Ex Royal Marine shares 3 of The BEST Tarp setups |TARPOLOGY

[Music] [Applause] so we're looking for a spot that's flat enough to sleep in not too many widowmakers and isn't on the course or on an animal course or a known animal track easier said than done this looks like a nice flat section up here let's see if we can get into this till he's leading the way hi everyone today we're going to be talking about topology the dark art of what is topology it's basically using a tarpaulin and doing origami of sorts to fold it into lots of different configurations okay for different situations and scenarios so that's what i love about using a tarp it's a very versatile piece of equipment whereas maybe a tent is just one shape one does all you could do an awful lot with these so today i'm going to be using the dd hammocks xl tarpaulin's one of the largest ones they make it's four and a half meters by three meters so it's a good good size tarpaulin okay and as such we can do lots of different things with it so today i'm going to show you my top three configurations with a tarpaulin these two forest giants are like the gateway in here into this little uh enclave so this is called an open lean-to bivvy yeah definitely definitely and this is my first option that i'm going to show you guys today okay so what i'm what i'm looking for right now is i'm thinking about my orientation to the wind is really important because for this type of configuration which is just an open bivvy this allows me to have a nice long log fire in front and feel the full heat of the fire from head to toe so what i really need to do is think about and maybe you can use a stick to help you think about use the back of your hand where that wind's coming from and orientate your stick so you're looking for this angle between trees and i think i found it quite nicely between here and here so that the wind is moving across me now the reason this is so important is because classically what people tend to do is put their back to the wind they'll put their tarpaulin up with the back to the wind the wind strikes the tarp gets driven over the top naturally hits the fire that's in front of it brings a huge eddy of smoke into your face and then on on its way out so what we're looking to do is get maximum heat from that fire none of the smoke so if i'm side on here and the wind's coming across me i can feel the heat from that fire the smoke's going off in that direction and i'm less likely to burn a hole in my tarp because of course these are tech fibers these things you've got to be thinking about this stuff so the first thing i'm going to do here is i'm going to put up my ridge line and i'm going to need a fixed end for that and then i'm going to have to come down here and go around this tree and i'm going to have to do a tensioning knot on here to make sure this is nice and tight as tight as i can kind of happily make it and all i'm going to do here is pass this over the top here and crank down on it you see how it's eating up some of that tension okay and then i'm going to pass my little uh not all the way around this side again and then i'm going to go over the top again okay so that's twice now so i've gone over the top and you can see that tension coming out again in this knot there we go and i'm just going to put a little half hitch on there and that should work for me i've just broken off a stick i'm going to pop that through the loop and tighten that down just to give myself a bit of tension in there i've got that tension i need to put my uh put my tarpool in up to the edge of that as always i tried to keep my tarp up off the floor as i do with all my sort of equipment where possible uh just looking at this thing i can see that that's the outside and this shiny side is the inner so this is going to want to go up and over okay so get this up and over here now i want to give myself the most amount of luxury ground sheet underneath even if that means i can fold it back on myself and get twice the effect of that so i'm going to try and bring this thing right down to its outside edge then i'm going to need to peg out these corners and make sure that i've got enough shelf here enough ground sheet for my for me to sleep on and i know where the front line very importantly with the front line of where i'm going to where the edge of my tarpaulin is okay because this will dictate how far away i make that fire come on right now all i need to do to finish this off now is pretty much take one at the back so if i've got an excess piece of cordage on one of these corners that is not being used i'll simply put a loop through there and attach that up to the back and this really opens out my little uh open fronted bivvy you'll have seen i've managed to double the uh the ground sheet thicken that up for myself which is an added treat um so i'll sleep on that shelf inside there with the fire giving me the warmth any excess wind coming in through the side i'll either choose to close this down slightly more and then occlude this with my bag my rucksack that'll probably be all it needs to be honest okay and hopefully we've now got something worthy of spending a night in the woods under whoa would you look at that okay oh yes okay so now we have a nice little open fronted bivvy twice the ground sheet underneath okay some good clearance above and i'll be sleeping back here under this shelf as i said any residual wind because the wind is