Today I was out in the woods testing a new (for me) concept, with the inspiration to come up with it supplied by HF member and accomplished thru hiker @chef4. I don't know if it has been done before — although its utter simplicity screams 'Surely it must have!' — but a fair amount of googling with various keyword approaches yielded no results for me. Perhaps the combined brain trust and institutional memory of HF will recall a similar technique.
chef4 said he loves the job a snakeskin does because he likes to end his hiking day reading and stretching and looking at the sky for a couple of hours, while also having the tarp ready to deploy quickly when needed. What he doesn't like is the extra weight and especially the bulk of the snakeskin, and the fact that he can't use something like my folding technique to end up with a much smaller volume. So I got to thinking about these two requirements and the idea came to me very quickly. Today I couldn't wait to do the very simple rigging and hit the woods.
The first step is to set up the tarp as you normally would, getting all the angles set correctly and the ridge- and guylines to preferred tautness.
The basic idea here is to gather the tarp at the end of the hammock instead of along the tarp ridge line, which is the classic snakeskin arrangement. This works with a tarp with a CRL above the tarp. For my tarp, I use prusiks on both ends, and the only modification is to add a small carabiner or clip to one of the prusiks. To pull the tarp back and expose the heavens, all that must be done is to remove the two stakes at the carabiner end, unclip the tarp D-ring from the carabiner and slide the tarp to the other end of the hammock. At that point the gathered panels of the tarp are each wrapped in a spiral of light (1.2mm) shock cord that has a mitten hook on each end, with one shock cord for the right and one for the left.
For rapid deployment of the tarp, simply unwrap the spiral shock cords, pull the biner toward the opposite end of the hammock and clip into the ridge line, place two stakes. I did this today and with absolutely zero practice it took less than a minute, and after doing it 2-3 times I had it down to about 30 seconds.
So, here's a photo of what it looks like in 'retracted position," which, as you can see, has even less visual obstruction than a snakeskin...
nosnakeskin_quickdeploy_tarp_small.jpg
And here's my little video which goes into more detail...
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