Before I start...

[Killdeer]

Glamping is a four-letter word.

I started out hunting with shelter halves and a sterno stove.
Not nice.

After thirty-plus years, I am now pretty well-off, in stuff you can no longer get. Thanks, Cabelas.

Now, durnit, I have woodstove envy. It is all ApplePie’s fault. Kinda.

I also have guests for one of my three weeks in the woods. And I have degenerative disc disease, which means that my back becomes cantankerous, north and south, now and again.

I would love to have a central cookshack, with a wood stove, where we could dry our gear and share a meal, and sit with the door open and watch the world go by.

A traditional tipi would be unfeasible due to transporting poles and lifting the canvas.

With six in camp, I am thinking of a ferociously expensive poly/cotton tipi of 20’ diameter and 12 feet high, which would support a wood stove. This would be the communal cookshack. It weighs about 43 pounds, which is about what the current cookshack weighs.

Anybody here been in a Tentipi?

[Ron LaClair]

My wife Nancy (RedBird) and I use to camp/hunt out of a 14' tipi. We had a sheet metal stove for heat and to cook on. I don't think you can buy those stoves anymore. Two length's of stove pipe was all you needed just high enough to get the smoke above the liner.

One time we were camping on state land to deer hunt. While Nancy was getting her stuff put away I grabbed my bow and took a stroll to check things out. At the time I was hunting with my HH Big 5, 68" 85#@ 28" I was watching the trees hoping to see a squirrel when I spotted a porcupine. I didn't want to waste a broadhead so I pulled a flu-flu with a steel blunt out of my back quiver. I sent the arrow up into his underside and it penetrated to the fletching. I brought the porkie back to camp, skinned him and hung the hide on a limb stub in a tree near the tipi. I dressed him out trimmed off all the fat and told Nancy to put him in the pot to boil and we will have him for supper.

This story is getting long but I want to tell all of it.

I decided to take a walk over to a big clearing near camp so I grabbed my pipe, loaded it with tobacco and headed that way. I found a big log, sit down on it and lite my pipe. I wasn't there long when I saw a man come out of the woods and walk into the clearing from the other side. He walked to a pole in the middle of the clearing that had a bird house of some kind. He wrote on a clip board and walked on in my direction. As he got parallel to me I sad "HI", he jumped about a foot then said, "you scared the s@#$ out of me. I told him I was sorry. Then he said he worked for the DNR and was checking the bird house, then said what are you doing here. I said my wife and I are bow hunting and we're camped in our tipi over the hill. He said tipi? I gotta see this

He walked with me to camp and I called Nancy out of the tipi and told her we had company. The guy spotted the porcupine skin hanging on  the tree, he said, "I see you shot a porcupine" I said "ya I shot him with my longbow and my wife is cooking him for our supper" He said "REALLY!, I can't wait to get back to the office. When I tell them I met some people out here camped in a tipi, hunting with longbows, shooting porcupines with arrows and eating them.......they're not going to believe me"

[BAK]

   That's funny, good memories Ron. 

[woodchucker]

Killy!!! My darling sister, where the HELL have you been!!!???? I sure have missed you!!!

I just threw the darn catalog out, but Sportsman's Guide had flat-top Sheepherder type stoves pretty cheap?

Back when I was in HighSchool I had a teacher who lived in a Tipi on a friends farm, for 3 years. (divorce makes a man do crazy things?) He had a cement block fire ring in the center, over which he cooked his meals.
We were bunny hunting one day, and there was smoke coming from the flap, so we stopped in for a visit... (Hey, it was cold, and we had been stomping through 2 foot of snow, just seemed like a good idea) Well, it felt like it was about 90 in that Tipi LOL!!! We hung out, dried our wool clothes, said thanks and were on our way...

Looking back, I could do a Tipi

[Killdeer]

As I said, this would be a tipi substitute, and I was thinking about a Four Dog “Little Dog” stove. That would be about as much weight as I could handle in a stove.

Titanium is too darn expensive, and doesn’t hold the heat as well.
Great story, Ron, how was the spikey little rascal? 

[Hawkeye]

Killy,

I don't have any info on stoves or tents, but I wanted to say it made me smile to see your name pop up!

Hope you are enjoying life these days.

Daryl

[Friend]

Miss you Killdeer...