coming across the front of me here if i do get any coming in through this gap i'll just fix a piece of paracord to here close this down slightly and use my bag to occlude the rest of the gap i am gonna be inside uh obviously a sleeping bag possibly even my gore-tex movie bag my experience was sleeping next to fires okay so i've done this for three four nights at a time minus four at night no sleeping bag on a raised improvised bed on a springy bed of cedar bowels and i was absolutely pinned to the back of the shelter from the heat from the fire so so you know a sleeping bag and anything else is just luxury items so you haven't really got to worry too much about that stuff but if you do feel the wind for some reason then you might need to rethink your fire position so this is the next biggest consideration is how far away do i put my fire or how close do i put my fire after all i don't want to burn holes inside this so the general rule of thumb is going to be one and a half paces out okay that's like a well-known thing uh anyone who reads moore's kachanski or some of the other kind of great wilderness explorers will often see them writing that sort of stuff in their books so i've just marked this out roughly by putting a couple of sticks i've just gathered up in front of here and this represents my long log fire okay so that starts off as a regular fire as a little crisscross fire you'd cook on probably build it up into a bigger star fire check out our video on firelays on the four key fundamental firelays okay in bad weather i could turn it to a v fire but ultimately to sleep next to it's always all about the long log fire so i can feel that heat i better feel the heat from this thing from head to toe so the pros and cons of this bivvy are it's extremely open a lot of people like to really close things down an awful lot more um for me if you're gonna have that true wild camping experience and you want that mark one television that amazing campfire long log fire in front of you this is the way to do it you know you've got i'm sort of orientated uh i'm going to have the sun coming through in the morning coming around for the rest of the day and then and then going to bed over here somewhere so i'm going to get the last of the evenings light sat in front of the campfire in this nice open setting if it does start to rain or drizzle that's okay i'll just push back into the corner here and get my head down and i'll be fine so it's it's as simple as that one key consideration and we're pretty much it's much of a muchness i'm pretty level here is never make this setup okay or any setup with your fire orientated as a long log fire or something like that where the logs could potentially roll down onto you in the night okay so you don't want to be sleeping with you camping down here and the fire up here in the ideal world you want that ratio the other way around okay for the simple reason that also i mean as heat rises away from your campfire you want to try and get as much of that as possible and kind of catch that heat inside here and don't ever end up in that situation where a log could roll down onto you and the family okay cons are because it is incredibly open and we're living in the uk if we do get a pretty sudden change up in the weather um you know and and it goes icy cold and suddenly starts blowing from the north or whatever you could find yourself just just too open basically and getting quite cold quite quick so you might need to change all this around and turn it into a different configuration which isn't suddenly so easy when you've got a long log fire in front of you so that would probably be a con i think another pro okay so a pro for this would also be um i've doubled up on my ground sheet so i've got twice the thickness here plus my roll mat plus my sleeping bag i'm going to have a good night there's not going to be a problem here with the cold coming through at all there's many ways to put these things back uh i'm just being massively impatient here you could sit there and fold this thing and very carefully put it away properly the reality is i'm going to be using this like by tomorrow again so it's a shame because it was a new one as well i think making this youtube channel um has been a real revelation for me it's been really like a challenge it's been really enjoyable um because it's something different as well i mean teaching this stuff day in day out is great and i love teaching but learning how to to do this talk to the camera thing as well wasn't wasn't a very easy thing for me at all uh certainly not initially um and i'm still learning how to how to do that as i fight this into here not very glamorous okay so configuration number two um this is going to be something that you'd use without a fire so this is about recruiting maximum amount of heat and so i'm going to put my back to the wind and this is going to be a really simple pitched roof um almost like what would you call this this looks like classic tent but with no no closing on the door yeah as previously i'm going to need my temp pegs so they're going to come out the bag and now i've got all the key ingredients here i feel i need to put this thing together then we're going to begin to peg out the tarpaulin so i've got a good healthy amount of ground sheet so what i'm going to try and do here is pretty much just lay it in half to start with i'm just ensuring that i'm going to have a piece in