Rainy Winter Camping With My Wife In A Huge Hot Tent

This is heavy. It sure is. 100 pounds all in. Right about here? Yeah. Welcome back to Where is Wiseman. We are out on a beautiful winter camping trip, not in our camper. We are going to be staying in our huge stout bell tent, but with a stove. This is pretty much a test run for the stovepipe in the bell tent for a big trip coming up in February with my buddies. We go out in the middle of the snow, high elevation in the Cascades of Washington and camp out for a long weekend. We want to make sure the stove jack's set up properly. The stove's good to go in the tent and it's nice and cozy. The wind's picking up. Yeah, we got a 100% chance of rain tonight, maybe some snow. It's going to be a wet one, but hopefully we're nice and cozy in the tent. All right, let's get this thing set up as fast as possible. Let's go. Now. Oh, and if you want a full review of the tent, tutorial on the setup, how quick it can be setting up and taking down, we'll link that video down below. Okay. Probably should have done that before we staked it and did all the things, but. Just get so excited sometimes, you know. Well, hey, there's another lesson for when you guys set this up on your hike. Do this first. Good enough. 95 more to go. Maybe we shouldn't set it up right next to a river with rocks everywhere. Yeah, that was brutal. Otherwise, easy setup. So this stove jack's for a three inch pipe. We have a four. So I'm just going to make a top and bottom so the pipe can actually fit in better with the angle. I think that'll help. Ah, beautiful. Nice tight fit. All right. Initial run with the homemade stove my buddy Eric made a couple years ago. We've been using it on our winter trips where we build a snow fort, set this up, does great. Probably gonna do even better in here. Very excited to try this. So yeah, I do have a new pipe set up. We have another one we usually bring, but it's just not long enough. And we want to get this at least three feet off the tent and hopefully two feet above the top of the tent. So we need a 12 foot stack. So I got some of this stove pipe. Just got to put them all together. And I don't know if I'll keep them together or we'll break them down at the end of each trip for easier storage and our polk sleds. A lot to figure out here. But first off, we just want to get this cozy. A lot of people have trouble with these. I actually found it to be somewhat easy. Just kind of bend them in. You'll have to bend them and then reshape them after. That way you can get the channels to snap in. Boom. That snap is the final snap. We got the tent up just in time. It's going to be interesting to see how this tent holds up in the wind too, because it's supposed to get very gusty. I think 20 to 40 mile an hour gusts. So we'll see. I need a line to connect it. There, much better. Yeah, we definitely need a better pipe. It's just, one, typically when you connect pipes like this, you put at least three screws in to make sure they don't come apart. It's going to be windy tonight. I think it's good enough for this trip. We'll find out. With a pipe that tall, you should really have it tied off up top in the way it's leaning. It's not the best. We'll see how it goes. And we're dead. We got this beauty. Good thing we have backups. The one thing we really don't like about this tent is the guy line right outside the door, especially when you're wearing a hood because it's raining. I have hit my face on this so many times this afternoon. So Matt has 84 bungees out and we're going to take it straight out to that tree, which is what we did when we set it up the first time. That'll do. Oh, much better. You can bungee it up to that so we can take it down if we need to. These things are amazing. In case you never knew what they were for, a lot of uses. Better. There's a little, is it an eddy? Is that what it's called? Yeah. Is it the current? I wonder if there's lots of salmon over there. Is that in the spring? When do they run? In the fall? Like August. Yeah. Well, we didn't have much luck finding any good wood out here. Everything's soaked. Obviously there's not really any dead standing either. It's just the forest is really thinned out around here and obviously scavenged because it's a very popular camping area. But we have enough for a quick fire outside, maybe a while. And then, you know, we obviously have to save at least a bundle or two for inside later. Can't wait for that. But we got to hang out. So that means Matt can't put eight logs on the fire at once. This is true. This is true. I tend to do that. We've got our canopy up outside. I'll show you what the inside of the tent looks like. It's messy. It's dirty. Got the stove, which we'll get that going here later. Nothing fancy. Air mattress, our sleeping bags. We got a couple of blankets. We've got the fridge in here, which this is perfect because it's we can use the battery pack to charge this. So we'll see how long this lasts, because we have both of the compartments inside set to a refrigerator. So I would imagine we'll get more battery life with that setting than when we had a fridge and a freezer and turned way, way, way down on the freezer side. So we'll see how that goes. Got water. This is kind of the makeshift kitchen. We're just, you know, brought in some of the things we know we'll want in the morning. Utensils, stove. Yeah, that's about it. This is home for the night. Listen to that rain. It's here. Okay, it's time. We have earned it. Rainier on this trip. Well, the rain's actually been off and on. We're very lucky it's not too windy. If it was windy right now, we'd probably be shacked up inside the tent the whole night. Nothing wrong with that, but glad we can still be outside. And