Trekking pole tent in southern UT?

Car camping or backpacking?  I’m planning a trip myself, and it seems somewhat common to setup the tent on rock or hardback. In the SoCal desert we often use rocks hold the stakes or in place of stakes. For our car camping stops I plan to bring a free standing tent. For an overnight backpack I was thinking bivouac sacks or cowboy camping.

I hike in the uintas and in southern utah… I prefer a freestanding in the Deseret/southern utah and use my tarp tents in the uintas.

that said, rocks can help, dead mans anchors with sticks, stakes, buried sand filled stiff sacks etc work well if you are comfortable relying on that set up …..

I’ve had a few trips to Coyote Gulch near Escalante, and Salt Creek in Canyonlands.

I too worried about the sand on the first trip. Bought some parachute anchors from REI. Returned them unused. The sand wasn’t an issue for my treking pole tent. I used some titanium shepherds hooks from Zpacks; red hooks, 7″ or so. Good general purpose stake, slips between rocks too.

Experiment!

Learn something new!

Take a (slight) risk!

Have more experience tomorrow than you do today!

Learn to use little rock big rock technique.

^^ Or net type produce bags filled with large rock. Easier to tie off bag than rock alone. Weigh zilch. Good for potential slickrock sites. Available Amazon ( where else sheesh?)

PS another good thing about that 4-corners area is there is a huge variety of potential stake (sticks-limbs etc.) material seasoned and dried lying about anywhere there’s any vegetation. There’s also lots of potential hammers in the form of rocks lying about pretty much everywhere.

Edited to add: John’s picture above of the tent in that nice sandy spot with the rock stake-outs is a good example. Rocks all around and in the background about a zillion potential stakes. OTOH Nice thing about rocks in net produce bags is you can just move the bag a little to adjust the pitch.

Give us an update after your trip!

Karen, I’ll have to let you know next year because I’ve had a change of plans and can’t make it down there this year. By then I’ll have some experience with the trekking pole tent.

I use rocks regularly when pitching and have fashioned dead man (dead men?) anchors as well. Having no experience beyond free-standing tent I just wasn’t sure if these methods would be adequate.

And @mhr, really??

Those methods are usually adequate but the more options you have the better. Could be good to have some wider sand stakes too, plus the included V stakes for medium soils, or the included ti hook stakes for firmer soils.

I hike a lot in the Southwest.  I rarely bother taking stakes, since they are no use on hard surfaces or sand.   Instead, put a ~12″ stick through the guyline loop, lay the stick flat on the ground, put a rock on each end of the stick.  This is much more secure than trying to put a rock on a short metal stake.  It is solid on any surface, and it’s absolutely secure in any weather conditions – when very windy just use bigger sticks & bigger rocks.   It’s more laborious to gather suitable sticks and rocks compared to setting up a freestanding tent, but in the desert you might only need to pitch a shelter 1 night in 5.   Most nights you can cowboy camp.  So the huge weight saving of a 6oz tarp (with no stakes) over a freestanding tent is very much worthwhile.