sleeping in the snow

on our newfound affection for winter camping

Winter’s dress is a different type of blue than that of summer’s. Reflected against the glittering snow, her soft pale blue is enough. Summer’s blue frock is saturated and absorbing. What choice does she have when dancing with the verdant greens of exploding life? She’s gotta’ do something to stand out. I like them both in their own unique expression, each as beautiful as the other - just different. Like our children who come into our lives already their own unique beings with their own unique talents and personalities, the seasons hold for us opportunities to discover things within ourselves that may just lie dormant otherwise.

These were the things my husband, Troy, and I were thinking about last winter when we decided to try out winter camping for ourselves. We could have just continued to enjoy winter as we do by the usual snowshoeing, hiking, skating, skiing, and lying in the snow and watching the ravens overhead. We could stick to our routines of stripping down and go for semi-naked walks to challenge our bodies with cold, exposing them to whatever sunlight was on offer. We could keep on doing the tasks that need to be done, working outside, chopping wood and caring for our animals. We could have called it good, but we wanted more. Those things felt mastered and we wanted to be challenged. Who and what was waiting for us in those unknown frozen places? Those deeper places in the forest, inaccessible in the thick of summer, but open in their snow-frosted, skeletal form.

I love my home. I especially love my home in winter when wood fires heat us and everything is thick with furs and sheepskin and wool. It’s a time of year, with the rush of spring, summer, and fall harvest completed, that arrives as a guilt-free indulgence. I have earned my rest. That remains true, but the sweetness of that rest tends to wane over the months. Come spring, it’s not unusual for many of us to be crawling out of our skin in anticipation of getting out there, getting back to work. Too much ease makes the muscles itch. Too much rest, too many walls, too much comfort softens us like the limp, furry carrots in the root cellar.

For over a year I’ve been trying to finish a book I had started writing a couple of years ago. I had become frustrated with my dribbled attempts at getting things together and finally completing it. I needed some saturated time to just get it done. The whole fascination with winter camping folded nicely into my decision that this would be the time to finish that writing once and for all. We could head out on an adventure into the frozen tundra AND I could use that quiet, secluded time to just write. It seemed a reasonable way to welcome some adventure and peace into our winter days.

So, how does one winter camp? With proper preparation. The last thing we wanted to do was get out there in our tent and be miserable. That wasn’t part of the plan. So we did what any great adventurer does when heading out to conquest terra incognita - we watched YouTube videos. Both of us have military experience which means, in Canada, winter exercises sleeping and training in various frozen, barren landscapes. There’s whole units and battalions to spread the equipment over. There’s logistical supplies and fuel. It’s about stressing the soldier, building resilience, pushing past discomfort. Some of that would come in handy, but that’s not what we were after. We wanted to live in the beauty of winter, not the torment.

Years ago, Troy lead a sovereignty exercise with Canada’s Inuit Rangers in the Arctic. One of the great moments of his life was a successful muskox hunt he participated in with the traditional peoples of that icy land. But the biggest thing he took away, next to the relationships with the people that he developed, was how our high-tech military gear paled in comparison to their furs and skins and their own adaption to their environment. In fact, seeing the soldiers miserable with frozen fingers and toes, the Inuit offered up their gloves to them and just went bare handed. Now, that’s cold adapted!

I don’t know who’s cuter - frozen, young Troy or that polar bear.

While I’m on the cold adapted part, I should mention that this was also something we were after. It was a few years ago now that I was first introduced to cold adaptation as a tool to better health, both metabolic, physical health and mental and spiritual wellbeing. When I was sick for those many years, cold was absolutely painful to me. I did all I could to avoid it. That was a mistake. I was on medication for my thyroid at one time and my freezing fingers and toes could just never get warm. It’s an altogether unpleasant way to live - always feeling the bite in the air in a most uncomfortable way. I remember going to a friend’s timber framed home in winter. She still lives using an outhouse and heating her home with only one old, leaky cookstove. Sometimes you can even see your breath in her house. I would bring wool socks and layers of sweaters and still I was painfully cold while she moved about nonplussed. I would have to come home and soak in a steaming tub to melt my bones after every visit. But you know what? She is lean and healthy and vibrant well into her sixties. That’s not the only reason why, but I know it’s part of it.

