Adventure
Camping
Fire and heating
Living in a Nordic tipi
An Evening With The Stones
19 Aug 2014
The Art of Storing Heat.
When you can’t find what fits your needs you may as well make it on your own. This issue of the Tentipi blog features a good portion of DIY-creativity as we meet 23-year-old Swede, Petra Alinder. She first built her own tipi out of tarp, but later got her hands on an Onyx 9 to which she, of course, added some special touches.
It all started in Beneficio, an off grid alternative village outside Orgiva in southern Spain. It was in the winter 2012 that me and a friend drove from Sweden to Spain, escaping the mean winter winds. We drove by the Pyrenees and visited Orgiva. Beneficio was kind of a known spot and I´ve heard about it before because of its anarchy-inspired origins. I went there one day and pretty fast found my way to the main meeting point, a huge North American native-inspired tipi. I think it might be this day I decided that I wanted to live in one myself someday. I was totally amazed by its beauty and the comforting feeling I got by just being inside it. It´s something special with the cone shape, feels like being held somehow.
Later that spring when back in Sweden, I started to build my own tent in the forest outside the village of Järna. To do it I used my imagination and advice from friends combined with a simple guide from the Internet. Looking back, I´m impressed by my own ambition! Early march, snow, ice, stormy. But it was so much fun! I got help from a good friend to put up all the tree poles I´d collected in the forest. First the big tripod (the three thickest), and then the remaining 9. Instead of a canvas I used two large tarpaulins, because it was easier. This project was more of an experiment to see for myself if I had the guts to go all the way and actually move there. Therefore I didn´t engage in sewing a canvas. Two months later I moved out of my rented room, to live in the tipi during the summer months. I still had a car and a part time job in the village, so I got my share of social life… and showering! I collected my drinking water from a natural spring below the hill where I had my tent. As a toilet I dug simple pits a good distance from the tent (you don´t want the same flies at your toilet as around your cooking pot). I stayed in that forest for 3 months and it became a wonderful summer. So now I’m doing it again, but this time I have a Tentipi Onyx that I bought from a friend, and instead of the forest I chose a more comfortable spot in my friends’ backyard.
One of the first things I added to my tent was to put a small wooden deck at the entrance of the tent to make it mud-proof. Springtime in Sweden might be kind of wet and with all the going-in and going-out every day it would become a mud puddle in no time. Since I keep all my clothes and stuff in the tipi I´m pretty careful to keep it clean inside. Still, there´s always some moss in my hair, grass in my bed and small spiders running around among my clothes. That´s part of the charm with living in the nature. Since the tipi often stands open during the days the bugs are able to get in, but I´m not bothered by them. They´re nice company.
Then we have the stove.
In early march the nights were snowy and below zero. It was really warm and cozy in the evenings when having a fire burning, but I often woke up at dawn freezing. I didn´t like the idea of getting out of the warm sleeping bag to start a new fire, so I often tried to reach the logs and the stove from inside the sleeping bag and ended up falling out of bed. I started to think of better solutions and got the idea from a friend to insulate the stove and make improvements to hold the warmth longer. The easiest way was to use a big pot full of water. It will hold some warmth for a couple of hours, and as a bonus it moistens the air inside the tent. Without it I felt my throat and eyes get pretty dry after a night. Another plus is you always have hot tea water prepared!
Then I got the idea to use rocks as radiators. It was a big project collecting them but luckily I got help from a friend to get the stones from the forest. The heat radiates a lot to the sides and the back of the stove, almost none underneath. So I built the stones up all around the sides and the back. Wow, what a difference it made! A big plus is that the heat doesn´t radiate so intense anymore. My legs used to get grilled as they were placed at the side of the stove at night. The stones hold warmth almost all night depending on how cold it is outside. After two hours of fire they are really hot, and some mornings when I get up they´re still lukewarm. One great thing to do at winter nights would be to put some hot stones in a cloth and put them in bed. Should be excellent when you don´t have a partner or a dog there to spoon with ;-). The stones don’t keep the tent as warm as a burning fire would, but I think it´s enough to spare you from waking up in the middle of the night chattering your teeth. And the bigger the stones the better, since they hold warmth longer. They´re just so damn heavy to carry! Still, I don´t know how this would work on really cold nights, like -5 celcius and below. It’ll be interesting to find out!
It was the first day of the trip, adventurer Mike Fuchs and his friend Eric Folz had just a couple of hours before been dropped off as far north as they could possibly come in Svalbard when they saw them. Two polar bears, one mother and its cub. A situation that could become deadly if the bears decided to have a closer look on their new visitors.
“I know how protective the mothers can be of their cubs. We had to set up our camp in a place that provided a good overview of the location so we could spend the night bear watching. It was both a scary feeling seeing them so early into our trip, but it was also very fascinating”, says Mike Fuchs.
Wouldn't it be exciting to spend the night right in the middle of a zoo? – That is exactly what you can do at Skånes Djurpark, a wildlife park in southern Sweden. At their campsite, Camp Oak, you stay in the park after it closes and will make yourself at home in a Nordic tipi from Tentipi. When the night comes you might just fall asleep to the wolves’ howls.
Skånes Djurpark is a Wildlife Park with a long history, it dates back to 1952. It focuses on animals from the Nordic area and has always lived by the ruling with “no animals in cages”. The animals live in large paddocks that recreates the animals’ natural environments.
Lennart Pittja is a Sámi entrepreneur with a mission: with his world-renowned eco-tourism company he wants to spread the knowledge about his people – the Sami, indigenous of northern Scandinavia and Russia. With over 20 years of experience as a wildlife guide and nature photographer in the arctic region he started Sápmi Nature Camp. Where his guests stay in Nordic tipis from Tentipi on his reindeer herding land outside of Gällivare, in northern Sweden.
At Sapmi Nature camp you can experience real winter, see the northern lights, eat traditional Sami food, and have a cultural exchange in a genuine atmosphere. The scenic location has gained attraction from around the world. In 2017 it was listed by National Geographic as one of the top 21 places in the world to visit if you care about the planet.
Prepare before setting out for winter camping. Here are nine tips and tricks from Tentipi about what you need to think of before you go: the right tent for winter camping, how to pack the snow, comfort in snow, which tent pegs to use, where to pitch the tent, about snow weight, what heat sources can be combined with the tent, how to make a fire safely and other equipment.
Choose tents according to occasion, different tent types work differently at winter camping. When it’s icy, the tent needs to be more robust than a tent which is exclusively used in summer. The tent frame needs to withstand a certain amount of snow and functional ventilation is important. If you want to use a heat source, for example a fireplace or a stove, the tent needs to have ventilation openings both at ground level and at the top. Without a heat source, a smaller tent is preferable, as it heats up faster when the air volume is smaller.
A tent from Tentipi is a Nordic tipi and the tent has eight or nine sides, if it is not the smallest that has six sides. In the smallest tent you can stand straight if you are less than 160 centimetres long and in the largest you can get together several thousand people. The tent is versatile in more ways. Continue to read to see why these tents are so flexible and adaptable. This blog post is about the smaller tents in Tentipi's range, tents used by adventurers, families, hikers and others who want to live close to nature for a shorter or longer period of time.