Tents in the woods
General Topic
In a recent CO weather post, Jaquomo told about a branch spearing their tent. You can see they had a great campsite, until the snow came down. On a Prince William Sound goat trip, my partner and I returned to a tent buried in the rain forest there. It took us 2 hours to clear a place for an 8x8 tent. A large branch had flattened one side of the tent. I don't know that it would have killed us, but it would have been bad.
The west has experienced some terrible tree kills, pine bark beetle, spruce beetle, and the aspen leaf borer for example. This has left our forests with a lot of trees just waiting to come down. Maybe on you. Be leery of quakies if the weather gets bad.
Quakies typically have a lot of dead branches up high. When you get a heavy wet snow, a lot of them will come down. If you camp in the woods and get one of these snows you need to reexamine your tent site. In WY it is so bad that my brother and I cut over 20 trees to make our campsite safer. No shortage of firewood then.
If possible, camp among younger trees. Up north, Poplar start to die at about 40 years and are notorious for mid height snapoffs in high winds. The tops go 40-50 feet when that happens. Green pines, fir, and spruce are pretty safe, even in heavy snow.
Great advice, Larry. That morning we had several large branches on the wall tent that would have likely flattened a backpack tent.
The next afternoon I was hunting up an old two-track. The wind was blowing and I heard an odd faint sound. I stopped to figure what it was, just as a snow-burdened 12" diameter aspen fell over right where I'd have been. Whatci heard was the sound of the underground root system tearing loose.
A few years ago my partner and I were hunting a new area 50 miles or so, from Steamboat Springs and came across a tent that had been flattened, we were back in a couple hundred yards from the nearest trail. By the looks of it, it had been there for 2 to 3 years and everything was pretty well destroyed by rodents.
I dug around a bit and found a sleeping bag (also a 2nd sleeping bag still rolled up in a stuff sack), pillow and bunch of camo clothes (no bodies thank goodness).
We had a real windstorm tear through during a rifle elk season when I was a kid. Lifted the one side of the A frame of our wall tent out of the holes they were dug into. I slept right through it. Dad had to wake me up to reset it at 2 am, in the blowing, gusting snow to put it back up. Next AM my uncle and cousin came into our tent and asked if that fir laying outside had always been down.....it had not. Was probably 8 feet from the front of the tent, if the wind had been blowing the other way, I'd have had the worst morning wood.
Inshart, I found a whole camp in July that had been left behind previous fall. Wall tent (flattened and wrecked) sleeping bags (chewed up) lantern, stove, a few clothes. Not sure why they never came back, figured they were maybe NRs that got caught in a late snow and had to bail out. It was about 400 yards from an old 2 track, about 30 miles from Steamboat.
That country can go from Indian Summer in the morning to snowed-in for the winter that night.
5ish years ago, my brother and I did a halloween backpack trip on the PCT near where I live and the "2-3 inches and "20 mph wind" turned into 18 inches of snow and 70mpg gusts.
Every pole in our 3 season tent snapped and we used the remaining 1.5 poles we could keep together to keep the tent off of our faces. The zipper ripped off where it was sewn and I had to staple it to the tent with my skin stapler. My brother's long hair was iced to the tent in the AM and I had to cut it off. We had to cut our way out of the tent.
Never take a 3 season tent into the 4th season.
Dad and I also had a deadfall land near the tent once in WY. Scary stuff. Lighting, trees, and a freak storm can kill you in the mountains despite your best plans. Still, I'd rather die to a falling tree in the woods while hunting than a spun-out car on the interstate while driving to work.
Word to the wise: don't put your tent here just because it's the only place that is flat/out of the mud. We were lucky that deadfall to the right didn't kill us.
Tree Tipping
Tree Tipping
We spent 3 hours one day tipping over beetle killed trees from around our spike camp just in case the wind picked up. It was the only area that we could find to camp without being in the elk, so we thought. I ended up shooting an ok 6x6 about 200yds from camp two days after we tipped all the tress over. I was surprised how easy it was to tip over the beetle killed trees. Most of them went over by rocking them back and forth two or three times.
A buddy and I were glassing elk in the Flattops one September when a hell of a thunder storm came from the opposite side of the valley we were glassing. Saw the elk take off at a dead run to the dark timber, then looked up and saw why. We didn't have time to get lower so we set up our tent there. Got inside as it hit. The wind blew so hard it blew rain threw the rain fly and tent. Dug in our packs as we had trash bags to put meat in if we got to pack out an elk and used those to cover our sleeping bags. Was long before a fiberglass tent pole broke. Finally about 4 am. I asked my buddy " do you think we ought to try and get off this high point" his answer was " if we did we would be the highest thing up here for lightening to hit". We rode it out and it finally quit around 6:00 am. Damnest storm I was ever in!
"In WY it is so bad that my brother and I cut over 20 trees to make our campsite safer. No shortage of firewood then".
Always a good idea to have a couple of outs just in case the forest lights up In a blaze also! Stay Safe!
walking out of my treestand one evening because it was too windy to sit. It started gusting real hard, I reached the home pasture and the horses were going ape #$%@. About that time a two person dome tent came flying over about 50 feet off the ground. The tent would swirl with the wind and climb then fall then climb then fall. I watched disappear over the river bank and never thought about it again. This thread makes me wonder more where did it come from? where did it go? what was in it.
That was the day I learned horses cannot look up and therefore anything over their head makes them very uneasy. Wasn't sure dad was telling me the truth until I was riding when a hot air balloon went over and the horse couldn't stand it.
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