Allen, I know you understood the significance of my "compromised pitch" comment, but you're right that other folks may not have gotten it. So I'll expand on that.
With any of these tipi style shelters, solid stakes are a key part of the integrity of the pitch. That's why I'm such a fan of the military surplus stakes I keep recommending. They do really well in just about any circumstance. It's also why I really like my GoLite Utopia 2. It is a floorless shelter, but the integrity of the pitch doesn't rely on good staking. I've had that 12 man out in equivalent winds to what we experienced this weekend without any significant problems. In fact, it was rock solid when both a 16 man and 24 man had to get rescued from blowing over at the last CO rondy. The difference was my use of military stakes and 9" groundhog knock offs versus durapegs on the tipis that started to blow over. All tipis by the same maker, but the stakes made the difference. Size probably had a little to do with it too.
In the case of the video, the 12 man was in about the worst staking conditions you could ask for. A couple feet of snow that thawed out and turned to mush on a sunny day. Oh, and hard frozen ground below that you couldn't have driven SSTs into. All of the other shelters were pitched in the shade where the snow never thawed. Wind conditions were the same, as the wind was coming from the opposite direction as shown in the video all night long. When we first pitched the 12 man, it was below freezing and we got a good pitch. A couple folks suggested throwing snow around the outside edge of the tipi to solidify that pitch. That method works well and I've used it a bunch in the past. I vetoed that because this 5 year old tipi is very prone to ripping and I'm tired of patching it. Since it ripped in the wind and I've got to patch it anyway, might as well have gone with the snow edge.
The big mistake was not having a full complement of the 12" military stakes. I had 6 of them along with 4 9" ones, and then a bunch of the 9" groundhog knock offs. As the day wore on and we kept re-staking as the stakes drifted, we ended up with 12" mil, 9" mil, 9" groundhog, 12+" durapeg, and wooden firewood splits. The 12" mil and firewood splits resisted drifting the most. The firewood splits were the best performers because they didn't channel heat into the snow and melt around them, but had good holding power. We probably should have replaced every stake with a firewood split. I should note that the only way that it is possible to use firewood splits or mil stakes on that 12 man is because I replaced all of the stake loops with bigger ones out of webbing instead of edge binding. Deadman snow anchors probably would have performed well, but we weren't set up with a bunch of stuff sacks to implement that.
So, how would the SO 8 man tipis have performed out in the mush? They're smaller, and surface area does matter when it comes to wind load. Something to keep in mind when you're thinking about what size shelter to get. Other than that, they would have been just as susceptible to stake drift as any other shelter.
The fabric in the SOs is a lot thicker and stronger, so I wouldn't have expected a rip even with wind buffeting. In fact, here's an interesting anecdote -- one of the SO 8 man tipis was new out of the bag, but had several cuts in the fabric near the cone. (The damage had to have been inflicted during either packing or shipping, and SO replaced it without complaint). At any rate, when it got put up and those cuts were discovered, I thought to myself "those are going to be a lot bigger come morning". This was before the wind really picked up. To my surprise, they were a little frayed around the edges, but hadn't gotten any bigger despite several hours of wind buffeting. I consider that excellent fabric performance.
If I keep this up, I'll have a review written! At any rate, the video wasn't meant as a compare and contrast. It was meant to show how much wind we were getting and so folks could see how these types of shelters generically behave under wind load. At this point, you can also add how they behave with varying pitch qualities as well. Stake selection is absolutely key to pitch quality, and pitch quality is absolutely key to structural integrity.
