Sleeping bag and tarp are going to go with you anyways. Same fabric as 1 person tent, no poles.
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I’ve got a friend who did many a trips through Asian jungles. Worked in Sumatra, went to Borneo, Papua and so on. She bought a Hennessy hammock for a ridiculous price, and said it was just the best decision. Not only no broken poles, but also no problems of finding a level spot without too many roots. One one particular trip, a small creek became a stream and would have washed away any tent.
However, she’s in Switzerland now. Wild camping is only legal in most cantons above 2000m. There’s a certain lack of trees in a certain height which makes hammocks difficult to use…
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Fair enough, my mental model was “just a hammock” it sounds like apples to apples is more like this
tent: ground cover + tent + rain fly + pad + sleeping bag
hammock: under-quilt + hammock + rain fly + sleeping bag
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I think you’d only need an underquilt if if there was a breeze cool enough to get through the compressed insulation of the bottom of your sleeping bag. It couldn’t be worse than in a tent without a ground pad.
Just to keep the rain off, a tarp wouldn’t have to be as heavy as a ground tarp.
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Hammock vs. tent is the Mac vs. PC of the backpacking world. You can find a slew of backpacking forum posts debating price, comfort, versatility, and (mostly) weight. I’m a tent guy, mostly because I like to shift around when I sleep,
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Funny you mention wild camping. I have thought that a hammock with canopy would be perfect for this!
Alas I suspect it is a similar problem as you are getting at. The best wild camping in the US Midwest is on uninhabited islands in the Great Lakes. Unfortunately, said lakes never get all that warm, so during the day you might hit high 80’s, but it reliably drops at night to low 60’s or high 50’s. Same problem near shore.
Some of the Ren Faires we worked at had vendors selling these. They are as comfortable as they look, and they are made by hand (used to be Boulder, now in Minnesota.)
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I would not call that “Done Right.” Even as green as that moss is, that’s a stupid place to have a campfire.
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Wonderful for reading an afternoon away, or sleeping on a hot night, is there anything else to “hammy-culture?” Yes. The gentle sway of the hammock. I’m not a baby, I am a grown ass man but please rock me to sleep in the backcountry. No roots, no rocks, no uneven ground. I made the switch years ago and the only time I take a tent backpacking is above treeline.
Forget the moss, embers can burn your gear.
I was more worried about burning down the forest. The greenness of the moss was just a proxy for how damp the forest is.
Careful now. Hammocks are the gateway drug towards recliners.
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You should have a look at hammock videos on YT. Plenty of them show off well below freezing point. The brand I mentioned has double-layer bottom models, and insulation can go in there.
Re: wild camping, sadly it’s illegal through most parts of continental Europe. OTH, given the observable stupidity of our fellow human beings, that might be for the greater good… Especially at the moment, with the risk of wildfires in many parts of Europe at a very high level.
sighs
I just got a project mail reminding everyone that at the current risk level, none of our field workers is allowed to drive on forest paths. Someone did just that. Professional field workers, biologists, no less.
Google hammock sex.
Those dirty dirty Mayans.
I’ve been camping with hammocks for about 40 years. I won’t use anything but the Yucatan string hammocks, where you can get the proper angled across the hammock position that most cloth hammocks won’t allow, despite them being a bit heavier. And yes, a tarp strung above is a necessary part of the kit. The cooling effect of having your body suspended in air and the squish factor on the bottom is significant, especially compared with a tent/pad. You need a bit more (synthetic) insulated bag for a given temperature than you do with tent camping. An under quilt is just more gear that I wouldn’t consider carrying.
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