X-mid - Dan’s Tips For Uneven Ground

After I had spent a few nights on X-mids, I went to Dan Durston (designer of X-mid tents) for some advice to minimise the noise and flapping of the panels. The nights I’ve spent in the X-mids were all in somewhat uneven ground which caused excessive ventilation (read: draughts) inside the tent. Now X-mid is an amazing tent, with its simplicity of pitching it and it’s interior space in relation to the weight.

The simplicity comes from the square geometry, which allows a fast pitch of 4 pegs, one in each corner and the trekking poles. This is all that it’s needed in fair weather conditions. In reality, 2 extra pegs for doors is needed for practical access and in windy conditions, 2 apex lines can be added. There are several extra guy out points on the side panes and the hem, but those are rarely needed, except in the most extreme conditions.

This simplicity comes with a caveat. The initial four corner pitch needs to be pretty accurate and solid. If it’s not, then the pitch will end up being not taut. Flapping might also occur if the pitch isn’t taut, or if the wind gets too much under the hem. This is what has happened to me a couple of times. Dan Durston is very active on hiking forums and always happy to help with anything. I asked him about the best practises about pitching an X-mid on an uneven ground to prevent the aforementioned issues. I shared a photo of my recent pitch with hime and here’s what he had to say:

A pitch on a concave trail in Dartmoor.

There's a few options here. The corner cords act like extensions of the fly, so you can get a good pitch on uneven ground by varying the cord length (e.g. longer cords to reach down into low areas, and shorter cords at high spots so they don't lift the fly).

To get the lowest pitch, you can set the cord length to 0 at the highest corner. If the entire site is a simple slope then the whole tent can pitch that low, whereas if the site is truly uneven then you could have more of a gap in areas where the group is dipping. This is going to be the case with essentially every tent, since at best a tent can be cut with a flat bottom edge that hugs the ground except where the ground dips (and then many tents are higher yet if they cut the fly high and/or cat curve the fly upwards along the sides).

If you have the tent pitched at near zero gap on the highest areas, hopefully any actual dips aren't more than 5cm or so and then gap is quite manageable. If you actually have truly large dips (e.g. 10-15cm) then it's a pretty awful tent site Here you could fill the dips (e.g. moss, rocks). Another option is to collapse the vestibule on that side (stake out the peak guyline and then unstake the corner) which will cause it to hang down lower and close the gap - but there is loose fabric here so if it's so windy that a gap is a problem then this may not be a good idea.

So basically I would pitch it as low as you can at the high points, avoid putting any corner on a really high point that is going to lift the whole thing, have dips and high points inside the fly area instead below the fly edge where they may lift the fly (bumps) or create gaps (dips), then in extreme cases where you still have a large dip I might look at tossing a log or some rocks to fill it. Do be careful that the bottom edge of the fly is not flapping/abrading against rocks if you pitch it low.