Murray Toft described the benefits of a Zdarsky tent in an Alpine Club of Canada newsletter in the winter of 1994. His article was reprinted in Playing It Safe, a book of selected papers published by the ACC in 1998.

A Zdarsky tent is a European bivi sack design that has been around since the 1930s or earlier. This design is better than a mummy-style bivi sack for many uses. You can get under it without taking off your boots, or even your crampons, since it has no floor. Three people can sit under a Zdarsky tent, sharing warmth. You can even cook under it in a pinch. The loops at the top corners of the tent can be clipped to the tips of skis driven into the snow, anchors on a rock climb, or whatever else you can think of.

Since the tent is designed for a person sitting upright, it's best for day use or as an emergency overnight shelter. The tent is especially good as a quick shelter on the go, for example to wait out a rain squall or to rest and stay warm during a cold winter lunch stop. Since the fabric is waterproof, it gets clammy after a while. But with more than one person it can be quite warm. When made from lightweight silicone nylon, a Zdarsky tent weighs just 12 ounces (340 grams) and packs the size of a one-liter bottle. (I've also made an uncoated version, which is even lighter.)

To make the tent, get a rectangular piece of coated fabric about 10ft by 5ft (3m by 1.5m). Fold it in half so that each half is about 5ft by 5ft. Get a piece of fabric about 5ft by 1.5ft and cut it in half along the diagonal so you end up with two triangular shaped pieces.

This sil-nylon Zdarsky tent weighs 12oz and packs the size of a half-liter bottle.

For the two apexes, get some webbing loops a few inches long. (Rock climbers may want to use 1-foot quickdraws for this.) Sew the triangular end pieces onto the tent roof, sewing the webbing loops into the corners. (If you use a quickdraw, sew it through the apex so that you can clip into it from either the inside or outside of the tent.)

Sew a pair of tunnel vents on one side of the tent about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way down from the top and in from the ends. The finished tent looks like the diagram shown above. The tent has no floor.