What experience you have with tents that has open/no floor

[Lark Bunting]

You asked for experience with floorless shelters, here's mine. I'll caveat this by saying this was not my tent, and overall the tent did an exceptional job at keeping the snow off us during a 2nd season rifle hunt last year. My good friend @atfrith offered to bring his big 'ole teepee last year, with titanium stove. Sounded awesome for an October hunt! First night, the stovetop, spark arrestor was a little clogged. We filled the teepee with some smoke, let the stove burn out and let the teepee air out. Slept pretty decent that first night. The second night we took the time to unclog the spark arrestor and had a nice warm fire. After nearly finishing off a bottle of whiskey and some beers it was time to crawl into the tent. Well, I think every spider in western Colorado had the same idea. Those sumb!tches were crawling all over us all night. When I had gotten home from that trip and was going to take a shower a damn spider crawled out of my underwear. I also had a few bite marks in the nether regions. Nothing serious and the slight swelling was welcomed. Ahem...

So, I can summarize by saying that I really liked the idea of having a floorless shelter/stove while on an October hunt with snow in the forecast. Reality though, I'll stick to shelters with a floor.

 

[atfrith]

You asked for experience with floorless shelters, here's mine. I'll caveat this by saying this was not my tent, and overall the tent did an exceptional job at keeping the snow off us during a 2nd season rifle hunt last year. My good friend @atfrith offered to bring his big 'ole teepee last year, with titanium stove. Sounded awesome for an October hunt! First night, the stovetop, spark arrestor was a little clogged. We filled the teepee with some smoke, let the stove burn out and let the teepee air out. Slept pretty decent that first night. The second night we took the time to unclog the spark arrestor and had a nice warm fire. After nearly finishing off a bottle of whiskey and some beers it was time to crawl into the tent. Well, I think every spider in western Colorado had the same idea. Those sumb!tches were crawling all over us all night. When I had gotten home from that trip and was going to take a shower a damn spider crawled out of my underwear. I also had a few bite marks in the nether regions. Nothing serious and the slight swelling was welcomed. Ahem...

So, I can summarize by saying that I really liked the idea of having a floorless shelter/stove while on an October hunt with snow in the forecast. Reality though, I'll stick to shelters with a floor.

HAHA. This was definitely the night from hell. Granted, I do believe our site selection played a major role in the amount of spiders we encountered. I've used this shelter (seek outside cimmaron) on a few other trips without similar issues. Having said that, I do find myself going back to my standard floored tent more and more these days. And when we do run the Cimmaron, I typically also use the nest to cut down on the insects. But cuddling with Tom in that little thing was simply not in the cards on this trip...

 

[dukkhnter]

I've been using a tarp for early hunts and added a Jimmy Tarps bivy sack to keep the bugs down. Bivy doesn't weigh much and works great. If you get one of his bivys it helps to have tapered sleeping pad as mine is rectangle and tight fit.