It’s since learning about cold adaptation and implementing the principles of cold exposure in my own life that my health improved dramatically. I really just don’t get sick, not even in winter, but best of all is that my body isn’t cold in the way it used to be. My body truly has adapted and now my temperature runs warm. I sleep with the window open even in winter. I take off my down parka and my shirt when I walk in the freezing winter temperatures. I cold plunge and put the shower on cold for as long as I can stand it. I go from the heat of our wood fired hot tub or sauna to rolling in the snow. All of these things felt impossible before, but because I did them anyway, I’m now undaunted by the cold. I actually, and truly enjoy being outside in the winter now.

So, with the cold beast tamed, we decided that being outdoors, especially in a winter’s night, was something we wanted to experience together. After watching some videos of other intrepid Canadian and Alaskan winter tenting enthusiasts, we started building our supplies. A winter tent is, obviously, a must. We went with a heavy duty cotton one over the plastic types for, hopefully, obvious reasons. Our tent was made here in Canada and so was the wood stove that we bought with it. The stove has a chimney that sticks out of a fire-proofed hole in the tent and collapses into itself. That part was easy. The trick was in the bedding.

Have you looked at camping stuff lately? Everything is plastic upon plastic layered with plastic. The clothes, the boots, the tents and liners and sleeping bags. One of the other reasons we wanted to camp was so that we could ground, picking up all of those healing, life-giving electrons from the earth. Having sheets of plastic under us and around us would prevent that grounding. That problem had no answers on those camping videos because nobody seemed to see it as a problem. Either their ignorance or my neurosis. We’ll go with they just don’t know. So, we had to figure out a lot of stuff on our own. We decided that the wisest thing to do would be to camp on our own land while we worked out the chinks in our setup. That way, should we start to freeze our buns off, we could simply bundle up and walk back to the warmth and comfort of our home. I knew we wouldn’t do that because we’re both pretty stubborn, but it was always an option.

When we had our equipment squared away, including the sleds to pull everything we needed, we headed out on a crisp sunny day to find our first locale. We ended up choosing a lovely little clearing, smack dab in the middle of a gathering of large, old pines. They seemed most welcoming and so we started figuring out how to erect a heavy canvas tent in snow and ice. Mistakes were made, but good humor prevailed. It’s connecting to take on challenges together as a couple. This is especially true when something is new and requires you both to pull on old experiences and creative brainstorming. It forces you to come together, each with your own strengths, to make something happen. Yes, we both had those military experiences, but to be honest, it wasn’t all that useful.

Once the tent was set up, we got down to the business of setting up our beds inside. There’s some considerations in a winter tent that are absent in summer. The big one is the crackling wood stove that is all that stands between warm-blooded-you and icicle-you. That baby has got to keep on roaring throughout the night. We made the mistake of sleeping side by side the first night. Troy was too close to the wall of the tent which was coated in ice on the outside. I was too close to the fire, melting my face while my back was icy cold. Not a pleasant sensation. I spent the night rolling from side to side to warm whatever side was freezing. We woke up every few hours to add more wood to the fire. There’s no getting around that.

The next night, now a little wiser, we slept in an L configuration. We also rejigged our “beds”. Because we didn’t want to sleep on plastic, we were a bit perplexed by how to both ground to the earth and keep ourselves dry. Snow, obviously, melts as the heat of our body lies on it. It doesn’t melt into a pool of water, it just condenses and hardens into a rock-hard ice bed. We went through a few different configurations of how to deal with this situation. We tried using wood shavings as a base layer. It was okay but cumbersome and not something we could haul into parks and wilderness locales as we branch out from our experimental on-farm camping. We tried just heavy wool blankets as a base. No good, got wet and cold. We tried furs, both rabbit and reindeer. That was by far the best option. In the end, a hybrid of furs and waxed/oiled canvas as a ground sheet is what we’ve settled on. I plan on oiling meters of organic canvas this summer to have it ready for next year. We’ll be tanning our rabbit furs and making rolls with them which is what we decided we liked best. Lightweight and very warm.