yeah, just another fun winter rainy trip where we did the prep. We're comfortable, having a good time. We're dry. We're trying to be easy on the fire outside so we can take it inside later tonight. Really excited to try that out. And I'm not sure the stovepipe setup's going to continue on with this tent. My buddy Rob found a really great option. It's one of those roll-up stovepipes. You can actually take a backpack and they take it apart, roll it up really tight. It's lightweight. I was worried with how hot of fires we create that that thing would just get deformed and fall apart or just warp. But let us know in the comments if you used one of those type of stovepipes for a hot tent stove. I was just worried about the pipe being too narrow, like a three inch instead of a four inch, which we're using the night because we want more airflow. But let us know, have you used those? Do they work with hot fires? Do they warp or anything like that? Because I think we're going to have to go that route. Just trying to transport 12 feet of stovepipe on a sled in the winter sounds awful. Well, we're inside. We're making the transition. Really excited to try this out. One thing I'm going to do is heat up the stovepipe a bit to hopefully get the air draw pulling up the stovepipe right away. I don't know if it's going to work. Experiments. Oh, that's actually hot. So I don't know. Maybe this will work. And I'm going to have to run really quick and shovel some coals. Doors open. This thing's probably going to explode. Oh, we're committed now. Oh my gosh. We're getting a very strong draw already. It could be just because we have a tall enough pipe. Maybe the heat helped. I can actually hear the air. Very exciting stuff. We have smoke coming out of the top. We're looking good. I'm so glad we took the price tags off all of the stovepipes before we put them in. That was hot. Okay. No issue on draft. I'll let that burn for a minute. Make sure we're good. How's the heat underneath it? Is that going to be protective enough? Yeah. Oh, wow. What? The stove is doing work now. We just jumped to 64 degrees in here. So that's why I had to just take a layer off. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. So one piece wasn't enough. Two and a half ended up being too many. So like one and a kindling, one and a, yeah, one big one, one little one every half hour. And you like, that's not even open air from there. I mean, it's, there's some gaps, so it's still getting here. Yeah. Well, took a minute to work out the kinks, but we are good. Got really smoky right away, which that usually happens. It was drawing the air, but I think the new stove pipe just needed some time to acclimate to the heat. So we kind of opened everything up, waited outside that cleared out. It is getting toasty in here. Temperature rose 20 degrees within minutes and yeah, it's 38 degrees Fahrenheit outside 55 and climbing in here. It's raining. We're comfortable. Don't get me wrong. This is a lot more work than just pulling up in your teardrop camper or a van or whatever, and just getting down to camping. But, uh, it is a very unique, fun experience. What? No way. I think it still has 96%. That's been going since we got here. Okay. So if you don't put the freezer on negative four, the battery will last a really long time. We brought a projector we've had, uh, saved up for a trip like this for quite some time now. And, uh, we're going to watch some movies. We might still listen to music or Christmas music in the background, but we're just going to have Christmas movies playing with no audio just for some ambiance. Well, another rainy night, rainy morning. We both slept pretty good last night. Got up a couple of times to throw some logs on the fire, but it went out pretty quick and we were plenty warm. So we definitely had enough, uh, sleeping bag and blanket gear to keep us warm. Yeah. Got her started right back up. Got the coffee going. Stove pipe worked great. It's still, uh, does lean a little bit, but it's, it's very rigid. So it's not going to fall over. If there was some wind, we'd probably be more concerned. So thank goodness there wasn't wind last night, but overall great setup. It is toasty in here. I'm sweating. I'm about to take my sweatshirt off. Don't forget the syrup. Oh yeah. So I put syrup on my hash. You guys, it's probably really weird. I think I discovered this when I was a kid and you know, you have pancakes and hash and eggs and the syrup just kind of goes everywhere. It's an amazing combination. If you've never tried it, you should. And if you have, let me know what you think. Am I totally crazy? Or do you also like the sweet and the salty? Oh, that's amazing. I just put it all over my eggs too. Why not? Well, second test with the iceco portable battery that magnetizes to the cooler. Pretty stoked on this. First time we tried it, we had the freezer at minus four and the cooler at 32 or 34. So we had it working hard. So it only lasted about 48 hours, maybe a little under that, but just running this as a cooler, we've had this going for 18 hours. It's still at 91%. Pretty excited about this. Just gives you the ability to take your cooler out of your trailer, your van, your truck, and you know, bring it down to the river, down to the beach, whatever you want to do. Well, that's one way to do it. Are you okay? I got that. So just let the rest of that just die out, cool off. Yeah. Take the stove apart. That all cooled off pretty quick, huh? Yeah. No more than 10 minutes later and it's cool to the touch. Thanks for joining us on this hot tent trial run. If you have any recommendations, please let us know in the comments. Also, if you enjoyed this video, make sure to subscribe. So you catch us on the next.