A windy June overnighter / Rocky Mountain (CO) high country

Nice. I love some good winds.. but trees snapping all night long?? One of those nights!! I need to get out to Colorado one time. Thanks for posting.

Thanks for posting this!  Beautiful shot of the whitecaps on the lake…but would love a large view to see the mountains beyond.

Tell us more about the fishing!

Wearing a puffy. I was at 7,900′ and it was pretty warm. What was the temperature?

Terran: temps were in the high-40s by the time I got to camp around 7 pm, and mid-30s overnight.

Paul – I was hunting Colorado River Cutthroat. There aren’t many places on the east side of the Continental Divide where they don’t crossbreed with stocked rainbows, so that was my main objective. The lakes at treeline have good Callibaetis hatches this time of year, which is a super fun hatch to fish since the mayflies are big and the cutts rise slow and lazy to them. I like walking the shoreline and twitching a big kebari soft hackle in front of feeding cruisers.

Here’s another photo taken from the same spot as the whitecap photo:

Ryan, would you shelter differently if you had it to do over again? If so, how?

Both of your black and white photos really caught my attention. It might just be me but I feel drawn to examine them more closely because they lack the normal color information.

I’m a sucker for B&W, it’s so fun to play with to get rid of some of the busi-ness in the image.

I was pretty happy with this shelter – it’s an Argali Owyhee 1P w/inner tent. I like the Owyhee geometry better than the Solomid XL/inner tent (probably the main “competitor” here) – the inner tent is roomier, taller, more gear storage inside, and I can pitch the Owyhee tighter in high winds than the Solomid XL.

However, on this trip, what I really wanted was an inner tent with the lower half of its height made with solid fabric for dust control and to keep the breeze off my sleeping bag. Winds this strong sneak into your shelter no matter how low you pitch to the ground – and I had my pitch pretty low.

Other highlights of this pitch:

• Five external guylines, attached to the vertical seam guyline tie-outs that are about one-third up from the bottom. Because these are along seams, you can really crank the tension down and offset guylines so they oppose each other to induce horizontal panel tension = really good shelter stability (you can’t do this using the mid-panel guyline tie-outs that are on the Solomid XL, which are mainly there for snow loading/interior volume adjustment).
• Four corner stakeout points were double-staked.
• One big 8″ tubular stake used for the front vestibule.

Overall, the patterning of the Owyhee is excellent; you can crank the tension down on it really hard and create a fortress out of it without disrupting its shape.

Interesting to hear about your shelter. I’m not familiar with that model.

I realize I didn’t articulate my question very well. Looking back, do you think you would have chosen a different campsite? I’m wondering how the experience might have changed if you’d been 500 feet lower among the trees, or above treeline sheltered between some large boulders.

The main challenge I had was finding a site that was safe – there’s a lot of bark-beetle kill (spruce and pine) in this area, more so at the lower elevations. The trees were healthier at higher elevations. I could have dropped 500 feet or tucked deeper into the trees at this location and been more protected, but it was getting late in the day, and this was a pretty spot.

Thanks. That makes sense.

Ryan, can you explain how the corners are “double-staked?” Is that two lines to two stakes at different locations or do you use one line and two stakes together for increased volume? I assume this strategy is better than a larger and longer single stake at the corners. I’m not familiar with this technique.

Two stakes where you’d normally put one, for additional holding power. I really like a tubular stake (e.g., MSR Carbon Core) placed in the groove in front (shelter side) of an aluminum V-channel stake for this. Larger and longer stakes are fine, they’re just harder to place deeply when the ground is rocky.