Barbara Beckwith

Winter in New England used to drive me indoors every year. I would shrink from the cold, huddling under layers of wool, dashing from heated house to heated car to heated workplace, dreading the daily weather forecast. Winter seemed to chill my soul. Finally, I got fed up.

Move to Florida, I told myself, or learn to love winter. I made up my mind to embrace the cold and decided to take up winter camping.

I learned how to winter camp the hard way – by doing it all wrong. I survived my mistakes, but don’t recommend my method.

As a levelheaded woman in my forties, I didn’t leap into winter camping without looking. I quizzed my friend Bert, an expert outdoorsman. Bert’s not the gabby type: he had all the answers, but I had to ask first. The trouble was: I asked only half the question whose answers turned out to be crucial to the survival of me and my fellow campers.

Clothes I knew about: wear wool (it stays warm when wet), dress in layers, avoid strenuous exercise that causes sweating, change socks at night, use cotton gloves instead of bare hands when touching metal. Bert told me that if my feet got cold, I should put on my hat (body heat escapes head first) and gave me tips on spotting and treating hypothermia (the core body temperature drops too low) and frostbite (the freezing of body extremities).
During a practice sleep-out near a warm cabin, I thought I’d be smart and place dry bark on top of the snow before starting my fire. The bark burned, the snow underneath melted, and my fire sank into a foot-deep hole. Now I knew to use wet wood as a non-combustible platform on which to build my fire.

Feeling like an expert after my research and trial night out, I invited my son and two friends to the Adirondacks in upstate New York. I told them I would show them how to camp in the snow.

They were impressed by my instructions. I told them to tie straps on every zipper (for easy handling with gloves), to leave alcohol at home (it warms cheeks but takes heat from the body’s core) and avoid tight clothes like jeans. Air pockets between loose layers, I said sagely, are the best kind of insulation. Each of us should carry a canteen and drink from it regularly, I told them, because cold air dehydrates you even when you don’t feel thirsty.
I thought I knew it all.

We arrived at the start of the trail behind schedule because we had dawdled. That was a big mistake — it was midafternoon and already the shadows were lengthening. We had five miles to ski to reach Campsite One by dark.

It felt cold. The ranger we’d signed in with, as Bert had advised, told us the temperature was 20 below and falling. I was startled — the temperature had been 20 degrees above on my trial camping night. We hadn’t thought to call ahead for the forecast.

We should have headed home right then. Instead, too excited to change our plans, we unpacked our gear. That’s when I found out why equipment checks are dull but absolute necessities. We discovered we were missing one pair of skis. No problem, I thought. I had brought along snowshoes “for fun,” and one person could use them instead of skis.

A mile down the trail, it was no fun anymore. None of us had experience using snowshoes or skiis in four feet of snow with packs on our backs. We soon tired and found ourselves in danger of working up a chilling sweat. I ordered everyone to shed layers and drink water, but we found our canteens had iced up solid. I hadn’t thought to ask Bert how to keep water in a liquid state in sub-freezing weather. He would have told me to carry out canteens inside our jackets where our body heat would keep them warm. Instead, to keep them handy, we’d hung them on the outside of our packs, where they promptly froze.

We were forced to resort to sucking moisture form snow. At least I knew not to eat the snow, which would have chilled us too much.

Three miles later, the sky clouded up and snow began to fall. The route we knew so well from summer trips now looked unfamiliar. Familiar landmarks were buried deep in drifts. We were about to take a turn when we spotted a Campsite One marker half-buried in snow pointing the opposite way.

We never did reach Campsite One. Dusk arrived suddenly — night falls earlier the farther north you go and we were caught unaware. Then one of us lost a snowshoe binding in the snowdrifts. So we camped in a nearby dell where at least we’d be out of the gusting wind. We’d have to make do without the lean-to we’d been counting on.

We would have to set up camp and cook by flashlight. But I kept my cool and showed everyone how to pack down squares off snow with our snowshoes to make “platforms” for our tents. Not until that moment did I think of another question I should have asked Bert: how do you stake down a tent in four foot deep snow? Bert would have said: “Easy. Bury your snowshoes or a log deep in packed snow with ropes sticking out to attach to your tentlines.”

Instead, we tried using a pair of skis as stakes. The tent collapsed after 10 minutes of use. All four of would have to sleep in the remaining freestanding tent.

Dinner was a fresh disaster. We rubbed the sides of our gas stove for half an hour to heat it up, but the pressure still wasn’t high enough to drive the fuel up the wick so we could light it. We cleaned it — with cotton gloves — and tried again. Still no fuel. Assumingg the stove was broken (we had neglected to test it before the trip), we gave up and munched cold, dry gorp instead of the hot dinner we had planned. Later, I found out that the cold lowers the air pressure and our stove would have started eventually had we persisted. Or we could have bought a pump to increase the air pressure in the stove.

No hot dinner and no water except chilling moisture sucked from snow. We did feel cozy, however, packed tight in one small tent. And just before we bedded down, the sky cleared to reveal a mass of stars glittering in the black sky. The sight stunned us. My son was enchanted. But all I thought of was Bert’s warning that clouds hold warm air in while clear skies mean colder air. The next day we learned that it reached 28 degrees below zero that night.

By now I knew I had asked Bert for only half the information that we needed to be comfortable and safe. The unasked questions were doing us in.

The next morning we woke to snow falling on our faces. Could it be snowing inside out tent? Then we saw that our breath and body moisture had condensed on the tent ceiling and were falling on us each time someone joggled the tent. The edges of our down sleeping bags pressed against the tent were frozen solid from the same condensation. Had I asked, Bert would have advised me to bring fiberfill sleeping bags. Down, when wet, flattens out and loses almost all of its insulating value. Or I could have hung a “frostliner” on the inside of the tent to catch the frost.

Our disasters were wearing us down. We finally got the stove going after rubbing it desperately for 40 minutes, and were able to fortify ourselves with hot food and drinks. But when one of us complained of cold feet (she wore boots too snug for more than one pair of wool socks), it was the last straw. We packed up and headed back to the car — our smartest move of the trip, as Bert would have agreed.

I’ve learned how to camp in the snow — the hard way.

[Versions of this article were published in Adirondack Life, Backpackers Footnotes, and the Middlesex News]