WINTER TENTS A COMPARISON

By SHAUN MITTWOLLEN

TO WINTER CAMP IN THE MOUNTAINS is to experience their truest form. They are raw. Wild. Inhospitable. The peaks are alive as spindrift wafts from knife-edged ridges, as idyllic lakes fill in and become powdery bowls, and as avalanches transport frozen slopes like frenzied rivers. They are places where pleasantries are exchanged for excitement, challenges and the great unknown—the elements that ultimately drive us to explore. When camping in the winter mountains, we are temporary visitors to inhospitable environments; to explore them, we need a space to exist—a tiny home. Inuit peoples addressed the challenges of life in the snow by designing the igloo. Alpinists introduced their own special designations of suffering in the forms of the snow cave and the bivy.

And then there is the tent. I am a self-professed tent nerd. For me, tents are the most interesting items of gear; over the years I’ve accumulated a quiver of them, each with its own purpose. Differences in design create key specialities, and the more you experiment, the more you realise there is no single perfect tent. Each has its place in the mountains, each is a compromise of weight, strength and comfort. I own tents that cover three of the main winter-tent designs: the dependable dome, the pliable tunnel and the space-age pyramid. Note that one tent type I don’t own is that of a lightweight, single-skin, breathable tent like The North Face’s Futurelight Assault. But in this piece, I want to share my personal experiences, so I’ll restrict what I say to being about only those winter-tent styles that I actually own.

MOUNTAINEERING DOMES:

- Heavy, suiting shorter approaches or longer expeditions with an established base camp

- Multiple crossing poles are effective against high wind and heavy snow loading

- Warm and comfortable inside

- Ideal for mid-winter expeditions in the alpine or with extreme weather expected

PYRAMID SHELTERS:

- Low weight suits fast and light expeditions or big distances

- Can be time consuming to setup

- Handles wind and snow loading moderately well when perfectly set up

- Cold but spacious inside

- Best uses are for spring tours with light winds

TUNNEL TENTS:

- Moderate weight suits both shorter and longer expeditions

- Excels in high wind if positioned correctly

- Collapses with significant snow loading

- Warm and comfortable inside without wind changes

- Best uses are for mid-winter expeditions without big dumps or high wind spring tours

Dense snow clags the scrub as we bury our way upwards, bending limbs and showering us with semi-frozen water. The path is obscured and a howling gale shrieks among the rocky pinnacles above our intended base camp. We are soaked through and chilling rapidly but so close that we must push on. At this stage, any shelter will do as blowing snow circulates quartzite crags before instantly freezing to our outer shells. We move forward knowing our packs are weighed down by four kilos of tent, The North Face’s Mountain 25, a geodesic dome and a veritable fortress. A mountaineering staple. The dome will keep us safe from the storm at our base camp for almost a week, during which almost a metre of wet, heavy snow will accumulate and winds will gust over 90km/h. Despite its crushing weight, on the approach at this point in time I’d rather nothing more than that four kilos of tent in my pack.

This is the quintessential space for such a tent: An exposed multi-night base camp where high winds and heavy snowfalls are expected. Warm, its double layers will guard us from Tasmania’s lowest recorded temperatures, and its plethora of crossing poles will create a rigid structure to protect us from the snow accumulation and battering winds which would collapse a weaker tent within an hour. All of this boosts our morale. While a long and arduous approach lugging a heavy mountaineering dome can be a suffer-fest, but sometimes it’s a necessary evil. In an isolated area that is particularly weather prone, your survival is dependent on your shelter’s survival. And here the dome is, from my experience, the strongest and most comfortable option, despite the increase in weight. After a rough and rowdy storm day chasing forgotten couloirs and rime-coated ridges, the classic dome is the tent I most look forward to returning to.

The pyramid shelter is the techiest of the three shelter types. It excites gear nerds like myself with its sheer lack of weight. Generally under a kilo even for four people, repurposed materials such as Dyneema have created some incredible possibilities for the ultralight hiking community. For example, my Hyperlite Mountain Gear UltraMid is about 500g; an eighth of the weight of our mountaineering dome. Pyramids are floorless meaning you can dig out bed platforms, kitchen benches and even create full standing height inside. Instead of carrying separate tent poles, a pyramid is set up with your ski poles, a clever multi-purposing tactic. But before we start gushing too much, let’s take a closer look at some of the drawbacks. Setup of the pyramid shelter must be highly precise. The pyramid shape in itself is highly resistant to wind from all directions when, and only when, perfectly set up. All corners must be tensioned evenly and on level ground to create tautness in each panel. This all takes time, effort and experience, which you may or may not have. A corner slightly higher than the other creates annoying and potentially structurally unstable flapping in moderate to strong breezes. Failure of one corner stakeout point may result in a swift collapse in the middle of the night. And lastly, being only a single wall, the pyramid is significantly colder than a double-wall counterpart. Nevertheless, these drawbacks are often worth it for the incredible lack of weight. Fast and light to the extreme, the pyramid is the first shelter I look to when there are glorious high-pressure conditions in the mountains with light winds and little snow.

Lastly, like anything in life, there are compromises, and this is no more apt than with the tunnel-tent design. The tunnel tent has been frequenting high-wind, low-snow environments for decades, and is the go-to for polar expeditions where huge overnight dumps are rare but the winds are frequently extreme. Instead of fighting the wind, a tunnel tent, such as my Hilleberg Akto, learns to live with it. Positioned with the narrow end into the breeze, the tent is aerodynamically stable and limpets onto the snow as waves of air crash overhead. When hit by a side gust, the tent deforms before springing back to its original shape, albeit with a bit of a slap in the face for the occupants. Most tunnel tents are in the vicinity of half the weight of a four-season dome, so therefore it can be thought of as trading off some of the extra strength of a dome for a decrease in weight. So yes, lighter weight and a faster approach, but on the downside, the tunnel tent is like living across from a salty seabreeze; it’s a high maintenance kinda home. A wind change during the night can make for an uncomfortable experience and may necessitate a reposition. Heavy snowfalls can load unsupported panels and seek to collapse your shelter, and periodic wake ups are necessary to bump off the excess snow buildup. But these trade-offs are often worth it for light and fast missions after a storm, or during spring tours when high winds are forecast. W