>all we really had to do was move a couple of tents

Uh... No shit? How did it get to an hour of such a laborious effort without anyone suggesting the obvious solution? I assumed there was some reason why you absolutely had to camp at that precise location.

We can get stuck in our minds and lean too much on prior skills instead of fully assessing the problem at hand. More likely than not, given he was a contractor, building a trench and walls seemed like a simple solution to something he has probably dealt with many time and didn't think twice about it.