Tent stories 1

Implying, of course, that there will be further tent stories to come.

The past few weeks have been very nose-to-the-grindstone, trying to catch up with at least the most urgent things at work, with some success. Hence the dearth of new posts; it’s not so much time I run out of, as energy and brainpower.

However, I’m just not constituted to be all work and no play, so to keep myself going, I’ve been obsessing about tents. Why tents? I’m so glad you asked.

For several years I drove a GMC Safari van. I had removed the back seats and built a bed in back so the dogs and I could travel and live in it during the summer, and it served me well. But last summer, with the precipitous rise in gas prices (and I admit the movie An Inconvenient Truth), I decided I couldn’t live with the low mileage any more, and bought a new car, a Pontiac Vibe. One of the reasons I settled on the Vibe is that I can actually sleep in it; another is that it comes with a roof rack.

Fast forward to this coming summer. I am planning to make a loop around the West, encompassing Arizona, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and back to California. I hate paying for motels, I want to get out into the wilds where the dogs and I can both run free (well, they run; I walk sedately), and I hate bugs. Conclusion: I needed something larger than the Vibe, but portable, to live in. Hence–obsessing about tents.

After many hours on the internet looking at every conceivable variety of tent, I concluded that a single tent would not suffice for all the conditions I expect to encounter, so I ended up buying three (yes, three). The first is a conventional dome tent, a Kelty Merced 6 (I want to be able to stand up in the tent, and it pretty much takes a six-person tent to get one high enough.) The second is technically a screen house, a Eureka Northern Breeze. The third I’ll discuss in a later post.

So last Thursday the first two tents arrived. The big question: could I put them up by myself? I decided to begin with the Kelty, which I decided to erect on the patio. Here it is, laid out ready to go:

Here are the poles.

You link them together into two very LONG poles, thread them through a coupls of tubes (I can’t think of a better word, though I’m sure there is one) on the top of the tent (by far the hardest part of the process; you can’t pull the poles through because then the sections become disengaged), insert the ends of the poles into grommets at the corners of the tent (the fourth one is the hard one, you have to lift, bend, and hook all at once), and voila!

You hook the sides to the poles, and you have a tent! A very light tent, I might add; out there in the wilds, I will definitely need to stake it and tie it down with guy lines.

One of the things I wanted was lots of windows with mesh coverings (I hate bugs, particularly mosquitoes). Here’s a view from inside, looking out the door through its mesh window.

Putting on the rain fly is gong to be a serious challenge in the wind. You insert a couple of poles on the underside of the fly, then turn it over and lay it on the tent, fastening it down at the corners. With the poles in, it’s like a large kite. I managed it, but we’ll see how it goes when it really counts. Here it is, all done.

One of the things that sold me on the Kelty is what I’m hoping will prove to be a good compromise between rain protection and openness and airiness. Some rain flies just barely cover the top of the tent, which doesn’t look very protective to me; others cover everything, coming down the sides nearly to the ground, which would be very cozy and rain-safe, but also a bit claustrophobic to spend much time in. This looks like a good compromise to me. Here’s hoping.

So, I can raise the Kelty. Keep in mind that I’m 59 years old and female. It wasn’t entirely obvious that I could do this solo; though I was somewhat confident, it’s good to know for sure I can do it.

On to the Northern Breeze. A whole other story. I had started this whole tent hunt from imagining myself happily ensconced in a camping spot, sitting and reading or playing on the computer after a nice morning hike with the dogs. Enter the bugs. I hate bugs, particularly bugs buzzing around my head. The desert has flies, the mountains both flies and mosquitoes. Also, shade can be in short supply in the desert, and even in some mountainous areas. No longer an idyllic fantasy. However, add a screen room, with all four sides made of mesh but with a roof for shade–now we’re getting back to idyllic. I got the Northern Breeze for a variety of reasons: it looked like I could raise it alone, it has sides that can be down for privacy or rain protection, or furled for air, or deployed as awnings for additional shade. You can even add a floor, so that it’s nearly like a tent. The big disadvantage appeared to be size–it’s 12″ by 12″, which is bigger than even I wanted. But there aren’t all that many options out there, and all of the others I saw explicitly require at least two people to raise them.

So buoyed by my success with the Kelty, I took it out to a nice large open field across from my house to see if I could do it. I had the feeling it wouldn’t work as it came from the factory, but I figured I should try it that way first. Disaster! I managed to hook it up as instructed, and began to lift it into place, but the support poles went every which way and the wind caught the tent (it came with the walls down, so wind resistance was maximized) and thoroughly blew it, me, and the framework around. Needless to say, I got no pictures of any of this–I was too busy. The worst part is that one of the legs got bent in the fray. Look closely–the bend is toward the top, where the leg inserts into the first roof section.

But I didn’t give up. I figured if I could get the framework up and standing, I could then lift the tent and hook it into place. So I first modified the tent by removing the lug doohicky at the top into which the poles insert and adding a quicklink latch to the tent. I took it out to the back yard (less wind there because of the fence) and tried to raise the framework. However, there was no way I could get it to stand up on its own, let alone support the tent. The poles link together by inserting one section into the next, and they just rotated freely around these points, so the framework wobbled and fell no matter what I did, reminding me of a drunken spider.

Back to the hardware store. Must stop rotation. Did you know you can create your own screw-holes? Did you know there’s such a thing as a wing screw? I inserted wing screws through each joint in the roof sections of the poles, and also through into the lug at the top that joins them all together. You can see them here:

It was actually easier than I thought it would be when I first set out to do it. Ha! No more rotation. And, with a bit of cussing, I got that sucker UP! (Is it just me, or is there a certain smutty tone to these last two paragraphs?) Here’s the proof:

Here’s a picture taken from the inside looking out one of the doors:

The blue at the top of the picture is the roof, the black stripe the zipper holding the door closed.

Here’s a view out the corner, with two of the dogs on the patio looking at me:

So I now know I can get both tents up by myself. I’m still not sure the Northern Breeze is going to be a viable shelter, though. It seemed really flimsy to me–I can’t imagine it surviving much of a wind, even if it’s well staked and guyed down. Those poles just don’t seem very strong (and then there’s that bent one, though I may try to replace it). It’s also just plain a lot of material to handle–it’s gotta be well over 300 square feet altogether, hard to deploy and hard to confine again to get it into its bag. And the mesh picks up weed seeds at the merest touch. But I’m a stubborn person, and god wot I can’t return it now, so I’ll take it with me and we’ll see if I ever use it, or how well it works if I do.