Paul LaRocque's Blog: December 2016

I've had this tent in my inventory for a little while now and have wanted to test it out in some pretty decently cold weather . I took it out in September on an overnight that saw -1 degree C and it did great but I really wanted to see if I could trust this tent on a winter camp out. My nephew Andon and I settled on a location close to home and we hiked about 1 kilometer and begin to set up. We first found an area out of the wind and not in a cold sump and checked the ground for stumps and heaves, once satisfied with the ground we laid down a ground sheet (A US army shelter half) the choice of groundsheet turned into a lesson learned but more on that later. We then raised the inner tent and secured the outer fly all easy tasks. While I staked the fly and tied the guy lines Andon covered over the bottom edges of the fly with snow. The tent has two very useful vestibules and we faced them in a north south facing, we used the north facing vestibule as our gear storage for our packs and the south one as the entrance and place for our boots.

I went inside the tent and unrolled our sleeping bags and placed the lantern and thermometer.
We collected firewood and Andon started up the fire which we set on top of a salvaged metal sheet found nearby, After a supper of chilli and soup we set aside our fuel and kindling for the next
morning and settled in for the night.

We changed into our sleeping clothes and it didn't take long to notice that the tent was retaining a considerable amount of heat at 11 C with an outside temp of - 13 C. We fell asleep around 2100 and I awoke at 0100 and checked the temperature 7 C outside temp still - 13 C. When I woke up at 0300 it was 0 C with an outside temp of -18 C. When we got out of bed at 0630 the temp was still 0 C and the outside temp -20 C. It didn't take long and we got the fire roaring. When we took the tent down the ground sheet I had put down had absorbed a great deal of moisture and was a sheet of ice that I had to pound with the back of my axe to fold up. The tent had a lot of ice on the inside from condensation and I think it was due to me closing the vent flaps in the early part of the night and opening it around 0300.

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