Any tent I've ever seen new had an opening for the stovepipe already installed. You're putting in your own?
Cautionary tale about flies. Stay away from the tarps! We had a tarp on an old forestry tent we picked up The tent was as thin and as dry as toilet paper to begin with, so we tarped it. It caught fire one night at around 2AM. My buddy had been laying awake for a few minutes after stoking the fire and he saw it catch. He yelled "Boys, we've got a fire!" and you've never seen a bunch of sorry assed middle age guys move so fast. The tarp was dripping like napalm onto the nice dry tent fabric in seconds. We bailed and I started trying to cut the tarp off while my other three buddies were throwing water and snow onto the tarp to put it out. I got three guy lines cut before the fire flashed across the ridgepole, burned through the ropes holing it up and dropped the whole flaming mass on our gear.
We were three hours in the bush by ATV and another hour by truck to anywhere so we started trying to salvage gear and guns. I sleep with my clothes under my sleeping bag as a pillow, so I scooped up my flamming cot and threw it into a clearing. That's when the real fun began. I had a box of 22 shells in my jacket and they started going off like fire crackers. A couple of magazines with 308 shells exploded, and the white gas lantern we had to give us light as we settled into bed ballooned up like a basketball and started spewing jets of flame from it's seams like a V2 rocket. It was like fireworks on Canada Day. One buddy got some small but nasty 3rd degree burns retrieving gear and another got shot in the gut by a 308 round. Being loose in a magazine, it's energy wasn't expended in one direction so he only suffered a nasty red welt. The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes.
I had extra gear in my ATV box to share with the guys, we had some camp shoes that had been laying around, and a couple of left boots, and we sat around the campfire in sleeping bags that looked like burnt Swiss cheese. I had a down vest that had a hole the size of Texas in the back and every time I took a step I puffed feathers out the back of my jacket like a snow blower.
And we still had to go get the moose we had put down just before dark in a difficult ravine. The next day was one of the longest I remember.
We didn't have the walls pegged down in our tent so it was easy to get out wherevere you wanted to; you just had to lift the wall. Don't know what it would have been like if we all had to go out the front. Our new tent still has the stovepipe going out the roof, and it's moved up beside the door, despite past experiences, because it really is a pain to lug firewood to the back of the tent. That's where I'd put it again. Just stay away from the tarps.
