Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Montana is an interesting state. Other than our total lack of ocean frontage, you can find pretty much every sort of climatological and environmental element in this state. We got ‘em all…deserts, rain forest, heavy timber, prairie, wind-blasted rock, mountains, valleys, plains, glaciers, tundra, and eveyting else you can imagine. Camouflage is, naturally, a tricky call. I am very taken with the Crye multicam camo pattern…it seems perfect for just about anything in Montana. However, like anything that is new and really cool it is also, for now, fairly expensive…since it was never, as far as I know, adopted officially by any military there arent millions of cheap surplus clothes, gear and tents available in multicam.

What other pattern works well? I’ve been a fan of the flectarn pattern which seems to work pretty well here in my region. (To be fair, simple, basic, unpretentious and dirt cheap OD also works quite well.) The flectarn (also spelled flecktarn and flectar) pattern traces its German roots back a little further than most modenr German military folks would care to admit.Too bad because despite that whole crimes against humanity thing, the Nazi’s had some pretty advanced (for the day) field gear.

Anyway, I like the flectarn pattern and Im also pretty pleased with most W. German military surplus gear so that works out well for me. I was flipping through Sportsmans Guide’s HQ catalog (their military surplus catalog) last week and saw that they had a few goodies I wanted and nothin’ says lovin’ like something from the Bund. First and foremost, there was a package deal of five surplus .308 cleaning kits and five G3 leather slings for a lousy $15. Well…thats a definite buy. I just happen to have a couple PTR-91 HKlones that’ll love having new slings and a few extra cleaning kits.

What caught my after that was these babies. Five flectar shelter halves for $22. This was interesting because I was hoping that the Germans would have thrown political correctness aside in favor of functionality and these would be the zeltbahns. (And zeltbahns are an entirely different post. Those things are probably the most useful and versatile piece of kit you can have. I’d love to have several made of modern materials.)

So..I ordered ‘em up and they arrived today. Man, I love that musty surplus smell. Anyway, turns out the shelter halves are not of the ze;tbahn variety but, I believe, simply knockoffs of the US pattern shelter halves. There are, apparently, some provisions for wearing it as a poncho and that puts it a step ahead of the US shelter half.

So…shelter halves. How the bloody hell do you use them? The internet was not as forthcoming as I would have preferred but perhaps my Google-fu is weak. I did come up with this interesting link to a .pdf that shows pretty clearly how to do what to whom.  The flectarn shelter halves are of the same diamond-ish pattern and should join together in the same way. Thus, the two-halves shelter should look pretty much just like the one in the .pdf. I need to experiment and try setting this thing up.

Why did I get them? A couple reasons. They would make excellent groundcloths and I wanted some sort of camouflage for covering things up in the boonies. If I wanted to stash something in the woods for the short term, maybe ditch my pack for a few hours so I could go fishing or something, hiding it in a well camouflaged pile goes a long way towards keeping it secure. Also, I wanted some flectar-pattern fabric for any future tailoring endeavours. I may take this down to a seamstress in town along with the dimensions and pattern for an orginal zeltbahn and have one made up.

As an aside, the cleaning kits, slings, and shelter halves were in excellent shape and if you feel the need to have such items I can say that the ones I got from SG:HQ were not lacking in any regard. I’ll be experimenting with the shelter halves in one way or another here shortly and if anyting interesting comes up I’ll try to post it.