A Winter Camping Vision – Edition 1 – Pole Prototyping

Over the last few years I’ve reflected on the activities that bring a group of campers or back country enthusiasts together in winter conditions. An overnight winter experience without a hut or a sheltered communal space can make for a particularly boring, disconnected evening in the dark. Everyone returns to their individual tents shortly after the sun goes down and huddles away in the comfort of their sleeping bags. How great would it be if we could gather somewhere and cook or spend the context of the evening together telling adventure stories, having instrumental singalongs and sharing some cider. So this isn’t a trip report but rather a vision document of sorts, an idea, a concept an inspiration. It’s edition one in anticipation or rather in expectation that there will be future posts to this pursuit.

With a spark of motivation in December 2020 I decided I would take a shot at solving this back country winter camping issue. After realizing I wasn’t in the position to fork out the $9400 before tax for the Mountain Hardware Space Station, I asked myself, “Could I make this tent myself?”. I started modelling the tent poles design at a small scale. In my research I stumbled across the following pdf dome creation template that North Face putout to celebrate its designs. It proved to be helpful in understanding the dome tent structure. It’s a cool craft exercise but it’s definitely not a quick easy activity. Early on I was experimenting with the idea of creating this tent for the purposes of teaching on the Sustainable Development Goals and had backlit the individual graphics in each hexagon to see what it would look like.

You can find the North Face dome craft document at the following link: https://www.goldwin.co.jp/tnf/special/at_your_home/en_index.html?srsltid=AfmBOoobaGTp47DQwY3WXoukiC6Rwb9AvhxKBamgxhjE21ouTvF1OCwm

NF Dome top

The 10 poles dome tent design. Overhead.

NF Dome Model Side

Dome design with 10 poles. The arcs are a little shallow because the umbrella rods could only bend so far before snapping.

backyard mockup

A backyard 2/3 scale to test the pole structure of the 10 pole dome.

In hopes of obtaining a low cost protoyping material I went around the Lower Mainland and purchased all of the cheap tents from Value Village and FB Marketplace. I did a rough 2/3 scale mock-up of the pole design in the 2 meter dome tent to try and understand its geometry. It was challenging to try and wrap my head around the physical process of creating the arc shape for the dome with a desired volume and height. It’s one thing to drop a line  and bend it in auto-cad, but a different challenge altogether to figure out how to shape a model in physical space. Both the North Face 2 Meter Dome and the Mountain Hardware Space Station are established by 5 poles that create a central pentagon at the top. Northface then adds 1 more pole parallel on each side for a total of 10 poles. Mountain Hardware adds two more poles parallel for a total of 15. The Mountain Hardware tent is 2.5 meters tall, 5.8 meters wide, the Northface is 2 meters high. The mountain hardware tent is advertised as having standing room for roughly 20+ persons.

mountain hardware front

The Mountain Hardware Space Station

northface tent front

The North Face 2 Meter Dome

15 poles design edit

The 15 pole design found in the Mountain Hardware Space Station.

 

IMG_2850 3

Foam core was useful for mounting aluminum rods into for modeling the dome. Longest poles in red, medium length in blue and shortest in green.

I purchased 15 fiberglass tent poles from Tent Pole Technologies . I was hoping to get the aluminum option for weight saving but they were quite expensive! The fiber-glass option are quite bulky. I have not weighed them but this will not be a light tent to transport. I went about trying to construct a holding system to keep them in place while I sew the fabric outside.

This center attachment board held all of the pole bottoms at a fixed radial length for my first full scale mockup. The plumb bob hung from the center of top pentagon measurement piece that was mounted to an offset ladder.

pentagon holder

I used this wood platform on a ladder to shape the initial pentagon geometry for the top of the dome.

IMG_2967 copy

The poles were tied at their intersections to try and maintain the pentagon geometry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

set up at Jericho

Set up in the leaves at Jericho beach park.

I’ve been asked why I don’t just purchase a yurt type setup tent and save money and time. I’m not particularly fond of the way a center support divides up the interior space. I want something that creates an unobstructed interior volume with symmetry and has the option for a bottomless design so the snow below can be dug out in the winter or tarped in summer on solid terrain.

tent set up at beach

Set up with the perimeter of webbing. The hanging webbing will later be attached to the fly.

zoom in at beach

One of the pole lengths needed to be trimmed. It caused too much sideways pressure resulting in the ends coming loose from the attachments along the webbing. These were secured down with para-cord.

space station hanging system

The carabiner systems that attaches the pole intersections together on the mountain hardware tent.

NF sleeve edition

An older model of the North Face 2 meter dome. The poles are fished through fabric sleeves in this model.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The biggest barrier to continued prototyping is deciding how the fly will be attached to the pole system. The original NF 2 meter dome utilized sleeves to hold the pole alignment to the fly. This is an easy option to make but I can imagine it will be exceptionally complicated to string 15, 25′+ poles through fabric sections especially given the raised edge of the pole joinery. I would like to explore in more detail the carabiner type attachment that mountain hardware has used for their most recent editions. My first edition of the tent fly will not hang though, it will be draped over the top of the pole structure and secured into the perimeter webbing. It is my goal to have two tent surfaces, an outer fly and an inner tent. But the biggest question in this whole endeavour though is how much is all of this going to cost? And will further endeavours be worth the design effort? How much time is this design going to take? I have chuckled with people that I have discussed this idea with, recognizing that if i had taken a part time job flipping burgers from the start of the idea phase I could have indeed purchased the whole new tent by now. But c’est la vie” and make progress I must. Will I see this vision through to completion? Only the god of outdoor adventure knows, haha. 

Are you curious to see how this dome tent progresses? If it does? I am leading winter long hike in Feb 2025. My hope is to bring it along and have a space to gather in. Stay tuned for details!

northface inside inspiration

Isn’t this image inspiring?! Can you imagine an amphitheater type seating or a an epic kitchen setup on a good snow pack? I found this image at https://www.wudfdeal.store/?path=page/ggitem&ggpid=237415

 

 

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3 Responses to A Winter Camping Vision – Edition 1 – Pole Prototyping

  1. Duncan MacIntyre says:

    This is an amazing project. I hope it works!

  2. Roland Burton says:

    Huts are nice too, and they don’t flap in the wind, but you need permits, and it’s too bad if the logging road that you use to get to the hut becomes unavailable.

    I guess you plan to have your structure filled with happy people. It would be nice to install a camp fire in the middle, but I guess the cover would catch fire.

    I find that half inch or 3/4 inch white plastic piping is good for a lot of things. It might be good for large tent poles of the non-collapsible variety, but maybe hard to carry.

  3. Nick Hindley says:

    Awesome. Thanks for sharing! While the DIY projects may not necessarily end up saving much money (if you put a $ value on your time), that’s not exactly the point, is it? This seems much more fun than flipping burgers! Looking forward to seeing the final result out in the wild.

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