Titanium Tent Stakes
Light Duty Skewers

Titan Mountain Sports
A Division of Simon Metals Company

Purchased in 2001
Review Written September 17, 2002

Reviewer
Helen Hillberg
Email: hhloth at msn.com
Gender: Female
Age: 56
Height: 5'5" (1.65 m)
Weight: 115 pounds (52 kg)
Region: Auburn, CA

Reviewer Experience:  My backpacking style could be classified as lightweight, but not minimalist. I am on a constant quest to lighten my backpacking load while not giving up on every little luxury such as carrying tent stakes.

Review:  I purchased ten of the Light Duty Skewers AKA UltraLite Titanium Stakes for use with my Integral Designs SilShelter.  The ten stakes weigh 2.4 oz. (.235 oz. per stake) as compared to 3.4 oz for my motley collection of ten aluminum stakes and 6 oz. for the same number of heavy-duty steel skewers.  The current MSRP is $2.99 per stake, or six with a storage pouch for $17.95.

Obviously there is not much in the weight-saving department between the aluminum and the titanium stakes but I hoped for better performance and an ounce saved is big in my eyes.  I'm willing to pay an additional $20.00 for each ounce saved without any qualms but I have to admit that I felt a little silly paying $30.00 for tent stakes when I already had about 30 assorted stakes at home.  My other consideration was cutting down on the bulk of my pack-along-gear since it has to fit in a small backpack to allow for even greater weight savings.  The bundle of ten titanium stakes is less than half the circumference of a like bundle of aluminum stakes.

The stakes are simple 6in-long, slender, smooth pokers with a shepherd's crook at one end and cut at a 45-degree angle on the business end.  It is impossible for me to bend the light duty stakes using my hands but they perform pretty much the same as my aluminum stakes as far as resistance to bending when I don't use a rock to tap them home.  They bend less easily but will bend if I attempt to drive them in by standing on them, a major disappointment since I understood titanium to be a material that is very hard to bend but with a lot of flex.  They penetrate hard ground more easily than my aluminum stakes, partly because they are so thin, at less than half the diameter of my aluminum stakes, and partly because they are very slick and quite sharp.  The shepherd's crook is easy to grip and makes the stakes very easy to remove.

The stakes do not perform well in soft dirt, snow or sand.  The very fact that they are so easy to pound home and to remove means that they will pull out under tension if the ground is not firm.  They are also virtually invisible when lying around on the ground.  Rather than rely on eyeballing the campsite for missing stakes I do a careful stake count each time I break camp.  The stakes are really quite sharp and need to be wrapped in something to keep them from damaging my other gear.

Am I disappointed with my purchase?  No, I am happy with the stakes and would purchase them again.  I do the vast majority of my summer camping in the mountains where soft dirt and sand is in short supply.  I use a freestanding tent for winter and tie it off to the nearest rock or tree, or simply bury the guy lines, in high wind situations so I don't carry stakes at all.

I am happy to report that after almost a year's worth of use I still have ten stakes and that only one of them is slightly bent.  Across the same period of time my lightweight, aluminum stakes would have looked like pretzels.

Addendum added in January 2004:  I have an additional 1,000 miles or so of trail hiking behind me and I'm happy to report I still have ten stakes.  The majority of them now have some sort of bend or another, as can be seen in the photo below, but nothing that interferes with their utility.  The part of the shepherd's crook that is the point of impact for rocks used to drive the stakes home in hard ground is now scratched and somewhat rough, which is only to be expected.