[Cyclic-Rivers]

Welcome back killie. I miss your witty humor and stories

[Lori]

We use a 10x14 Egyptian canvas wall tent with an aluminum center truss and a 9x9 Egyptian canvas Baker tent with the full 6x9 front enclosure, we heat either one with a four dog.  The chimney exits through the vertical front wall on both, not through the roof.  We have a slightly elevated charcoal grid inside of the stove, so we can burn charcoal.  Without the grid, the charcoal will smother itself with its own ashes. We use one of the two wheel telescope carts and the deer cart to move things to the setup. The telescopes are much heavier than the tent. We both have bad backs as well, So we are stuck to public campsites, not way out in the hinter lands like when we go on wilderness canoe trips, all of the canoe stuff is ultra light.  Although the Baker tent has gone on a bunch them, when we had strong backs in the group to haul the extra gear.  The Baker fits in a number 3 Duluth pack, tent plus rubber floor and poles weighs 45 pounds when dry, more when it is wet.  Note: Egyptian canvas is much lighter than waxed canvas and never leaks.

[Ron LaClair]

Great story, Ron, how was the spikey little rascal?

Killy, I couldn't tell you how many porkies and coons I've eaten. I think it started with my uncle who was a coon hunter, trapper, fisherman anything to put meat on the table to feed his six kids. Time's were tough after the war in northern Michigan. My aunt would roast the coons and porkies in the oven and they were a delicious dark meat. 

Later I live a couple years with my Grandma and Uncle who was a WWII Vet. Grandma lived on my uncle's Service pension which I think was about $100.00 a month. I was 15 and had a .22 and a shotgun. I spent a lot of time in the woods, even skipped school to go hunting. (that's another story) Any critter that looked like food ended up in Grandma's kitchen and she was happy to get it. She used to cook in the lumber camps  when my mom was little so she could cook anything that didn't have a hide on it.

 

[mj seratt]

So good to see you back here.  Really miss your humor and your way of expressing yourself.  Hope to see more.

Murray

[Kokopelli]

I've always found it somewhat amusing how people look at food.
If you eat lobster, you're a food connoisseur and likely a judge of fine wine.
If you eat crawdads, you're a redneck and likely drink from a bottle of Thunderbird in a paper bag.
We won't even talk about bobcats or rattlesnakes.     

[GCook]

I've spent more than a few nights camped in a spruce bow lean to eating stream caught fish or maybe a snowshoe hare or grouse cooked over open fires. 
Growing up without much and my mother was always glad to see game for the pot.   With a  huge garden we always had plenty of taters and home canned veggies but meat was minimal and mom had seven mouths to feed. 
I won't say everything she cooked was gourmet but we were never hungry and the .22 put a lot of small game on her stove.

[George Tsoukalas]

Welcome back, Killy. Jawge

[Kelly]

Nice to hear from you again. Killy pm sent.

[pdk25]

Miss you Killdeer...

x 2

[hunting badger]

Killdeer, I have two set ups similar to what you are looking at, one is a Spike Tent from Reliable Tent and Tipi out of Billings Montana, the other is a tent tipi from Sportsman Guide. They both work very well, I use the canvas one if weight is not a consideration and the lighter weight nylon version when I'm rafting or where weight and space are a consideration. I have a stove I bought at a Rendezvous that made out of well casing, the legs and stove pipe fit into the stove for transportation. I have used the spike tent for multiple days at 30 below here in Alaska Moose hunting and I have used the tent tipi caribou hunting on the North Slope but in warmer weather. I think If you want a stove the canvas is the way to go. They are both very easy and quick to set up and would not be a strain on your back. I have quite a bit of experience with both tents here in Alaska and in Montana, if you would like more information please PM me.

[rastaman]

Can't help you with the tenttipi, but i have greatly missed your  posts!

[Guss]

Yep... I’ve missed Killdeer’s wise voice and always enjoyed her back in forths over their Centaurs with Larry...
Jr.

[Killdeer]

Lori, last October a buddy showed up in camp with a Baker. I had been looking at them and Whelens for a long time.

How is the Baker in the snow? Constant removal of snowload? Would love to see pics. Love its versatility and the nostalgia of the great campfires of the late 1800s.

The tentipi is a specific brand, phenomenally spendy, but seems to offer me lots of room in a canvas tent that won’t spaz out my back. And I can have the dry heat of a stove! It does have more than a whiff of glampiness, though. If I could find somebody with lots of experience with them, I would want to pick that brain thoroughly. My hope would be that they would tell me that the tent is eminently practical, and I shouldn’t hate it for being “stylish.”

Currently I use a 12x12 Cabelas XWT (bombproof) and the gazebo is the cook shack. These are discontinued, and nothing lasts forever. Propane heaters.

The tentipi would become the cookshack and central gathering place for the hunters in camp.
As they are only there for a week, I would likely live in it for the two weeks that they are absent.