consensus on winter stakes?

I've used soft ancors like this and I dislike them, at least in our Washington wet/hardpack/frozen snow. They are lighter than solid flukes like the SMC T-Anchor but they require more time to get them placed correctly. A T-Anchor, on the other hand, places in seconds.

Walk the area in snowshoes.
Use a shovel to cut a narrow slot for the cord
slide the anchor through the snow at an angle
Tramp down once more to secure the anchor

Much faster than with a soft anchor.

Hi Joe

> The use of dead branches works great in the Colorado Mtns
Oh, don't get me wrong. I have used dead sticks in the snow and on sand too. But sometimes, up on the high plains, there aren't any around to be used. Just bare snow-covered rolling hills – with a good freezing winter wind blowing across them!

I just got in from Cypress provincial park; I tromped out into the middle of a meadow to try out my new Oware USA 10×10 mid.

My SMC T-Anchors haven't come in the mail yet, so I had a chance to experiment with some other anchors. Here are some notes from the field:

1) Snowshoes are *awesome* anchors. They shovel out their own hole, the adjustable bindings give you one more way to control guyline tension, and oh *man* do they have surface area. (Used these for 2 corners.)

2) The stuffsack provided with the 'mid, filled with snow, was a great anchor too. Quick to fill and dump, and seriously lightweight. Also, very low fiddle-factor which is great with frozen fingers.

3) A stick worked great too. Really great.

4) Once compacted, the snow around the anchors quickly set up very hard. If I was pitching in a storm, I might bury the anchors but wait 30 minutes (crouched under the tarp if necessary) to erect the centre pole. Otherwise, no waiting is required and the snow is already really solid after 15 minutes.

5) A trucker's hitch in very fine cord is a great idea in your livingroom, and very trying on my patience in the field. For the next trip, I'm going to try just tying a series of loops in the guyline to give me different placement options for a mini-biner.

6) re-tensioning can be done from inside by lengthening and re-orienting the centre pole. Sweet.

7) Don't count on your snow claw as an anchor for your floorless shelter. Why? Because once you're in there you're always going to be digging/sweeping/reconfiguring the interior. It's tonnes of fun and impossible to ignore!

8) I'd love to try out some of those little "parachute" style sil anchors. The idea struck me as really being the best of all worlds unless I was in rock-hard snow that my shovel couldn't readily penetrate.

Brian