the front here that's going to go up and round all fixed to this tree alongside these two other little ones and i'm going to peg out the base and make myself a little uh shelf inside there to sleep on it's really really simple stuff it's important when you're setting out any sort of tarpaulin to try not to tread all over it silly keeps coming and walking over it but i'll have to let her off but if you can try not to do that because you weigh considerably more there might be some sort of sharp something that you haven't spotted underneath it'll just go straight through so we're going to need this one up in here somewhere and then it's all about bringing that apex up and fixing around the tree itself so ah see my next problem the tree i've got is massive huh okay need another one of these adjustability when you suddenly realize that the tree you've chosen is a monster i find that really satisfying every time i do that i don't know why ever since i've learned that and we teach it regularly i think it's brilliant again things i never i was never taught this in the royal marines you know we were using bungee cord because it was all about that kind of you're there and you're gone um a bungee cord is fine but a bungee cord in the eye in the middle of the night is not great when you go make an adjustment and it wings back and and hits you that's not fun and it has happened all right i'll just pin that out for now okay so i'm going to try and use this one as an extension oh yeah let's use that up over there something like that okay i'm just gonna fix to okay so that would be a classic tent would be to come down onto this one tent shape put that around there points to note on this would be this is very much about recruitment of warmth because you're not you're not using a large heat source like a fire so this is very much about um you know kind of sighting yourself in the correct position don't put yourself on an obvious path where animals are making their way down to water or are coming through in a hurry and be careful and look up before you set this thing up okay think about those widow makers and and if the wind does decide to kick up and really kick off you could find yourself getting squashed under a tree or something so you know think about your location very carefully and the lay of the land as well nobody nobody likes to be sleeping on a slope and then i'm going to scooch inside it's got a much more closed down front to something like the open fronted bivvy that we've done in this video we've got absolutely loads of room inside this thing i can't feel the wind life is pretty good again there's enough room for tilly moo inside here with me [Applause] yes [Music] pros and cons so pros i'm out of the wind uh pros i've got tilly moon here with me to share the body heat tonight khan there's not an awful lot of working height in here compared to the the open bivvy with the campfire i could pretty much stand up in front of um but then it's that whole kind of trade-off between maintaining calories and warmth and you've got to think about what you want it for really so um another slight con would be i'm only kind of one thickness here on the floor whereas the open bivy i'm twice as thick if it really rains really hard there's not an awful lot of pitch to this with that lack of pitch inside here i could find myself getting sandwiched in but then again that's partly what you'd have a stick on standby for just to give you that extra support what i've used here is my bag i always push my bag down to the bottom to help just give me that extra couple of inches of lift and yeah it's not too bad at all um it's quite nice when you just want to disappear for a bit and uh and it's a fairly easy setup it's not rocket science i folded the top in half pegged it all out and basically lifted up the top it's very simple to do it's not overly complicated some of the top configurations you can find out there are are really are some kind of uh origami act of act of genius um and fair play to them they're fantastic but you remember in the outdoors we need to keep things simple so for that reason this is my kind of number two number two type configuration that i'm showing you today well for a start this is a lot flatter down here so this might be a lot more workable i just need there you go that's not root is it a to b for the purposes of today and today's demonstration i'm going to be using these two trees which just so happen to be placed rather closely to the the spring that's running through the woodland here in reality see our video on wild camping don't camp anywhere within 200 feet of a water source and that's just simply because you may not be the only people's camping in this in this area and over time you know as humans we do end up contributing to the water source whether that's through fecal matter food waste or whatever that may be so this is just for demonstration purposes today i'm just going to use these two trees just because we walked through here and i happen to like the distance there we are okay so this is going to be your classic pitched tarpaulin this is the third technique i'm showing you today this is much more aimed at kind of families or individuals we're going to use the tarp in a slightly different configuration to give ourselves some real height to this thing so it's obviously four and a half meters long by three and a half meters wide so first things first i'm going