent has one). While this will get your tent standing upright and looking like a tent, it isn’t nearly enough to keep it from blowing away or getting destroyed in a big storm. The keys to structural integrity are the mid-height guy-line attachments on the fly, but most people don’t even notice them. Luckily, you’ve already pre-rigged all of these points with accessory cord. Make yourself a solid anchor at least as far away from the tent as the guy-line attachment is from the ground. Now loop the cord around the anchor, and tighten it with a trucker’s hitch. The trucker’s hitch not only lets you tighten each guy line until it’s guitar-string tight, but it also lets you untie each of them with a single pull. Remember to check for loose guy lines as the night goes on.
This setup is obviously overkill for a crystal-clear night, but weather can always get worse. When in doubt, make it stronger. Practice at home a few times, and you’ll go from hiking down the trail to relaxing in your tent before the rest of the group even finds a campsite. The only drawback to a well-pitched tent is that your friends always want to get in after their tent blows away. But hey, think of all the favors you’ll be able to call in when you’re back in civilization.
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Tags: backpacking, camping, expeditions, how to repair tents, tents