Unusual Way to Use a Tarp Over a Fire - The Beast Sleeping Pad Set Up

Description

Rain and snow flurries were part of my camp this week, a natural thing this time of year in the mountains where I live. Enjoying camp means being able to use a tarp to construct shelter directly over a campfire and having a sleeping set up that accommodates the weather in comfort.

More information about The Beast sleeping system https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLupuI--ZGYQ7hTOOqVPuRpHG1BppZcRYK

Playlist for our tarps https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLupuI--ZGYQ4pgzZcZsep79YB2FX5LzJz

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Video Transcription

that's a been a rainy day today and I was hoping to get I was hoping to get a little farther up the mountain to camp but you know I'm up quite a ways but it's it's really starting to get dicey up in here the the road is so muddy and slippery with the it's the roads up here clay and a little bit of gravel in places but I'm not gonna make it much farther than this so I already know about this is a good spot in here so this is gonna be the camp but the Forest Service has closed that so this is the end of the road right here oh I think what I'd like to do since it's been raining and everything it's still daylight I think I'm gonna go ahead and get my fire going get that going good before I do any camp set up this pine right here looks like it's a pretty dense top on it looks like back in there yeah it's it's been getting just a little bit of moisture but it's thought it's fairly dry so I'm going to bust out some of that stuff to use for fire starting I've gotta kind of mash all this down a little bit especially when you have these pine needles they usually have too much space between them to to work well if you don't mash them a little bit let's just see if we get a little something going here a little something happening oftentimes you burn your fingers when you're starting these because they when they start to go they may flare out and they'll it become like a little globe blowtorch I think we're good to go there so let her rip here get some more wood on there yeah some of this woods pretty pretty wet on the outside so I'm just kind of loosely piling it over here so get a chance to dry out so I'm gonna start burning well I was pretty good fire originally my intention was to go backpacking and then just things at work just didn't uh just had so much to do I just wasn't able to get away in time so I decided to do a closer by camp up here about 20 miles from home and the west mountains I figured I'd hang a hammock and sleep sleep that way tonight but I don't know I'm kind of where I got to here I wanted to get up higher work and drop that into a little want to drop down into kind of a little more enclosed area to just set up my camp and everything I'm just thinking probably I'm just going to throw out the throughout the beast and use that instead of instead of trying to do the the hammock right now I might do it tomorrow but for tonight and I think that's what I'm going to do where's my campfire down there just came up a little above that up right into here and I think I'll set up right here in this grass actually I'm very little time to do this because the fact it might almost be too dark right now okay think I'm going to throw it on the ground cloth because the ground is spongy wet pretty soaked so I'm not terribly concerned about it just a little bit of something I think I would probably be just fine without doing anything but you know go ahead and do it anyway and we got a good chance of rain showers through the night and in the morning

I'm gonna put my canopy over try to get this kind of spaced out sort of even yeah I'll come down in here and do up a couple of snaps here so I'll be able to uh I'll be over tagged in on the other side

all right so okay have to do it we can hear shake the poles to assemble I'm gonna do a video coming up where I show you how to also adjust the how to adjust the tension on the shock cord all right back in here no catch this throat

I have to let it down aways here and then I need a lower profile they can be closer to can it be over the top here straps right here go a little more straight up well here's my shelter got a rainy rainy day here today so I put it up and I like I like to be able to see out so I've got it pitch down on three sides and lift it up on the front side so I can lay in there I can see from here down to my campfire a little lift up there and there's the back side I got anything shock corded on the corner so Landel the wind good chilly rainy night here tonight so I intend to have plenty of hot drink available anything right up get this thing on the fire there's some hot water

yeah that things start warming up I've got a little pivot deal right here that that hook goes into because I found it's handy to build to rotate the spout of this to wherever it works the best it's trying to snow that wouldn't be good if it snowed I wouldn't even get out of here let's see here where's the can opener tool that is yeah there's too many tools in this thing guys supposed to remember all my swiss army my red Swiss Army knife hiker camper whichever one it is I have both I have several Oh both actually they have cattle photos on them - all right this is country style all right so I'm going to have some beans

I'm going to have some corn this corns already been shut up where's the core and I got butter and salt and pepper and I like all right there we go these coals have been running ever since I got here so I've put my cooking sticks there that's gonna be more than enough coals so I made a little pocket right down here for the coals de city in I'm gonna do a nice about these pot lifters as they work for darn near everything so close the lid a little bit because I don't want to get a bunch of big chunks of charcoal in there where the corn here so throw the corn right down in there and pull some coals over top of it sizzle for a little while you won't take too long little something over top actually find a few uh cover stuff a little a little bit with the coals if you still have flame going in the fire the flame of the fire will just burn stuff like really fast so if you can cover it with some coals it actually prevents excess burning all right let's check some corn here I think it should be good oh yeah that's how I like it right there

and I've heated up a little butter in the cast-iron skillet yeah put me a little salt on there and a little pepper of course gotta have a little pepper never try here nice hot roasted corn on a chilly evening is good I love it to get the rest of the vittles on here see this these beans have been done for a long time but I like to let them sit there and simmer a little extra long so they kind of thicken up a little bit and jump a little bit of some corn chips in there with them just for good measure corn chips make good spoons good grub here corns about too hot to eat and that's perfect but burns your lips off that's good yeah look it up for my shelter this morning