Clothing, of course, is paramount in the cold. There’s endless synthetics out there, but that’s not me. I find wool and down infinitely warmer. I have an old down-filled military parka that I pull out when it’s below -35, but I found my wool jacket plenty warm with the layers of wool beneath it. We both wore wool long-johns under further layers of wool clothing. We wore our Stenger mukluks which kept our feet very, very warm, but we’ll likely switch those out next year for something with a little more traction and support. When the snow is soft, the mukluks work well, but when it’s frozen and hard, the strain on ankles from the constant twisting gets tiresome. Still working on a solution for that given the weight of the loads we’re carrying and pulling and the distance we’re travelling. Our hats and scarves are also made of wool and our gloves are filled with down instead of polyester fibre. We had absolutely no issues with being cold. In fact, we peeled off layers as we hiked in. 

The dark shadowy figure is Troy pulling our equipment to new ground with me following in hot pursuit, stopping for the obvious necessity of admiring that wondrous winter moon.

We also practiced setting up and tearing down our tent by moving locations. Other factors that we came to learn about included: the necessity of bringing in and then finding dry firewood, having a good water source (melting snow is really not very efficient), drying wet clothes, using candle lanterns vs. a kerosene lantern, card games and reading are most suitable to winter camping, my freeze dryer is a modern miracle invention that kept us marvelling at our meals of gourmet stews, omelettes, etc.. and sleep comes early in the dark and the cold. 

So, what was it like? It was even more beautiful than I imagined. I’ve long written of the sweetness of life being more pronounced through the toil of earning it. Our culture sells us on indulgence after indulgence, skipping the parts of working for those pleasures. It’s a corruption of how we deeply and meaningfully experience reward. In summer camping, I suppose you have the work of popping a tent open and keeping the bugs off you, but in winter camping, the work is saturated and amplified. There’s an element of danger and a feeling of deep connection that’s missing in the comfort of summer. The first night we slept in our tent, the coyotes came near and howled in the dark. We felt like the only two people in the whole wide world, cozy in our glowing tent, listening to our coyote lullaby. 

The nights were always like that. Sometimes, when the air pressure was just right, a far away train’s horn blast found its way into our tent and I wondered who the person was pulling on that cord. Did he know, as he barrelled down those tracks at lightening speed, that there were people lying still inside the arms of pines listening to the calls from his metal machine? Did he wonder who was out there? The machine came and left, but the barred owls remained, reclaiming their rightful rule over the night. As they always will.

And then there were the stars. Oh, those glowing winter stars! They’re only surpassed by the moon. Our whole darkened world illuminated by that winter moon. My lover’s face silhouetted in silver by the kiss of a far away planet. That alone is worth trudging through knee-deep snow.

Life, still so much life in the cold. Even some intrepid little rodents came around to see if we might spare a crumb or two. 

So, yes, we will return to winter camping. It’s now a part of us and what we do. Another layer to add to the life-cake we continue, and hope to always continue, to build together. It’s a good challenge, a good way to come together and problem solve and work with and enjoy each other. We’ve added some more equipment, like sleds and a “whiskey jack” that will make our experience even richer as we discover new areas to visit. In the summer, many places here are inaccessible because of the density of the bush and the concentration of the bugs. We live in an enormous province and the northerly areas are barely touched. We want to touch them.

In the mornings, still lit with only moonlight, we roused. Heading outside of the tent for a pee is a most concise and determined way to shake any cobwebs from one’s sleepy body. Shivering, I’d return back inside and sit next to the fire, waiting for the coffee percolator to work its magic. That was probably one of my favourite parts of this whole winter. Sitting in a tent with a silence so thick and persistent that it almost becomes another living thing next to you. Cuddled up in the arms of the great love of my life, sipping hot coffee. Untouchable. Impermeable. A great clarity settles into one’s bones in such a moment. Modernity’s illusions lift. Worries dissipate. Everything shrinks.

I don’t need to know what’s happening there. We have no phones. No way to be contacted or to contact. We don’t need them. Our security is held in us and in faith that all will be well. There’s nothing we need outside of this little pocket world. I am here with my man in my little tent in the woods. We are guarded by the ents and shrouded in the love of Creation. The crackling wood fire and bubbling water the only sounds in all the land. And that’s why we do hard things. The sweet from a little struggle. A reminder of who we are and what awaits us in the wilds of the land and the wilds in our hearts. 

To winter comes spring. Unstoppable, brilliant, beautiful life.