Mythbusting: should tent pegs really go in at an angle?

When camping somewhere windy, it’s very important to ensure your tent is . We all know this. But what does “properly” actually mean? Should go into the ground at a 45° angle? Or are you better off driving them straight into the soil? In this article, we take a deep dive into proper peg etiquette to answer a burning question that’s been keeping the world awake at night: what’s the best way to stake out pegs? How many times have you pushed your pegs in at an angle when staking out a tent in calm conditions? Irrespective of the ground, the peg or the weather, it just feels like the right thing to do.

If your is pulling at the peg at, say, a 45° angle, then surely offsetting those forces by putting the peg into the ground at the equivalent 45° angle is the way to maximise strength. After all, Isaac Newton’s third law of motion tells us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And even before he had his apple-flavored revelation, campers all over the world had long since being following their gut and driving pegs into the ground at an angle.

But are they right to do so? When you push or pull something, the same effect occurs in the opposite direction. That’s to say that if Object A were to exert a force on Object B, Object B must exert a force of equal magnitude back onto Object A. Got it? “If you put a tent peg in dead straight.

.. your guy line will pull it out quite happily,” says , the developer of .

“Guy lines run at about 30°, an.