Pitching on ground that will not take a peg

First, work out which refusal you have

Push a peg in by hand at two or three points. What happens next puts the pitch into one of four groups, and they are not solved the same way:

• It stops dead after a few centimetres. Stony or baked ground. The peg cannot get in.
• It goes in easily and pulls out just as easily. Sand, dry soft grass, loose snow. The peg gets in and finds nothing to hold.
• It will not go in at all, anywhere. A wooden platform, a rock slab, a gravel hardstanding, deeply frozen ground. There is nothing to go into.
• It goes in, holds, and the ground is standing water. Waterlogged turf. The peg is fine and the pitch is not.

Diagnose before you improvise. Most bad nights on hard ground come from treating the second problem with the answer to the first.

Carry two peg types, not eighteen of one

The peg is chosen by the ground rather than by the tent, and tents ship with the cheapest pegs the maker can supply.

A Y or V cross-section peg in 7075 aluminium resists twisting in soft turf and is the general-purpose answer. A round steel nail peg takes a hammer into stony or baked ground where an alloy peg folds. A wide plastic or alloy stake spreads load in sand and snow, where a thin peg simply pulls through.

Length is the figure that decides holding power, because a long peg bites below the dry crust, and it trades directly against the stated weight per peg — which is the number to multiply by the peg count when you are deciding what to carry. Check the diameter passes through your own tent’s peg-out loops, and prefer a hooked or notched head so a guyline cannot ride off, with a cord loop for pulling a buried peg out without a tool.

Stony and baked ground

Move first. A metre either way frequently finds soil where the last spot found rock, and moving is free.

If the ground is genuinely stony throughout:

1. Switch to steel nail pegs on the corners, which are the loaded points, and keep alloy pegs for the rest.
2. Drive rather than push. A flat stone works; so does the heel of a boot. Do not lever a peg sideways to seat it — that is how alloy pegs bend and how steel ones bury themselves at an angle you cannot recover.
3. If a peg stops at half depth, do not force the last centimetres. Take it out, move it a hand’s width, and try again. A peg at half depth is holding on almost nothing.
4. Where a peg refuses everywhere, put a rock on the guyline instead: run the line to a stone the size of your head, take a turn around it, and load it downwards rather than sideways.

Sand, soft grass and snow: spread or bury

Here the peg goes in and holds nothing, so the answer is area or mass rather than depth.

Wide stakes are the direct fix and the reason that peg type exists. Beyond them, two techniques:

• The deadman. Lay a peg, a stick or a filled dry bag horizontally in a trench, tie the guyline around its middle, run the line up to the surface, and bury it. What holds is the material on top, not friction on a shaft.
• The weighted anchor. On sand, a stuff sack filled with sand is a perfectly good corner anchor. On a beach or a river bar there is usually more of it than you can carry.

Note that water is roughly a kilogram per litre, so a filled bladder or bottle is a usable weight and an accurate one. And on soft ground, everything with feet — camp chairs, camp tables — sinks: wide discs on the feet are what stops a table dropping a corner into the grass by the end of the week.

Wooden platforms, rock slabs and hardstanding

Nothing goes in, so the pitch has to stand up on its own and then be tied to something.

This is where pitch type stops being a specification and becomes the whole decision. A freestanding tent stands without pegs; a semi-freestanding one needs at least the ends pegged; a tent that pitches on trekking poles needs ground that takes pegs and cannot be made to work on a deck without improvisation.

On a platform, look for what the platform gives you: edge boards, rails, screw eyes, cleats, gaps between planks. Run guylines to those rather than trying to load the fabric flat. Paracord is useful here for extending a line to a distant rail; note that its published minimum breaking strength is a manufacturer figure for new, straight, undamaged cord rather than a working load, and that it is not made to the standards that cover climbing equipment, EN 892 and EN 12277 among them. It is a guyline, not a lifeline.

On a rock slab, use the rock. A boulder, a crack that will take a stone, a rounded knob — take a turn of line around it and pull downwards. Bring the guyline angle low: a line pulling near-horizontally holds far better on a weight than one pulling up at the sky.

Then weight the inside. Full water containers, a filled dry bag, the boxes if you have a car. An unpegged freestanding tent left empty is a sail, and it leaves.

Waterlogged ground

The peg is not the problem. Move if there is anywhere higher, even by a few centimetres.

If you cannot move, the groundsheet hydrostatic head is the figure that decides the night, and it is the one many listings omit while quoting the fly. Keep pressure off the floor where you can — a footprint cut 3 to 5 cm inside the floor on every edge helps, and one that sticks out past the fly actively hurts by channelling rain underneath. A closed-cell foam mat under an inflatable adds R-value and a second layer between you and standing water.

Retension after rain, and again in the morning

Silicone-coated nylon stretches when it is wet, so a taut pitch goes slack during rain and needs the guylines reset. Silicone-coated polyester barely moves. Dyneema composite neither stretches nor absorbs water. Knowing which one you own tells you whether the midnight adjustment is coming.

On improvised anchors, check them again after any rain and after any wind shift. A deadman in wet sand and a stone on a wet slab both behave differently from how they behaved when you set them.

Before you leave, pull everything out

Improvised anchors have a habit of staying behind. Recover every peg, unbury every deadman, put the stones back roughly where they were, and take the cord with you. Then check the peg heads: the ones that went into stony ground are the ones that will be bent, and they are cheaper to replace at home than to discover on the next pitch.