- fantastic night's sleep yeah the birds are all out there chirping away I've had enough sleep and I can't make myself have any more so I suppose I'd better just get up that's a nice morning miss rainy rainy through the night yeah man I slept so good I'm like groggy glad I'm working on getting a fire courses rainy throw it through the night everything it's a little chilly this morning it's yeah spring day it's it's 38 I just checked it's 38 degrees so you know it's a little on the chilly side I was wanting to show you starting a fire with some punk wood and the batteries on my camera had died and I was trying to stall it long enough it's trying to get my batteries change before it start it started on its own most this woods a little on the damp side but it'll dry that I had last night I had one log that I'd busted into is soft and punky and there's a kind of a chunk of it on the ground and so I just got in there just started with my hands and just started breaking it up and I got about like I say I got about a grapefruit-sized of this stuff like that and I just started maneuvering around in the coals and I just happened on a spot that had just a tiny bit of coals left from last night and that's what we started this deal from there the bark that's on this is sopping wet I try to get some of it off there

hit it on a rock see you know bust it off the fire is getting going well enough it pretty soon it'll be it'll be good enough it won't matter but give it a quicker start to bust the bark off in the woods a little damp underneath the bark not a little damp it is damp there's no question about it well I got fire I'll use the formula P equals plenty that'll be a good fire it'll warm up my chilly bones Morris gihan ski teaches that for a warming fire the fire should be so hot that it forces you to stay about one step out one step on pace three feet away from the fire it kind of seems on the surface you might think well that sounds kind of dumb but in reality when a fire has that much heat output it means it means it's putting out in a big area here enough heat to warm you if you're trying to warm yourself over a little fire you're having to huddle right in there around it and it really doesn't have it really doesn't have sufficient heat to really warm you well there's the there's the headquarters for the night my Beast

my beast with the ocean the narrow blanket that did the trick for me right there rain through the night and I was good to go so for a warming fire so for warming fire why do I need a fire that I have to stay a few feet away from how much radiant energy do you have because you have a large fire even though that may be the overall temperature the fire isn't any greater the amount of radiant energy might be a hundred times greater so it's like trying to warm yourself with a butane lighter or trying to warm yourself with a big fire the big fire may not actually temperature-wise be any hotter but it has more radiant energy and that radiant energy can penetrate your clothing and penetrate your body and warm you up so that's why you need a need a sufficient fire if you really want to warm up now I'm getting some poles ready it was a kind of start out a nice morning and then clouded up again and it started to rain I think I'm going to put a parachute over my fire it's gonna make a little shorter I'm gonna trim the crooked parts off I like to be small as I can on the end but it's worse to be crooked because it's pretty hard to get a decent lashing on the end when you're crooked just to make a little better lashing

a little bit bark off of there cuz it's not exactly tight makes it makes it work on the parachute a little better so if I stick my finger in there in between each one of these and I make myself two wraps would be good enough but I did three now go that in between here we don't really want to be we don't really want to be all that tight here because we're making a big wide footed triangle tripod I mean so the common mistake is to last to do this tripod lashing too tight and we're not we're not building a we're not building a tower anything well so I have a dilemma apparently apparently I took my PD shelter I had it in my organizer drawer in my truck I don't remember ever taking it out of there but it's not in there so doing a PD shelter over the fire it ain't happenin today but I'll be damned if I'm not gonna put something over the fire for what it rained so I'm going to do something I've done I did a few years ago quite a bit before I before I did the PD shelter I've got my 10 by 10 multicam tarp it's like the original multicam tarp I made at and it's got so many experiments on it it looks hideous but nevertheless it will work so my thought is I'm going to put the tripod pulls up all right so I secured me a carabiner here to the top of the tripod and put a cut another cord through through this end of it and tie that off to the center tab on my pstl tarp and hopefully I can position this over the fire get the tripod where I want it and then and then pull the tarp up with the cord while I'm kind of holding it out of the way of the fire at the same time whoo it's gonna be spooky and this beast up well here's the deal you got to have adaptable gear you got up dere gear get out gear that will do more than one thing stuff you can set up in a lot of different ways that's that's why we've got what we've got not only that but you yourself got to be adaptable you know I've really had my heart set on doing that PD shelter because I knew is going to be rainy and stormy so I'll be beautiful over the fire but now I'm forced with having to do something not as good but try to make the best of it so here we go I want to use the carabiner up top I could just use a loop and a rope or something but I want this to slide very easily start off with I want to put it high high as I can we are

