Hammocks are usually seen as a way to rig a suspended bed, to avoid having to lay down on the uncomfortable ground, to sleep. However, a hammock-suspension that supports the whole weight of a person is way more than strong enough to also support a tent or tarp shelter, which are insignificant loads in comparison.
The first priority with hammock-promotion might be to avoid damaging the trees. Pick support-trees that are plenty big enough. Leave branches and boughs that are in the way, rather than clearing them. The idea isn’t just to sling a hammock, but to create a “leave no trace” campsite. The hammock-rig enables camping over ground-surfaces that are too sloped or uneven for a tent, or to sleep on.
At low elevations there are lots of sturdy, tall trees. In the high-country, trees may be scarce, short, small and weak-rooted; suitable guy-trees might then receive excessive use. In such situations, only rock should be used for guying. In sparsely-treed terrain, concentrating on a few sites with good guy-trees will again concentrate usage and lead to cummulative impact-effects.
Use a separate (wide) nylon-web strap or runner, to attach the main guy lines to trees. Don’t just pass a small-diameter high-strength line around a tree, and then load it with hundreds of pounds. Make sure the force is spread over a suitable surface-area of the trunk. Pad-material under a strap offers added protection & benefits.
Anchor-straps need to be wrapped several times around an anchor-trunk. A single wrap creates a tourniquet or choke-collar, amplifies pressures on the bark, and is liable to cut or wear into tree-bark. Using 3 or 4 wraps halts this cinching-effect, distributes pressure & force evenly around the circumference, and is also a more-stable and secure guyline anchor.
Secondary guylines are an important enhancement. The main anchor-points need to be placed high enough to get the camp up off the ground, but secondary anchors can and should be fixed at or near ground-level. Secondaries relieve some of the pressure applied by the main anchor-straps, and can eliminate side-pull. Secondary anchors don’t apply much side-force, but do pull up. Smaller trees can be used for secondaries, but beware of uprooting.
Both the main anchors and especially secondary guy-anchors are potentially subject to axial slippage. The anchor-strap can slide down or especially up an anchor tree-trunk. The lowest base of a tree also has more taper or flare, which facilitates up-slippage. Boulders or rock outcrops used for low-point anchors can be particularly prone to sudden up-slippage. An anchor-strap can suddenly ‘pop-off’ the rock. Pad-materials offer increased & improved grip for the strap, reducing slippage.
The first line of defense against the axial-slippage hazard, is to manually tug straight up on a newly-rigged low-point (secondary) anchor-strap. If it won’t come off or slide up when pulled straight up, then it will be even more secure when pulled at a lower side-angle.
Longer guys allow increased flexibility of rigging-configurations, and promote better anchor-physics (because the angles are lower). Newer synthetic fibers permit very high loads on small-diameter (light-weight) lines, making extra-long guylines a practical backpacking option. Just don’t use these tiny lines for tying to trees, since they will readily cut-in.
High-strength tent-pegs should not be overlooked, for use as low-point and secondary guy anchors (ground-stakes). Tent-pegs don’t normally require high strength, and are subject to price & weight market-factors that tend to reduce their suitability, for high-load hammock-guying. Look for ‘serious’ pegs, made of advanced materials and costing more.
Side, lateral or deflection guying allows a main hammock-sling to be displaced or pulled sideways. The main camp-suspension does not have to be in a straight line between the main guy-anchors. Longer main guylines allow for more side-deflection (they also require stronger anchors, and line). Deflection allows a camp to placed over more-favorable ground, and in rock-country avoids being pulled in against the pitch.
Don’t side-deflect from an overly-high anchor-line (or one over open air or a cliff), to lower ground suitable for the camp. If the side-guying fails in such a situation, the camp will then swing back to the elevated position (or out over the cliff), and likely dump the hammock-occupant from a height.
Backpacks come in either external or internal frame designs. Internal types dominate in the market today, due to two main factors. Most-conspicuously, but functionally secondary, is the popularity (or more accurately, prestige) of mountain climbing, rock-climbing, ice-climbing & etc. More-pragmatically & realistically, the problem with external frame designs is that they really need to be custom-fitted & adjusted. Mass-manufacturing cannot address this need well, and the design still inherently places complexity-demands on the user, even when it is implemented well. Continue reading “External versus internal frame backpacksthe external-frame is better; the cost is complexity“
Olympic National Park is mainly the inner Olympic Mountains of the Olympic Peninsula, a far northwest promontory of Washington State, at the far northwest corner of the United States. The old-fashioned US Highway 101 enters the Peninsula at its base, and circumnavigates the Park, mostly staying outside it. ‘The Loop’ is a big part of the popularity of Olympic, and a big defining element of its character and the Peninsula that hosts it. Although it can be driven in one long day, the Loop-tour around the Peninsula is a quick weekend-sized outing. Continue reading “Olympic National Park, NW USA”
Olympic Mountains is a small (50-75 mi), cleanly-defined, roughly circular and radial, even slightly spiraled local range (barely) on the far northwest coast of the USA. It dominates the interior of Olympic Peninsula. The Olympics are noted for their high degree of ruggedness, and for their high visibility from nearby urban and conurbated populations. Many Seattlites take the Olympics as their private yard-art, and as provocation & personal challenge to get off the sidewalk and engage with Nature. Continue reading “Olympic Mountains, NW USAan outlying buckle in the subduction zone“
The Firefox web browser is the flagship product of the Mozilla Foundation and its community of Open Source developers. It got its initial start, leadership and programmers, from the failure of Netscape which was overwhelmed by Internet Explorer, in the late 1990s. Today, Firefox battles fellow heavyweights Chrome and IE, and lesser combatants, in the ongoing global Browser Wars.
Treesearch is the site [1. U.S. Forest Service website] that provides easy access to a database of tens of thousands of Forest Service research papers, documents and projects from across a span of many decades.
The Forest Service itself is divided administratively into six Regions and corresponding Research Stations, each of which has historically addressed topics & issues that pertain to the different regions of the United States. One of the ways in which the Treesearch database is organized, in turn, is on the basis of these regions. So an interest in the forests and ecology of any given region of our continent can be persued, without having to paw through nonapplicable database results for the other regions. Continue reading “Treesearch, US Forest Service Publicationsthe U.S. Forest Service online library“
Ansel Adams was a successful commercial photographer & artist with a long career. But in 1941 he contracted with the government to record scenes in National Parks and public lands. This body of work became legal public property, and the set of 220 images is now becoming fully available to the public. Many are familiar pictures that are favorites of Americans. Continue reading “Ansel AdamsAnsel Adams Photographs of National Parks and Monuments“
