Dreams, Adventure, And Risk: Pics Or It Didn’t Happen

I recently expounded on my theory that people need dreams & adventure. I also gave a personal example (links: 1, 2, 3, 4). What was the example? I bought a hot tent* and stove* with which I intend to camp solo in “freeze your ass off” weather. (Note: the links to hot tent and stove go to Amazon. If you buy anything from those links it costs you nothing extra and I get a small kickback from Amazon.)

I want to make something perfectly clear. The goal is not to survive in a battle with nature it is to enjoy myself. (Any jackoff, including myself in younger ages, can huddle under a spruce bough; shivering around a smoky fire while wrapped in a cheap tarp until the dawn comes and a tired, beat, camper hikes eagerly for the truck. I’ve done that. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it sucks, but it’s never comfortable. That stage of life is in the rear view mirror for me. I got nuthin’ to prove to nobody about me and my drinking buddy Mother Nature.)

As for blogging and photos, today I’ll try to strike a balance. This particular Curmudgeonly tilting of windmills is still in the “getting feet wet” stage. I’m entirely a clueless n00b but there are details of the technology I’m still learning. I don’t want to nudge any impressionable dreamers into following my foolish notions before I can offer more reasoned analysis. On the other hand, pics or it didn’t happen. On the third hand, I got sick of taking photos so all I’ve got is grainy snapshots. On the fourth hand… it’s been super fun!

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Remember when American goods were top quality and Russian goods were a punch line? Yeah, I remember it too. It’s over! Don’t weep for it. Don’t complain. Don’t try to pretend otherwise. That time is gone like trustworthy elections and cheap gas.

Don’t cling to the past; adapt! I paid top dollar for more or less the best, toughest, tent I could buy for my purposes… and it came from Russia.

Russian tech was just right for my needs. Strong and designed like I might find myself hunting polar bears in Greenland. This isn’t REI shit. No man buns were harmed in the making of this blog but that’s only by chance. The tent was brutally expensive but it’s so damn macho it makes me smile.

The stove comes in a shipping box. A wood box. Holy shit!

The box isn’t an heirloom. It’s just plywood. But that’s a hint that they’re not screwing around.

The tent came in a cardboard box that looked like it had been trampled by wildebeests. My dog is suspicious of the battered box.

Inside the box, the woodstove has a very nice carrying bag. Pretty solid; which is good because the stove has all sorts of jagged edges that would eat a thin nylon bag.

Hot tent woodstoves sometimes have oils and residues leftover from the manufacturing process. You’re told to fire it up outside of the tent for an hour or so just to be sure that’s all gone.

I unpacked it and found all sorts of cool goodies. Now only did I have the titanium stove and pipe (as expected) but I had various gadgets and necessaries. Very thoughtful. It was packed like the box might be air dropped to a cast away on the coast of a lonely Norwegian Fjord. It has all you’ll need save matches.  The beige folded thing in the included materials is a heat/fire resistant mat. Put that under the stove if you use it on top of a fabric tent floor. The black shrink wrapped thing is replacement materials in case you break a fireplace window while in the hinterland. Losing a heat source is a very serious thing so it was wise to include it and the part is much appreciated by the buyer! The plastic bag is a smoke detector with battery. The green thing is a carrying pack with the stove’s four legs.

The sides of the stove have removable heat shields that are also protection for the glass windows. They’re easily removable or I you could leave them on if you wished.

The glass is not merely for show. Glass will not warp like metal will, thus keeping the stove more dimensionally sound. Plus the glass is vastly more efficient transmitting heat.

On a purely emotional level, a stove without a window to watch the pretty fire would be a tragedy.

There’s a heat shield in the back to keep the stove from burning the tent material that will be near it. The tent also has flame/heat resistant material in the appropriate place; much like a welding blanket. There’s a heat shield/ash pan on the bottom too.

There’s lots of nice details like the logo carved on the stovetop. (I’ll be cooking on that logo in due time.)

