MYOG Backpacking Tipi - Part 1 Design

For a while now there have been a number of things pushing me towards going to a Tipi (tepee? teepee?) for backpacking.  Normally I'm a hammock guy, and it's a great solution for trips where I'm sheltering alone.  A recent 4-person trip to the Dolly Sods Wilderness was the first thing... Four of us carried two 2+ pound shelters... not bad, but probably improved upon with an ultralight 4-person solution.  The other thing that got me thinking about it was my desire to take my kids backpacking.  Real backpacking, not car camping, which would mean lots of weight on my shoulders and no real lightweight solution to sleep more than 2 of us together.  Putting someone in their own tent without Daddy would be a non-starter at their ages, so I need a big and light shelter for the whole family.  Enter my defining MYOG project for this winter... a lightweight backpacking tepee capable of sleeping 4 adults or a few adults and a lot of kids.

Basic Design

I searched the web for a good template I could use, and while I found a lot of photos of cool ideas, many tepees are designed for base-camp uses, and less for ultralight backpacking.  Indeed, it would be cool to have a large tepee with a built-in wood burning stove, but that's not my main interest.  The best inspiration I found was this thread over at Backpacking Light.

I had decided on a floorless 8-sided tepee - this seemed to be a fair compromise between construction complexity and remaining wind and weather proof.  It should also be noted that most traditional Tepees were not right cones at all, but rather the cone was tilted away from the door.  For the sake of simplicity, I chose a right-angle design.

Finally, I wanted to be able to use it year-round, which meant including some level of bug protection for summer.  While I plan to use the tepee in winter, I did not make provisions for a stove jack.  I just can't see myself taking the time to set something like that up at the end of a day, and in the winter I'm rarely a base camp and day hike kind of guy.  Also note that my winters trips are in deep woods, well below treeline, and temperatures are never excessively cold... below freezing, for sure, but not cold enough to freeze the booze. 

I knew I wanted to sleep 4 adults comfortably, so I fired up SketchUp and first laid out 4 sleeping pad-sized rectangles (I used 72" x 20") with a little space between them.  Then I dropped an octagon around those 4 sleeping pads and scaled it so that it would surround the pads with some space left over.  That put the diameter of the bottom at about 12' across.  

I wanted to maintain something close to traditional proportions for height vs. diameter.  I was willing to alter this, however, for the sake of reducing weight and the space required to pitch the thing.  Most traditional designs have a height that's about 20 - 25% less than the diameter.  That would make my tepee 9' tall.  9' seemed a little large, especially considering I wanted the ability to pitch it from the outside with a rope strung between 2 trees (or hung down from one) in addition to the typical internal pole.  Reaching 9' up a tree is tough.  In the end I opted for a height of 7'4", which is about 40% less than the diameter.  Hopefully this won't impact the ability to shed wind, rain, and snow too much.

My first basic design is shown below.  Apologies for the dimension marks and the goofy angle.  I'll try to update with a better screenshot when I get back into SketchUp.



My first basic tipi design

Additional Considerations

Once I had the basic shape, I started to plan "features" like a zipper down one of the corners for a door (duh).  I also thought it would make sense to make a screen door as well, so the two sides that are joined with a zipper will also have a NoSeeUm mesh door behind them.  This will give me a traditional tent-style opening where I will have silnylon doors over mesh doors, giving me lots of options depending on the weather. 

I also thought that having some additional bug protection would make sense, so I planned to add an 8" skirt of NoSeeUm netting around the lower perimeter that would be tucked under to provide some level of bug protection. 

I planned for tie-down loops at all 8 corners, a loop at the very top so that the tepee could be hung from a rope as well as pushed up from a pole on the inside. 

I also thought I should reinforce the very top of the tepee with Cordura to provide some additional strength at this key point.

A few other things I thought about, but decided to "wait and see":

• Vents at / near the top for warm weather and to help manage condensation in cold weather
• Additional tie-outs on the inside for clothes lines, etc.
• Additional tie-outs n the outside for extreme weather

Materials

I decided to order all my materials (except for the tent pole) from Outdoor Wilderness Fabrics.  OWF has a nice deal where you get the order at wholesale prices if you order at least 20 yards of something.  I figured I needed about 15 yards of silnylon, and rounding that up to 20 yards gave me not only a little wiggle room material-wise, but actually made the whole order slightly less expensive. 

Without further ado, here's my complete material list:

• 15 yards of silnylon for the main body (I ordered 20 yards of 2nds quality)
• 6 yards of NoSeeUm mesh for the bug doors and skirt
• 1 yard of Cordura for reinforcing the peak
• 240" of #8 coil zipper, along with slides and stops, for the doors
• 20 yards of 3/4" Grosgrain for tie-outs and lots of other things (I don't need this much, but it never hurts to have a little extra around)
• Thread - I used Gutermann Mara 70
• A center pole - (I'll update here once I order it.  I want to get the final finished height before I buy this)

Total cost? Around $130 in materials, not including the pole.

I also used Sketchup to calculate the total area of each material so that I could estimate the finished weight.  My guess walking in to the project was that I could finish out somewhere around 3 lbs without the center pole, which I considered pretty good for a 4 person shelter.

Next Steps

So now it's on to construction, which I'll cover in a subsequent post.  Keep checking back (or subscribe via the link to the right to get notifications) as I continue to work through the details of construction.

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