How does tarp camping work? Do you set it up like tying to a tree? Use it like a blanket? I can’t picture it
ETA: I did search but I’m just getting ads for $600 tents like I’d ever try this myself
I have used a tarp for backpacking/kayaking for the last 15 years. I’ve used a tarp over my picnic table while car camping for, I dunno, 20 years. I do not use a blue tarp and won’t. My pieces are super lightweight and packable.
You CAN use one of those blue things for sleeping under, and some people do, but they get bulky after you’ve used them once: they’re impossible to get back into a nice tidy package.
There are a few things blue tarp users tend to forget when they’re going out imagining they’re going to use a blue tarp for a roof.
1. They need a second blue tarp under them if they’re going to sleep
2. They might need as much as 100 feet of rope.
3. In order to stay dry, they need a COLOSSAL tarp over them. Picture rain coming down. Some of it goes a little bit on the diagonal. Boom! You’re wet if you have a small tarp.
4. There’s no bug protection
5. Unless you have standing trees (i.e. not merely sticks lying around) a tarp-roof is the most hellish thing to erect if you’re by yourself.
6. A tarp sags. This gets really bad when it rains. It can sag right on top of you.
7. If the trees are too far apart, you either have to climb high to tie the rope, or you have to know how to jury-rig a pole to prop the rope up. This takes experience.
8. You usually need stakes as well.
9. All this makes a blue tarp a horrible backpacking/camping sleeping solution unless you have multiple people.
I went to a car camping campground near Lake George a couple of years ago. The upper canopy was festooned with rope from people hanging tarps and simply cutting the rope and not bothering to untie it. A ladder would have to be used by a cleanup crew to get that stuff down. Hundreds of trees, one tree at a time. Many people used big nails and hammered them into trees. All of this DESTROYS trees. I spent a couple of hours working to free trees at empty spots. I was absolutely appalled, not just for the selfishness at leaving debris in a camp site, but because campers were destroying living things. I suspect a lot of this goes on in the backcountry now that tarps have become a fad.