How big to cut a ground sheet for TarpTent Notch?

Andrea,

Tarptent’s site lists their optional Tyvek groundsheets for the Notch with the following dimensions:

20 / 42 in x 86 in

I used Tarptent’s Tyvek groundsheet dimensions to cut a polycro groundsheet for our Double Rainbow and found that it worked well.

It should be sufficiently smaller than the tent floor that rain will never fall on it. Since things can slide around a bit, I’d make it quite a bit smaller. In fact, my preference is to cut W/2 off of each side, where W is the width of the tent floor. :-)

I used to cut them a bit smaller than the floor of the inner (not the tent…)

As for the largish footprint, if you have to it can be set up without either or even both vestibules.

The last photo has the ugly side if set up with the door panels zipped up. You can minimise the flapping (if windy) on the side not in tension by using the mid panel pie outs (if you have) or improvise as I did , in my case I wrapped a small piece of quartz (we are on quartz here…) with some leaves and then used that to make the tie out.

Wow, nice setup. Hadn’t really thought about trying to make it skinny by ‘collapsing’ one of the vestibules.

BTW, the top photo is on uneven and sloping ground.

It can be done, just matter of practice.

The soft look is because I did not notice the camera was set on manual focus.

Left Field Observation—Ignore if desired—

When you place a ground sheet under the tent there’s always the possibility of getting rain water sandwiched between the ground sheet and the floor of the tent—no matter how big or small the tent footprint is.

Because if it rains hard enough (like the gully washers we get in the NC/TN mountains—and we’re getting today with Hurricane Nate)—all the buckets of water hitting the tent fly have to go somewhere.  These rain water hits the tent fly and pours off the fly onto the ground—and then this rain water goes under the tent because a tent always has a high side and a low side.

Point is, with enough rain water your campsite will get ground water—and this water while temporary will move under a tent and get between the ground cloth and the tent floor, creating pools on top of the ground sheet.

My solution is to put my ground cloth inside the tent—for a variety of reasons—including the above.