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SteveS

Member Since: 05 Oct 2010
Location: Devon & Berkshire
Posts: 388

2009 Defender 110 Puma 2.4 USW Santorini Black

Nordkapp 2012 - Experiences 3 Camping and equipment

Third in the series..........

Camping & Equipment
Our group without exception used Tentipi tents in 5, 7 and 9 man sizes. Note that these sizes are with ‘expedition’ sleeping arrangements (ie like sardines) and do not allow space for cooking, fire and equipment to be in the tent at the same time. There are other good quality brands available so do your homework. 7 man is just fine to get a large fire in, bags and wolf boxes, somewhere to set up a coleman (dual fuel – do not take compressed gas as this freezes and is useless. Note too the same problem with gas lighters – we had to scrounge windproof matches). Taking experience from others in our group we liked the idea of keeping a groundsheet down only for the rear half of the tent leaving the front half open to the snow ice – mostly it stays that way but the fire will likely cause a temporary puddle to form around it.

Sleeping set-up was belt and braces in my view and comprised of layers. On top of the groundsheet were a good quality sleepmat (closed cell to avoid water ingress) we used the foil heat reflecting expedition quality type, then Exped DLX9 inflating sleep mats (down filled and good to minus 37), then as an optional extra some reindeer skins and then a good quality sleeping bag. We chose Nanok (Norwegian army use them) -45 rated synthetic filled (as we were truck based then the extra 1Kg of weight over a full eider-down bag was not worth the cost). My loved one had the extra benefit of down filled Nanok bed socks. In addition we slept in our thermal underwear [(Helly Hansen mixed fibre/merino wool )]. The net result were comfortable nights sleep even when outside temperatures were -20C. I never fully closed up my bag around the head area which left me with the feeling that with additional head wear such as balaclava then the whole set-up would have been good to much lower temperatures. We also took our 3 season bags as a back-up to allow us to bag-in-bag if we needed to – they weren’t used

We equipped our tent with a Tentipi Eldfell stove. This is a fairly sizable beast (think Collie dog sized) but has a massive heat output – we regularly made it glow red. The 7 man tent is the smallest you can get it into. Even at the lowest heat setting and with the stove full of compressed wood shaving pellets (we used Heatmax) the fire would have lost almost all of its heat by 4 or 5am. So it is most useful in the evening when relaxing or preparing a meal and washing or changing your clothes – so don’t do that in the morning cold tent conditions. The alternatives are to carry coal (mess and clinker) or to have a night-watch stove load say at 2pm (noisy alarm). The stove itself is lightweight and packs down into a relatively compact space. The serious heat a fire provides allows things to be dried out or defrosted, and in the case of the Edfell the top surface can take a decent frying pan to cook with. Beware however that you have to manoeuvre around this thing in the tent and it is possible to burn or melt clothes, fingers etc. We refined an optimum tent lay-out by experience. We took a carbon monoxide detector from home as we knew that all the vents on the tent would be closed.

Tent location and other matters
This trip can have locations buried in 1m or more of snow down to no snow and solid perma-frost ground and thus you will need to prepare accordingly. We took both snow and rock tent pegs. The rock pegs were used on this trip but last years trip used only snow pegs (different weather conditions). Even though I took 8 good quality rock pegs 2 were starting to bend and I wished that I had a further 8 to provide further purchase against windy conditions. Under windy conditions we positioned our truck as a wind break. With limited success we used the dead-man technique and froze pegs lying on the ground using water. You will need a good snow shovel to either clear snow down to the ice beneath (on which to put your tent) or to pile up snow around the edges of the tipi to keep the wind out and provide stability.

21st Feb 2012 8:19pm

Higgers

Member Since: 08 Apr 2009
Location: Cheshire
Posts: 668

2014 Defender 110 Puma 2.2 XS CSW Firenze Red

Cheers Steve - really useful stuff, especially as i've just ordered a Tentipi.

Do you have any pictures of your trip?

Thanks

Ian

21st Feb 2012 8:55pm

SteveS

Member Since: 05 Oct 2010
Location: Devon & Berkshire
Posts: 388

I have Ian - still doing some post processing on the final set - now got a whole lot of distribution, posting to web etc to do.

Glad you found the articles useful.

22nd Feb 2012 7:02pm

GREENI

Member Since: 22 Aug 2010
Location: staffs
Posts: 10383

Thanks for sharing

22nd Feb 2012 7:52pm

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