camp in your backyard to learn winter skills

Hi All

this may seem lame but if you want to learn about winter camping and gear, start in your backyard and be sure you can get back into the house.

I have my wife's big old 8x8 30 pound tent set up in the front yard to hold her yard sale stuff. I also have a 3" thick full length piece of open celled foam from a futon. If I wanted to test a gear concept I'd go out there, sleep on the foam, and practice it in a safe place. Once yer in yer tent, it matters not where it is. First you need a warm sleeping bag or what ever. I personally would never take a quilt camping since I do have top end gear, BUT when I first started winter mountain camping, I used TNF bluekazoo which is overoptimistically rated at 20 degrees. I decided to wear my long underwear under my snow mobile suit inside the kazoo. It was cold and my hands froze because they weren't in the warm inside of the suit (after that I started carrying a spare 4 ounce pair of "hot hands" fleece gloves that are restricted to sleeping only.

You might try a summer bag with a quilt from home and test things out. Need a pillow? Try a balaclava - I have one right next to my sleeping gloves to wear in my bag. Don't worry about what anybody says or that it sounds lame, just take all this stuff into the tent and test it for yourself. You will learn that having you head inside a properly adjusted mummy bag hood will make you WAY WARMEWR. Never sleep with arms head or any part of your body out of your bag. Do not use a hoodless bag nor a square bag. The tighter the bag encloses you, the warmer you will be. Tucking extra bag under you will make it warmer. A cord tied loosely around the outside of the bag above your knees will make the bag warm enough to make up for a slight compression of a few feathers under the cord. You will be warmer draping your coat over you, either inside or outside the bag, depending on the amount of space available. Filling the extra space in your bag with a "warm material" will lessen its volume and make you warmer.

About the effects of clothes in a sleeping bag:
Insulated pants means your legs cannot warm each other. wearing your coat means the heat doesn't warm your hands or the rest of you inside the bag. Booties means cold feet as your feet cannot warm each other. Naked means if you turn you touch cold nylon to your skin - BBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. Even socks can make your feet cold, which is counter intuitive, and its important to understand IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, THE CORRECT THING WILL SEEM COUNTER INTUITIVE. I call this "living room camping logic" and its the reason you buy useless junk that seems so cool until you take it camping. (see a thread on useless gear)

Imagine a big sock that encloses BOTH feet. Doesn't it seem that it would be the warmest choice? Then one big two footed bootee? A well made mummy bag has a small overstuffed foot sack built in. I almost never wear anything on my feet in my winter bag cause its warmer, its the one case where naked is best.

Forget silk and thin underwear. Wear medium or heavy long underwear of wicking material, by a reputable manufacturer, it will be the layer against your skin and will ultimately determine how comfortable and warm you be. Wear your long underwear and maybe a light breathable fleece jacket that lets out your perspiration and body heat to help warm the inside of your bag.

Winter camping IS NOT for claustrophobic people. My buddy had a -5 bag and always froze in it at 10 above because he refused to have his arms or head inside it.

Jim - Have fun. Oh yes - one more word - chocolate....

Very good advice. I pushed a 35 degree quilt to 26 degrees recently on my patio. Yep, wife almost locked me out because she did not notice me in my hammock.



I love quilts.



I also have a pair of sleep only gloves. A fleece hoodie keeps my hat in place and the tunnel pocket is the perfect place to store the gloves. No more hunting for lost gloves.



If you can keep your hands, feet and head warm then the temperature rating on bags starts to make sense.



Spot on.

While Jim Shaw and I do not use the same gear and technique his advice is a good starting point to discover what works for you. The best advice is testing gear iin a safe place. It is not fun and can be dangerous to discover that your gear does not work for you when you are cold and wet in the middle of the night and hours from the trailhead.

I very much agree--all gear should be tested in the back yard (or on a car-camping trip if you don't have a back yard). This is especially important for beginners, to learn not only how to use their gear but to practice equally important outdoor skills (such as body temperature regulation, keeping dry, water treatment, fire building [where legal], cooking, etc.).

