Is it cold in the tent? I understand you!
On the Iceland trek (Laugavegur route) in the summer of 2019, I took a light tent MLD Trailstar. More precisely, it was a Trailstar tent, supplemented with a homemade bivouac bag - a single-place inner tent (inner tent) made of mesh and thin silicone. And literally on the second night of the hike, at the Landmannalaugar campsite, I not only froze, but also remembered that I had already stepped on this rake - I took a mesh tent to the mountains where there is a very strong wind. The last time this happened to me was on a winter hike along the Lycian Way in Turkey, where I froze due to the wind despite the very warm weather.
And now I slept restlessly again, woke up long before the alarm and thought a lot about how to stay warm in the tent. I didn’t have any means at hand to insulate the tent. To protect myself from the wind, I covered myself with a poncho, curtained myself with a towel, shaded myself with a backpack, and hid the tent behind boulders. In general, everything went well - I adapted to the Icelandic weather and began to sleep normally at night. But in fact, this problem (it’s cold in the tent) could have been solved much simpler - it was necessary to take a bivi (inner) with solid walls, without mesh. At home, if you had a sewing machine and fabric, you could remake an existing bivouac bag in an hour. And my life in Iceland would become much more comfortable.
On the other hand, we shouldn’t forget why I took this particular tent. After all, as an instructor, I have a huge amount of camping equipment, including many different tents. And out of all of them, I took the mesh one, because I wanted to conduct an experiment - to achieve the lightest possible backpack even in such harsh mountains as the Icelandic Landmannalaugar. And ease of movement initially implies that you sacrifice some of the comfort in parking lots for the sake of speed. What actually happened - I walked very quickly))
By the way, I have been walking around Iceland for several years now and the strong wind was not a surprise to me. I even made a video on how to choose a tent for trekking in Iceland. And here we can’t help but mention tents with a skirt - in my opinion, for cool and humid climates, a non-mesh inner liner is more preferable than a tent with a snow skirt. It's all about condensation - the skirt not only blocks the wind, but also makes ventilation difficult, which greatly contributes to the formation of condensation not only on the inner surface of the tent, but also on the sleeping bag.
However, manufacturers do not always give us such a choice - most often, equipment buyers are faced with the fact that there are two types of tents:
- warm but heavy (with a skirt, lots of arcs, thick fabric)
- light but cold (lots of mesh, low wind resistance)
What to do in such a situation? It's a difficult question. Personally, I, struggling with the contradictions of the outdoor market, came to tailoring equipment to order.
Yes, as you probably already understood, I love exotic equipment, and on this trip, in addition to an ultra-light tent (weighing less than 1 kg), I took a down quilt (sleeping bag without a zipper or back) and a special lightweight backpack. I also had with me quite the usual travel equipment:
- down vest
- inflatable mat Thermarest
- light crocs
- almost perfect rain poncho
- fleece gloves
- silicone tops
We organize such hikes every summer - join us, take warm tents with you and don’t be afraid to experiment.
Kirill Yasko, April 24, 2020