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5 Things – To Share or Not to Share Your Tent

By Dave Roberts   

on October 31, 2012    No ratings yet.

Posted in Outdoor Articles, Wild Camping Articles and Tutorials5 things, Five things, wild camping

5 Things – To Share or Not to Share Your Tent


While we’ve touched on the philosophy of wild camping, to give it a grand term, and just about everything wild camping in previous posts.

There’s still the overriding question for the majority of wild campers of whether to share or not to share.

Here are a few thoughts from the Mud and Routes crew:

1 – Smell. On longer trips where I’ve had to unleash my own feet in the confines of my tent, I’ve not particularly wanted to share even with myself. Imagine having to do so with someone else’s pungent feet and boots for days on end, not to mention the other odours that build up that don’t need elaboration here.

When it’s time to start washing yer smalls, two tents always wins.

2 – Space – If you’re in your own tent, you can stretch and organise yourself however you wish. You don’t have to worry about trying to get dressed while at the same time keeping your arse out of your tent partner’s face (this may lead to point 1 in some instances). You can obviously get around this with a larger tent, but the extra weight may make it less attractive than just taking your own.

3 – Privacy – Especially on a longer trip, you get time to yourself. It also makes it an easier proposition to get changed to the skin, and so on. It’s also good for the morale of any party for you to be able to get out of everyone’s way. If you can’t appreciate that pointer, it’s probably you that they’re trying to get away from.

If you’ve bagsied this view, you don’t want to share!

4 – Pitching is easier as the tent is smaller and you can face the porch in the direction you want. Want to see the setting sun from your bag, but your partner insists that it’s better to get up at 4 AM to see the dawn, then you can start to see the benefits. In mountainous terrain, you may find some perfect pitches that are just too small for anything larger. I’ve pitched on numerous pitches that have been ‘just so’, where anything larger would have been impossible to site. Look at the pitch above – perfect pitches for one.

5 – Sharing food – There’s no getting away from it if you like munching that spare bag of jelly babies that you’ve been hiding, your partner will ask “I hope you brought enough for everyone in the class?”.

 

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Dave Roberts

Dave Roberts founded Walk Eryri in 2004, with the aim of providing routes that are off the beaten track. Walk Eryri is now part of Mud and Routes which continues to provide more off beat routes and walks in Snowdonia and beyond. Dave has been exploring the hills of Eryri for over thirty years, and is a qualified Mountain Leader. Dave also established Walk up Snowdon, Walk up Scafell Pike and Walk up Ben Nevis just to mention a few.

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