Sometimes this is hard to do if you live in a mild climate where it doesn't freeze very much, like the coastal regions of the far west. Winter tests where I live involve mostly wind and rain rather than snow or below-freezing temperatures, although even these are valid tests. But at least in the back yard you can practice with the new tent (so you can pitch it in high wind, pouring rain, in the dark, without the directions), try out the new sleeping pad, practice setting up and breaking down camp so you can do it faster (my perpetual problem), practice cooking in inclement weather.

The next step after back-yard camping is car-camping. Of course if you're an apartment dweller with no back yard, car-camping is what you start with! If you live in a mild climate, car-camping in colder areas (mountains?) is the only way you can learn to cope with cold weather. With the car close by, if you mess up, you can retreat to your car and turn on the heater, or just pack up and go home.

Just remember to do this testing during bad weather, not just on warm sunny days and clear nights. No matter how closely you watch weather forecasts (which aren't always that reliable!), you need to be able to cope with the inevitable nasty stuff--again, doing your learning in a place where you can safely bail out!

I've found that the shower is a great place to test rain gear. If there are any leaks, you'll know in 20 minutes! It's also a good idea to use a hose (again for 20 minutes) after you've seam-sealed your shelter. It's much easier to find and fix that 1/4 inch space you skipped while at home instead of in a Rocky Mountain cloudburst 15 miles from the trailhead, when the skipped spot turns out to be directly over your sleeping bag!

No matter how expert you are, be sure to test out all new gear before you've left the trailhead, preferably under conditions in which you can keep it new and clean and therefore returnable. The money/comfort/even life you save may be your own!

This is such good advice. Camp in the rain. Or build a quinzee or igloo. Then when it all goes bad, go inside your home and take notes.

Better off well practiced and safe!!

Here's a good example. It is very rare that it snows here in the desert SW, at least here in my town, and we actually got a snow storm last night. I put up my tent, that I thought Id be able to use in winter since it has pretty steep side walls, and well this is a picture of it this morning. I guess Id have to wake up and shake the poles every so often.


Its a Eureka Zeus 3 that I use when I take the kids/family. I think the side flaps caught to much snow even though I didn't stake them out like I would on a summer day.

Not lame at all, Jim! I've always recommended testing outdoor skills in the back yard, especially survival skills. Things like emergency fire building take on a whole new slant when there is cold wind/rain/snow involved. Its always nice to have a warm home just a few steps away in the event your ideas or equipment fail to measure up. I spent many nights in the back yard perfecting hammock camping when things like Hennessey's weren't available. Good post!

Cesar its not just the sloped sides, its the single pole.

You can knock a lot of snow off from inside and press the snow outwards if you wake up often enough.

My buddy always got up and shoveled the snow from around his tent, sometimes several times in the night. Since he had a three hoop winter tent I thought he was being way too careful. Shoveling can damage the tent.

There are two alternatives to shoveling:
1) is to ignore it if you have a strong winter dome like my TNF mtn24. I shared it with a friend in a blizzard and there was a 3 foot high snow drift on top of it in the morning, but the dome shape - refer to the Roman arches supporting aqueducts - seemed to carry the weight around the tent and the outer tent was not pressed tightly against the inner tent, at least not enough to affect condensation as we were completely dry inside in the morning.
2) is to put your back against one wall and press the other wall outward with your feet, while remaining inside your sleeping bag. By pressing the snow outwards you effectively build a snow cave/wall around your tent which may help prevent the build up of deep loose snow that can collapse your tent. I've done this in my bibler and though the tent was completely buried, it stopped collapsing inward after about the third time I pushed it out.

A tent covered with snow is a lot quieter and offers a better nights sleep than one that flaps. This may be the best reason to carry a three to four pole tent, especially a dome.
Jim

Dryer
Hennessy has always made winter camping more fun.
Jim YMMV

The sad thing is that tent has two poles
Its supposed to look like this but the poles rotated in so it looks like a single pole in the middle. Got home late and had to go to work early that morning so didn't sleep in it. Ill try that next time and not stake the flaps on the side at all. Would like to try it out a few times before committing to a winter tent to use in the forests of southern NM.