Original Tarp & Bivy

2024-01-31

Here’s the project report I wrote a couple years ago:

Tarp & Bivy

March 28th, 2021

Around the time I made my Apex Quilt, I started reading the Backpackinglight.com forums, and I was quickly pulled into the ultralight backpacking ideology. BPL’s About Us page puts it well:

​ “… When you lighten up your pack weight, you enjoy hiking more. And when you enjoy hiking more, you’ll do it more. And when you hike more, you’ll connect with nature more. When you connect with nature more, you’ll be happier.”

In the winter months, I started to take a critical look at the gear I was packing out with me, and I realized that the heaviest thing I had was my tent. It’s your classic two pole, 2/3 person Mountainsmith tent, which ironically enough has a anvil logo.

To replace my tent, I decided to try a tarp and bivy setup. I made the tarp as just a 5’x9’ rectangle of silpoly with hemmed edges and reinforcements/timeouts at the corners and midpoints. Simple and light, and it works great in light to mid rain. I don’t want to use it in a torrential downpour, but I do my best to not be out backpacking if that’s in the forecast.

The bivy uses a 1.9oz polyurethane fabric for the ground cloth, a 1.1 ripstop upper, and 0.9oz bugnetting. I put together the design myself as an exercise in 2d patterning, and I think it came out well. I use my treking poles to setup the tarp and I have a tieout on the tarp to hold up the bug netting, and I can setup my poles in a pyramid to hold up the bugnetting if I’m not using the tarp.

I’ve done a bunch of overnights and a few 7+ day trips with this setup, and I’ve also taken it out bikepacking twice. It packs down extremely small, and the whole system is roughly 1.5 lbs. I think I could drop about half of that weight if I remade the bivy with lighter materials.