The front vent/door is weird. Nobody copies the Russians and the Russians don’t copy anybody. Then again the first part to go on small portable stoves are the hinges and the air vent apparatus. This design eliminates all hinges. The air intake control, despite looking funky, works like a charm. I had my doubts but it’s perfect.

There’s a spark arrestor for the top… because duh.

Here it is, all set up.

My cat came by to assist the burn in process. Damn cat.

The tent’s box looked like shit but the tent was pristine.

It’s a very nice carry bag. If you need to haul a body… this will do just fine.

The tent is a weird umbrella design. I’ve never seen anything like it. You set a 50 pound lump of fabric upright on the ground and release a strap. It pops out like a strange camouflage origami starfish. There are more details to the setup but you can see it on YouTube if you want the details.

It sets up ridiculously fast; especially considering this is a two layer, four season tent.

I set it up in an easy spot on a perfectly reasonable day. No wind, it wasn’t snowing, I set it up on frozen grass I’d plowed cleared of snow, etc… This was intended to be a relaxing overnight… not a backwoods forest challenge. I was close to a structure in case I needed to bailout.

At sunset it was smooth sailing. I kicked back in the toasty warm tent with a bottle of bourbon and a smug smile on my face. At midnight it started snowing hard and I got nervous. Around 3:00 am all hell broke loose. It was a genuine, no bullshit, hang on to your britches or you’ll be blown out of them, blizzard.

I should check the weather report more often.

The tent rode out a full on blizzard for many hours. I was warm and snug all night long. I was a bit nervous since I hadn’t tested the tent before but the tent was a damn fortress.

This is the lee side of the tent! This is the vent. I kept two vents open while I was operating the fire. All that snow fell in one night while I was in there!

The tent has an optional (you can install it or not) “hard door”. It’s a feature I’ve never seen in any tent. This is supposedly so you can’t freeze in if a zipper gets iced up. It’s also convenient. That’s the door right there.

A few days later, when the weather wasn’t trying to kill me, I set it back up and installed the optional um… It’s not really a vestibule. I’m going to call it an “airlock”. It appears to be a hexagonal hallway thing that allows this tent to link seamlessly to a very expensive vestibule that I didn’t buy. (The “vestibule” is practically a whole different attached tent.)

The airlock is crazy elaborate but I can see how it would make the vestibule / tent connection very warm and secure.

The tent is an octagon. There’s an anchor point at the base of each corner. There’s an anchor point at each “mid wall”. Do the math. That’s 16 places to stake it down at the base.

There’s a nearly equal number of waist high guyline anchor points. I rode out a “balls to the wall, Dan Rather clinging to a fencepost” blizzard with only 8 base points anchored and 7 guylines. The tent was very solid.

I bought cheap carabiners so I can clip guylines to whichever part of the tent most needs to be secured. The carabiners are my idea and I think it’s a good one. I will have anywhere from 8 to 12 guylines in the tent bag and simply use however many I think I need wherever is best. In most calm weather that number will be zero. An absolute outrageous amount of line is included but it’s not cut to any reasonable length. Maybe you need 30′ guylines to anchor it to an iceberg or something?

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This has nothing to do with the tent. It’s about fuel for the wood stove. While camping this summer I was carrying pallet wood. A trash can of pallet wood in my truck is waterproof and enough volume for several days of brewing coffee, cooking food, and watching the flames.

For no particular reason, I started keeping “the good stuff” for future woodworking projects and tossing “the not good stuff” in the garbage can for camping. It took less than an hour of chopping up pallets to fill the whole trash can and also make this pile of rough cut kiln dried pine.

One warning. I was afraid that kiln dried, milled, pine would burn too hot for a small portable woodstove. I used some of the pallet wood but also mixed in a lot of not-kiln dried wood harvested from the forest in general. Such fuel still put off plenty of heat and once the fire’s going, it didn’t seem hard to use the colder slightly wetter fuel.

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This is a squirrel’s ass…

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So there you have it. The tent (and I) passed a brutal “maiden voyage”. There will be additional stories as I gain experience and camp more.

A.C.

*Note: Amazon gives me a small kickback if you buy something (anything!) from a link on my blog. It costs you nothing but I get beer money out of it.