one happy camper

The last time I was near anything resembling a hoop tent-- one of those domed, self-supporting structures that looked like a cross between an igloo and a Moon Bounce-- it was 1990 and I was camping with some Georgetown classmates at the eastern edge of the Brienzersee in Interlaken, Switzerland. For shelter, I had packed a tarp, some cord, and a groundcloth for two people (me and one other guy named Steve), as well as a foam pad and sleeping bag just for me. The girls had brought a multi-person hoop tent they had borrowed from one of their Swiss host families.

My tarp was easy to set up, largely thanks to the trees, but the girls, who insisted they needed no help, ended up creating something on the lakeshore that looked more like a melting teepee than a proud dome: the poles had ended up concave instead of convex. Katty and Jessica actually spent the night in it, too, this conical (and comical) monstrosity.

I didn't sneer at the girls, because even though I had offered to help them, I had never dealt with a hoop tent before, and felt stymied just looking at it. The tents were becoming hugely popular in the late 1980s and early 90s, but many of us, yours truly included, had stuck with the more traditional design over the years: the two-man pup tent.

What could be easier to set up than such a tent? It had an easy-to-understand rectangular footprint (these days, "footprint" means "groundsheet" or "groundcloth"), two easy-to-assemble poles for the front and back end, and six loops or grommets into which you'd hammer six of your eight or ten stakes. The remaining stakes would be for the lines that radiated from the tent's front and back, and possibly for whatever type of tent fly you had.

So I admit I was apprehensive when I saw that my folks had FedExed me a new tent based on the classic hoop tent design. Having witnessed the girls' disaster all those years ago, I was prepared to wrestle with this thing until long after dark.

But as it turned out, the tent was very easy to put together once you got past the oblique instructions, which was how I wasted ten or fifteen minutes.

The tent pole for my one-man pup tent is a huge, spidery, Y-shaped thing; you lay out your footprint, lay out the tent on top of it, then feed the long part of the Y through the loops along the tent's spine, making sure to stab the pole's end through that final grommet. After you do that, you feed the shorter branches of the Y through the loops that help define the tent's front face. Once the pole has had all three of its ends put through those grommets, the natural tension of the bent Y is what keeps the tent up.

Do that-- a process that takes less than a minute-- and you're 90% done.

The rest of the setup will be familiar to anyone who has put together an old-style pup tent: loops and lines, hammer and stakes. Add the fly to the structure, do a bit more staking, and you're good to go. I finished with plenty of daylight to spare, and was thankful that temps were in the low sixties and the wind was practically zero. It was the perfect night for a practice run, and now that I know how truly easy the setup is, I'll be even faster next time.

And on that note, I'm going to leave this wooden pavilion I'm at (it's got electric sockets so that groups can cook or do other things here; I've been recharging the poor BlackBerry even as I've been sending photos and blogging) and head off to bed.

Oh, wait: I need to give a shout-out to Mark Johnson, the construction worker whose pic I'd uploaded earlier. Mark had wanted to know what I was up to when I was passing through his work zone, so I told him. He thought the idea for the walk was sound and he wished me well. So, ladies, go take a look at Mark!

As I was on the final road to the state park (Tilley, I think), I saw a sort of general store and went in to buy some drinks, some jerky, and some carbs in the form of cookies. This is how I met Andy, a friendly motorcycle-riding customer, and Bill, the store's genial owner. Andy's wife is Mongolian and he's been to Mongolia with her; Bill impressed us both with his encyclopedic knowledge of the area's restaurants and social hotspots. Both Andy and Bill kindly wished me well, so I snapped their pics and promised to blog them, too.

Right: NOW it's time for bed!


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