Pitching Camp Without Pitching a Fit
Enough lecturing on the do's and don'ts. Let's say you've reached the designated site that you reserved, or selected a previously used but environmentally sound site, or, if it's the most appropriate, located a completely untouched site that you plan to leave that way. What's the first order of business?

If the afternoon is waning or a thunderstorm is threatening, erecting the tent takes top priority. Most tents have an uncoated canopy with a waterproof fly. If you pitch your tent during a real downpour, the canopy, and hence the tent interior, will get damp if not soaked before you can attach the waterproof fly. Many thunderstorms are brief; if you arrive at camp in the rain, it may be best to wait until the storm passes before setting up the tent. If the storm looks unrelenting, your only recourse is to pitch the tent as fast as you can. Avoid the temptation to bring your soaking wet pack and sopping rain gear into the tent with you. You'll bring in so much moisture that condensation on the tent roof will be almost inevitable. Instead, unload the contents of your pack into the tent as quickly as possible. The contents should be drier than the pack itself if you packed everything in stuff sacks and plastic bags, like you should. Then shed your rain gear, stuff it into your pack and jump inside. Carrying a sponge will help you mop up whatever moisture does creep inside as well as soak up condensation on the walls or a cup of tea that gets spilled. In rainy country, a tent with a vestibule or rain fly that overhangs the door prevents rain from falling into the tent when the door is open, making it easier to unload gear and keep it and the tent dry.

Select the most level site you can; what seems to be a small tilt when looking down from an erect position will undergo a surprising magnification once you lie down. Even a slight tilt is usually sufficient to promote a caterpillar creep toward the lower end of your sleeping pad as you toss and turn during the night. Lying down is the most certain way to determine an acceptable degree of tilt and to determine which end of the tent is higher. In general, your head should occupy the high ground.

It's important to remove small stones and sticks from your site before erecting the tent to protect both you and the tent floor, but be sure to replace them if you're camping someplace no one has ever camped before. Don't camp in low spots, where puddles will form if it rains. Your tent may have a "waterproof" floor with "sealed" seams, but it isn't a boat. Don't assume it's as seaworthy as Noah's Ark.

So many varieties of tents exist today that it's impossible to give specific advice on pitching each type, but a few general hints may be helpful. Most importantly, be sure to master a new tent's idiosyncrasies by pitching it at home in your front yard or living room a couple of times before heading into the woods. That way you won't be inserting the right pole in the wrong pole sleeve on some pitch-black, frigid night with the rain pelting down.

In high winds, with most tents, stake out the corners first, before inserting the poles. With a few tents, staking the corners first can inhibit or prevent inserting the poles. Treat your poles with care. Nicking fiberglass poles or denting aluminum ones will weaken them significantly. When assembling the poles, make sure each pole segment's end is inserted fully into the neighboring segment's socket. The quickest way to break a pole, besides fending off grizzlies with it, is to flex a pole joint when the mating halves have not been fully inserted. The second quickest way is to bend a pole into a tighter curve than it assumes when the tent is pitched. Don't let the ends of the pole segments snap together, which can nick the pole ends and abrade the shock cord. Keep the poles clean; don't let grit and dirt enter the pole joints, which can jam shut. {Insert pole segment figure here}
Many tents today are free-standing, meaning they don't need to be staked to stand upright. They must be staked, however, to prevent them from blowing away like expensive, high-tech tumbleweeds. I was standing with some hapless rock-climbers once at the base of a crag when they happened to glance down into the meadow half a mile away and saw, to their horror, their tent rolling and bouncing across the field, driven by the downdraft from a looming thunderstorm, looking for all the world like the monstrous white ball that always overtook and swallowed the fleeing star of the old TV series The Prisoner. The tent continued its lumbering, ungainly journey for fully a quarter-mile across the meadow until finally coming to rest, torn and battered, against the edge of the forest. Moral: always stake your tent! In sand, on very hard ground and on slickrock, where stakes work poorly or not at all, rocks weighing at least 20 pounds apiece form good anchors. If smaller rocks are the only ones available, tie a stout cord coming from the tent around one, then pile rocks on top to anchor the bottom stone. Stuff sacks full of sand or small rocks also make good anchors. To keep grit out of your stuff sacks, turn them inside out before filling them. Don't rely on a couple of sleeping bags tossed inside the tent to weight it down. The tent will take off like a nylon clothes dryer with the sleeping bags tossing about inside.

As a general rule, rocks and logs form better tent anchors in summer than stakes do. Wire stakes, the kind that come with many tents, have little holding power; plastic ones frequently break. Just be sure that if you uproot rocks to anchor your tent that you replace them where you found them when you leave.

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