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The moment I realized my tent stakes were doing nothing.
I was camping in Rocky Mountain National Park about 5 years ago and a gust of wind lifted my whole tent 2 feet off the ground while I was inside. Turned out I had been hammering those cheap aluminum stakes straight into gravel the whole time without even checking if they bit into the dirt below. Has anyone else switched to screw stakes and felt like they wasted years before that?
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charlie2691d ago
Rocky Mountain National Park is actually one of the places where the soil can be REALLY deceptive. The gravelly sediment there is from glacial till, which means it looks solid on top but often has loose air pockets underneath. Those cheap aluminum stakes you mentioned - they're just too flexible for that terrain. They'll bend before they ever penetrate properly. You need something with a thicker gauge, like the MSR Groundhogs or even just basic 8-inch steel stakes, not screw stakes necessarily. Screw stakes work GREAT in loose sand or soft soil but in rocky mountain terrain they can actually snap or get twisted trying to bite through subsurface rocks. I've learned this the hard way too.
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