Reading a pitch before you put anything down

Arrive with light to spare

Everything below needs eyes rather than a torch. A slope reads as flat under a head torch, a dry channel reads as a dip, and a dead branch overhead reads as nothing at all. Plan to stop earlier than feels necessary; the half hour you gain is the one that makes every other step on this page possible.

Walk the ground before anything comes out of the bag

Put the kit down at the edge and walk about. You are looking for a piece of ground the size of your pitched footprint plus the space the guylines need, which is larger than the floor dimensions in the specification and is the figure people forget.

Lie down on the spot you like. Thirty seconds on your back tells you more about the slope and the lumps than five minutes of looking, and it is free to move ten metres before anything is pegged.

If you sleep in a hammock, the same walk is about anchors rather than ground: two sound trunks the right distance apart, at a height that lets the suspension set the sag you want, with nothing brittle above them.

Read the water first

Water is the thing that ruins a night, and it is legible in daylight.

• Slope: a slight fall is better than perfectly flat, and it decides where your head goes — uphill, always.
• Hollows: a dip that is soft and greener than its surroundings is where the water goes when it rains, whatever it looks like now.
• Channels: any small dry watercourse, any run of flattened grass, any line of gravel. These fill.
• The bank of a river or stream: levels change, and they change fastest at night after rain upstream.

This is also where the second waterproofing figure earns its place. Makers publish hydrostatic head in millimetres separately for the flysheet and for the groundsheet, and the floor figure is normally the higher of the two because a knee on a wet pitch presses harder than rain falls. A pitch chosen badly puts that floor figure under a load nothing in the specification anticipated.

Then read the wind

Stand still and find out where it comes from. Then look for what is already sheltering the ground: a wall, a bank, a line of low scrub, a fold in the hillside. A little shelter is worth a great deal more than a flat surface in the open.

Note the two failure modes. A tent set broadside to the wind loads the fabric and the pegs hardest. A tent tucked tight behind a solid obstacle can sit in turbulence rather than in calm. And on exposed ground, the wind that is pleasant at eight in the evening is frequently not the wind at four in the morning.

If you are pitching a tarp, this is the decision that matters most, because shape and orientation are almost the whole shelter. A rectangle is the most versatile and the noisiest in wind; a hexagonal or catenary cut tarp pitches taut with fewer wrinkles and sheds better, at the cost of some of the flat-pitch options.

Look up

Ten seconds. Dead branches, loose timber, anything above the pitch that is not attached to something living. Then look at what is around the pitch at head height, because that is what you will walk into in the dark.

Feel the ground with a peg, not with your eyes

Push a peg in by hand at two or three points across the pitch. This is the test that decides the rest of the evening, and it takes a minute.

Soft turf takes a Y or V cross-section peg in 7075 aluminium, which resists twisting. Stony or baked ground folds an alloy peg and wants a round steel nail peg driven in. Sand, soft grass and snow pull a thin peg straight through and want a wide plastic or alloy stake that spreads the load. Length is what decides holding power, because the long ones bite below the dry crust.

If the ground refuses a peg altogether — a wooden platform, a rock slab, frozen ground — stop here and go to the page on pitching where a peg will not hold, because the sequence below changes.

Set the orientation, then commit

Decide three things and then stop deliberating: which end is uphill, which face is into the wind, and where the door goes. Mark the spot with the stuff sack.

Pitch in the order the maker intends

Open the pitching instructions, even for a shape you know. What you are following is the pitch order: which pole goes in first, whether the fly and inner go up together or separately, and where the guy points are.

A workable general sequence:

1. Lay the footprint if you carry one, checking it sits inside the tent floor rather than out past the fly. A footprint that sticks out collects rain and channels it underneath — cut a universal sheet 3 to 5 cm inside the floor on every edge.
2. Peg the windward corners first, so the shelter cannot leave while you work.
3. Raise the poles, or the trekking poles if the tent pitches on them.
4. Peg out the remaining corners, working the fabric taut rather than tight.
5. Fit the flysheet and set its tension last.

Pegs go in at an angle away from the load, driven to the head. A peg standing proud is a peg that will trip you and a peg that will lift.

Guy it out while it is still calm

This is the step that gets skipped and the step that matters. Run every guyline the tent has, set the tensioners, and take the slack out. A hooked or notched peg head keeps the line from riding off, and a small cord loop on the peg is what lets you pull a buried one out later without a tool.

Silicone-coated nylon stretches when it is wet, so a pitch that was drum-taut before the rain will need retensioning during or after it. Coated polyester barely moves. Knowing which fabric you own tells you whether to expect the midnight adjustment.

The last look round before dark

Walk the perimeter once with the lamp on the middle setting. Check every peg is home, no guyline crosses a path you will walk, the door zips run cleanly, and anything loose is inside or weighted. Then put the lamp where you can find it by feel, and note where the pegs are so you can find them in the morning.