to take all the bits and pieces out i'm going to set up my ridge line from one tree to another throw the tarpaulin over the top and then we're going to take a look at some of the knots that we're going to need to make this thing okay so i'm just to begin with i'm just pitching this thing at about eye height and guesstimating how high up this wants to be once the tarpaulin is up only then we'll actually know whether i've kind of got this right or not it's easy enough to adjust so i'll put my safety stick in where's my safety stick now what i'd like to do here is uh rather than have a great big long tunnel of love that's you know not very high off the ground i'm going to configure this so that i'm using the length to give me the height inside and it's obviously only going to be three meters long which is ample for getting people underneath the wind at the moment is coming through here so i'm going to pitch this so that we're slightly side on to the wind so we're not fully going to get that sail effect but it's going to glance off that top corner which just means we aren't going to get wind funneling underneath we go four over the top so it looks like a number four inside once inside that hole twice it's a lovely knot because it bites on itself and then make that little thumb knot just like the event but pull the whole tail all the way through that just gives me something that will i can tension along here and bites on itself when it's doing its job this is very much i could peg this out but actually i want it to strike the ground because i don't want to let the wind get up underneath so if i was making a really high sided caboose to sleep in i'd use this and you know maybe tie it off to here but that's going to let the wind wind in underneath that's not what this is about today so i'm going to peg this down and keep it quite low because as you can see the wind is just trying to strike it so i'm going to push that all the way in if i need to secure it i've got another another bit of cordage here so what's really important is that you start off with your two sides then you do your middles and you do your corners last that's what's going to give you that lovely shape uh i hate to use this phrase again but that instagram perfect tarpaulin shape that everybody's trying to achieve got a couple of friends that use this configuration when they're using maybe a fishing camp bed chair to go underneath uh you know because it's got that kind of that height that admin room that they need underneath you could also argue that this is really recruiting and using the maximum amount of space available from this you know this this xl top you're using every last little bit of cubic space underneath there whereas maybe some of that's lost in some of the other configurations just look at how much room you've got underneath this thing it's mega there's oodles of space in there fantastic this is ideal for sort of family use or maybe the individual who wants the luxury to put their fishing camp bed chair right square in the middle there and have oodles admin space around them um yeah it's absolutely brilliant obviously orientation to the wind always has to be key because where this could fall down is if you make this thing with the wind thundering through the middle like a tunnel and you've just created a wind tunnel it doesn't have any element of itself protecting or acting as a ground sheet underneath so you're going to need to make sure you've got good insulation from from the ground if you're going to sleep under this bring your own ground mats use a gore-tex movie bag inside your sleeping bag so on and so forth having a fire is kind of a 50 50 with this one you could maybe have a fire off to one side here but you wouldn't really feel the heat you wouldn't really be getting the most out of that fire if you see what i'm saying so yeah it's uh it's a great design it's got a nice steep pitch to it is a pro keeps the wind and the rain off it's sturdy this ridge line running through the underneath here by doing it this way and ignoring these tabs on top okay so there's a tab on the top there in the middle but instead of using that and by using the ridgeline running underneath what this ensures is i've got somewhere to carabiner on clothes that need drying out um you know a little lantern or a torch or maybe my head torch what i tend to do is take that and fold it through itself so that hangs down and acts as my little light in my admin area under here if i'm using this configuration i've got a lot more room in here i mean i'm almost pretty much standing up if i was a child i'd definitely be standing up so it's got an awful lot of pros to it i've not had to use all of my uh lanyards my paracord around the outside edge because i've pinned this thing to the deck which is great again one thing to be sure of when you pack this thing away is make sure you pick up all your temp pegs so yeah that's pretty much concludes that i would have said but it's just a good sturdy solid pitched tarpaulin on a ridge line so there we go that's kind of it hope you've enjoyed this video you

Channel: Hidden Valley Bushcraft

Views: 191,459

Rating: 4.8930058 out of 5

Keywords: prepping, hiking gear, backpacking, camping, tarpology, bushcraft, tarp, tarp shelter, tarp setup, tarp camping, tarp tent, camping gear, backpacking gear, Tarpology

Id: iTYvwEdoRC0

Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020