now I've got to take out some of the slack in here to try to make this you know a a better looking shelter well it doesn't have to look good at all I can do whatever I feel like be honest with you so I'm just gonna take and fold back some of that you see that that takes up a bunch of the slack in here and I'll just pull that down so that kind of so that kind of cleans up this end of it this one here there's actually a couple option they could actually put a pole in here you know and but if it gets cold I want to trap some heat in there so I don't want to do that because the heat will escape so I want to really do the same kind of thing again so so I'm just gonna bring it across like that all right so I've got my shelter here I'm pretty good if it were to rain on me or whatever I can sit under here out of the rain the fire will keep me warm I can cook I can do whatever I need to in the shelter and be out of the rain but this is probably something you don't want to do with your favorite tarp this one is permanently permanently smoked it's like smoking dears like a deer height or whatever it's got kind of a tan color to the inside of it and it won't come out I've tried it's permanent so in case of emergency I would do this without hesitation to get myself some warmth overhead and to keep myself around the fire without being wet there's a shot from one angle here and just a crude crude tripod and I'm hanging a square tarp our pstl 10 foot by 10 foot I'm hanging that square tarp inside that triangle so that keeps the fire out of the rain and keeps me out of the rain so I could cook around the fire or just sit around the fire and even if a rained or snowed I would be toasty warm inside of there because that traps heat up inside the canopy it does mess with your tarp I won't lie to you about that because because your tarp is going to be permanently smoke flavored I've I did this on this tarp years ago I did I did a whole winter and spring of using this thing and it's still waterproof so I mean it hasn't like hurt it but you can see I've I've done some stuff here I've used some Easy Clip mideast you could use minis as well I just happen to grab the midis but just to take up the slack because we're going you know we're going in a tripod shape with a square tarp so I had to take a little slack out in a couple of places just to you know just to get it so that it would kind of hang here properly it probably looks ugly but like I say a lot of times you talk about style in the outdoors a lot of times style in the outdoors is being warm and comfortable being out of the elements and a lot of times it doesn't really matter what it looks like

what matters is does it do the trick for you you know it's like 10:00 or 10:30 I think I got to have breakfast like I didn't see I get unto all of this stuff right here like I always do always getting sidetracked always getting projects or hiking or whatever I'm doing and then breakfast is like the last thing I think of so I think it's time to actually do breakfast well it's coming down snow here that's a little snow flurries keep happening

well I think this is the first snowstorm for the Beast oh you got some snow coming down here and it's cozy inside of here

well I've weathered through the storm we've got kind of a tail end of it the break-up here coming you know we had snow and rain we had some hail we had snow pellets we had wind went all kinds of fun stuff and a lot of it you saw that I I spent a lot of time in here did some whittling some various things you know just piddling around underneath my shelter here I also went down to the Beast and I was actually gonna take it down and it was just so comfortable I got in there I just laid down had a nap so I so I slept for a good little while in the beast and and and I I woke up and the storm was the break-up some blue sky out here now and all that so but it's the end of my camp for for this week that thought I might fire the fire back up because it burned through everything and if I can get it going in time I have myself one last little treat before I go home so there goes the fire just started so I guess we're doing the treat and so I had a great time as a nice learning experience I don't really ever go anywhere that I don't have experience I don't have something that I learned you know I can't virtually every week and there's something every week that I learned you'd think by now I'd be smart but hey apparently I still have a lot of things to learn cuz I keep learning stuff but anyway it's part of the fun for me just doing some different things and being out here and and just enjoying the nature and just enjoying being out take it down I'd like to leave it but the the Forest Service doesn't really like us you know and marries particular like this they don't like us building structures and leaving them there so I'll stash it over here kind of out of the way a little bit and if I come back up here again and it's still there I might use it again because I've already made it once well I'm getting ready to knock off camp I've got everything packed up except for this class a little bit around the fire but have you ever had fried cookies I don't know I haven't but I'm gonna try it so I've got there's some chocolate chip pumpkin cookies that are made in the bakery of our grocery store and they are just excellent I have scraped some coals from that fire over underneath my cooking area here and put my cast-iron skillet there and it appears to be plenty hot

okay so let me just set a cookie in there and let's see what happens here see take this thing I'll stick another cookie in here let's try that and see what happens I think next time I do it I'm going to try see that and got it got crispy all right

it wasn't coming along so I added a bunch of coals underneath and I'm like I think I added too many I think I'm gonna try next time I maybe next time I come camping I might fail the skill it up and do like I do when I make scones and get some you know really hot oil like for scones and drop the cookies in there and see what happens so it's crisping up in any event the bottom is the bottom is crunchy and yeah I'm too hot the chocolates melted on the bottom but not up into us so we'll make this attempt attempt number one I'm gonna try well there we go again that's actually pretty good this cookie where it did Crispus there's normally this these cookies are really really soft and now I got a little crunchiness there on the bottom that tastes kind of good I like it even like the chocolate chips are a little crispy you enjoyed some of the stuff I put on the video and it's always some kind of adventure some sort or another a lot of times I don't know what the adventures gonna be till I get here so regardless we just deal with it and have fun so Perry peacock wilderness innovation absolutely loving my time in the outdoors even though today I didn't hike anywhere anything I just i sat most the time by the fire under my canopy watching it rain and snow and junk like that and just piddled around it was a very relaxing camp I really had a great time so you don't always have to be busy you don't always have to have a schedule sometimes it's nice just to do practically nothing so enjoy your time in the outdoors let's see on the next go-round