Making the Tents Decision: Choosing a Wilderness Shelter

"How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious starry firmament for a roof! In such places standing alone on the mountaintop it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make – leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents or piled stone – we all dwell in a house of one room – the world with the firmament for its roof – and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track."
John Muir, John of the Mountains, 1938

As a teenager venturing forth on my first backpacking trips, I was inspired by the example of John Muir, who roamed the High Sierra in the 1870s for days on end burdened only by a greatcoat, its pockets stuffed with biscuits. The ponderous sleeping bags and tents of his day were more suited to carting on the back of a mule than on the bowed shoulders of a human being, and Muir rightly preferred to ramble unencumbered. My attempts to emulate his example, however, soon showed me just how miserable such Spartan camping can be.

In August, 1979, two friends and I set out to climb Mt. Fay in the Canadian Rockies. We started up the approach in the evening, then bivouacked near the base of a steep, ice-floored gully with crumbling rock walls. Our plan was to rise before dawn and complete the ascent of the gully before the morning sun thawed the ice holding the shattered gully walls together and turned the gully into a bowling alley with 50-pound limestone blocks as bowling balls and ourselves as human bowling pins. With no tent or sleeping bags, we would be traveling light and fast in the best tradition of John Muir.

The problem, as we quickly discovered, was that our bodies needed far more insulation to remain comfortable while sleeping than we expected. We donned every scrap of clothing we'd brought and curled ourselves into the tightest little balls we could, and still we were shivering and squirming. The idea of carrying an extra five or six pounds of sleeping gear, which we had scorned just hours before, suddenly seemed irresistible. "You have to spend at least part of each year living this way," said Joe Kaelin, rolling over for the twentieth time in a futile effort to rewarm those body parts which were nearing frostbite through contact with the cold ground. As I vowed never again to spend a night outdoors without at least a sleeping bag, I wondered if Joe had succumbed to the notion that self-denial would lead to mystic revelations, or if his ambitions extended only to enshrinement in the pantheon of climbing heroes. We rose long before dawn – no need for an alarm clock, we were all wide awake – and climbed the gully as fast as our sleep-starved bodies would allow us. At mid-morning we reached the high mountain hut that sat on the plateau above the gully and promptly took a long nap. After a much more comfortable night in the hut, we climbed Mt. Fay the next day.

Muir may well have been much tougher than we were; he was certainly a mystic who verged on asceticism at times. However, he also availed himself freely, I suspect, of a luxury no longer available to the outdoorsmen of today: a crackling fire, perhaps built so its warmth would reflect off a granite boulder onto his backside. Fortunately, modern tents and sleeping bags make it easy to camp in comfort using only the gear you can readily carry on your back, while the burgeoning hordes of wilderness enthusiasts make fire-building reprehensible in most situations. (I'll have more to say about campfires in the chapter on campcraft.)

Next Page: Camping Without a Tent

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