Most peg advice online is written by people who want to sell you pegs. So here is ours, and it starts with the part that costs us money: there is ground where our peg is the wrong tool, and we will tell you which.
This page is short on purpose. Find your ground, read the two lines, go camping.
The whole guide in one line
Soft ground: screw it in. Hard ground: hammer steel.
That is genuinely it. A hard plastic peg has nothing to do against a steel peg in compacted ground — steel is denser, thinner and takes a hammer. We are not going to pretend otherwise, because you would find out on your first trip anyway.
But hardness is not where pegs actually fail. They fail in the soft stuff, where a straight peg has nothing to bite and slides out under load. That is the ground a thread was made for: a screw does not rely on friction along a smooth shaft, it relies on the ground sitting between the threads. The looser the ground, the more that matters.
The quick table
| Ground | What we would use |
|---|---|
| Dry sand, dunes, beach | Screw Peg |
| Wet sand | Screw Peg |
| Grass, meadow, campsite pitch | Screw Peg |
| Loose or turned soil | Screw Peg |
| Forest floor | Screw Peg, mind the roots |
| Ground soaked after rain | Screw Peg |
| Snow | Screw Peg |
| Hard, compacted ground | Steel peg |
| Rocky or stony ground | Steel peg |
Sand
This is the ground that breaks straight pegs, and it is where the difference is easiest to feel. A smooth peg in sand is held by nothing but the sand pressing against its sides, so the first strong gust that shakes the line walks it loose and out. Sand does not grip. It flows.
A thread changes the problem. Instead of holding on by friction, it traps a column of sand between the turns, and pulling the line straight up means dragging that whole column with it. You screw it in by hand until the head sits flush with the surface.
Wet sand behaves the same way and holds better, not worse — it packs tighter between the threads.
Grass and campsite pitches
The ground most people actually camp on, and the one where you never think about your pegs until one bends. Grass sits on topsoil that is usually soft for the first few centimetres and firmer underneath.
Screw it in with the flat of your hand on the head, keep it vertical, and stop when it stops turning easily. If it stops early and hard, you have hit something. Move twenty centimetres and try again rather than forcing it.
Loose soil and forest floor
Forest floor is normally soft — needles, leaf litter, loose topsoil — so the thread has plenty to bite into. The catch is roots. A root will stop the peg dead, and forcing a turn against a root is how you damage any peg, ours included.
The rule is simple: if it will not turn, do not push harder. Move. Twenty centimetres in any direction is usually enough to be past it. On forest floor, expect to move once or twice while pitching. Everyone does.
Ground soaked after rain
Wet ground is soft ground, so yes, screw it in. And this is where taking a tent down normally gets ugly: soaked ground swallows a straight peg, and pulling it out means either yanking on the line, digging with your fingers or leaving the peg behind.
A thread comes back out the same way it went in — you turn it two or three times and it lifts, without the mud fight and without the peg staying in the field.
Snow
Snow is soft ground that has an opinion. A straight peg in snow has almost nothing holding it, which is why they pull loose overnight as the snow settles and the lines slacken. A thread has snow packed between the turns instead, and packed snow is a lot harder to pull through than loose snow.
Two honest limits. In deep, powdery snow, no peg of any kind is really the right tool — that is the situation where people bury an anchor sideways instead, and we are not going to claim ours replaces that. And we have not run a proper winter test season yet, so if deep snow is your normal, sign up further down and we will write to you when we have something real to say.
Hard, compacted or rocky ground
Use steel. Ours is the wrong tool here.
Compacted ground has to be broken into, not threaded, and that means a thin steel pin and a hammer or a rock. A thread has nothing to cut into and you would just be standing there turning. If your ground is baked dry, walked flat by a hundred other tents, or full of stones, a set of steel pegs is what you want, and they cost very little.
We would rather you read this now than find it out on a pitch at nine at night.
What we would actually carry
Both. That is the honest answer for most people.
Keep your steel pegs — they are light, they cost almost nothing, and they are the right tool on hard ground. Add screw pegs for the pitches where steel lets you down: sand, wet ground, snow, anything that has given way on you before.
You are not replacing your kit. You are covering the gap in it.
Two things that apply everywhere
- Keep it vertical. A peg leaning away from the tent looks clever and is not. It reduces how much ground is working for you. Straight down, head flush with the surface.
- Angle the line, not the peg. The line should pull down and away at a steady angle. If the line pulls almost straight up, no peg on earth will save you.