Alaskan Adventure
We are happy campers due to our being outfitted with Hilleberg tents, but the WildSnow philosophy is that everything can be improved, so… In our two-man tents we installed a thin foam tent floor (that’s why Caleb is smiling in this photo). The idea with this is the foam provides your first line of insulation to the cold snow so you get even better solar heating, and also makes the floor more comfortable for kneeling or sitting. I also like the foam floor because parts of my sleeping bag never seem to stay exactly on my pad, so when my bag touches the floor I’m barricaded from the cold slimy nylon. Yeah, the foam tent floor is bulky and adds weight, but it really is nice. If these things are too much of a hassle to haul up high we’ll leave them in our mid-mountain cache. We got the tent floor foam from Forty Below.
Caleb enjoying his new foam floor. Note the nice long zipper pulls at upper left.
The tent floor foam is thin, fairly high density.
Another mod recommended for 'hoop' tunnel tents such as Louie and mine's Hillberg Nammatj is a triangulated guy line system. Idea behind this is when the wind is blowing hard the tent hoops need to resist force from all directions, rather than being held by just one guy line angle. In other words, for each set of lines pulling in one direction you have a set pulling the opposite way. They are also self equalizing.
Even without our additional couple of lines the Nammatj has a lot of string to get tangled. We added small bungie loops at each line anchor. Before packing up the tent, we quickly bundle each string and stuff it in the bungee loop. This works really well -- you unpack the tent for a setup and no snarl of lines. The time it takes to bundle the lines during takedown is less time than it takes to untangle them at setup, so no time lost and a quicker setup for harsh conditions.
We’re also using various interior storage and gear drying options. Caleb and Jordan will be installing a tent storage shelf they found at backcountry.com. Louie and I don’t have room for that, so along with our clothesline we added a daisy chain that runs down the back wall (hang gloves and stuff from the loops) and one the runs down the wall of our vestibule. We also figured out how to hang our satphone vertically from the clothesline as it seems to work fairly well from inside the tent, thus eliminating the hassle of setting up our remote antenna. I wish the Nammatj had more inside storage pockets running along the walls — we’ll have to make do with the existing one on each side (though I’m tempted to install a few more if we have time over the next weeks).
A couple other other important mods: We drilled holes in the middle of all our stakes so they can be used horizontally as snow anchors, without trying to get a girth hitch to hold on them. All zippers received nice long pulls made out of knotted cord.
Other than the above, our main goal now is to get out and use these things!
Louie Dawson earned his Bachelor Degree in Industrial Design from Western Washington University in 2014. When he’s not skiing Mount Baker or somewhere equally as snowy, he’s thinking about new products to make ski mountaineering more fun and safe.
