Winter Camping

 

     Some call winter the undiscovered season, because to most people the thought of being outdoors and camping in the snow is an automatic dismissal.  To be honest, most people think you are nuts if you go winter camping. Only a miniscule percentage of people who camp in the summer actually winter camp, but it actually is quite beautiful, serene and a unique experience to be had.    The beauty of the landscape and the challenge itself is a worthwhile.  The babbling brooks in the snowy gullies,  frozen waterfalls and lakes and the white blanket covering everything on a clear day makes for stunning landscapes and excellent photography.  A scene can look completely different from one season to the next.  It is also an opportunity to get much better views on the tops of ridges and peaks because there are no leaves on the trees and the serenity that gently falling snow in the woods creates is unmatched.
      With winter comes freedoms that summer doesn't have, but also takes it away others from the warmer seasons.  You suddenly become free to walk across lakes on routes you would require canoes for.  The forest opens up and off track is easier, the snow smoothing out the rougher summer landscape.  You can easily drag a sled full of gear behind you instead of being encumbered by it all on your back.  And, as I also say, the snow tells tales too, which I find fascinating.  The tracks in the snow from animals and people also show what they have been up to.  There are no bugs, no crowds, and for the most part you don't have to worry about your food being eaten (except for by mice and small critters).  Yet another difference is the quiet, which you don't notice at first but then when you relax it's obvious.  There's no leaves rustling in the trees or underfoot, no waves lapping n the shore, and not nearly as many birds or critters chirping or scurrying about, not to mention the freshly fallen snow just absorbs all the sounds so there is dead silence when there's no wind.

     There are some down sides to winter camping though – everything takes at least twice as long to do, and the cold temperatures can make for an experience and challenges of it’s own.  Camping at -5C is one thing but when you get to around -20C it is a strange hostile almost alien environment you are in, although it can be comfortable if you have the right gear.  That is the key, winter is unforgiving and having the right gear and also doing things at the right time when you are far off from civilization is paramount to having a good time.

     My last camping trip in winter to Killarney was unbelievably beautiful and an amazing experience, but the cold was brutal.  Strange things start happening when it’s near -20C.  Many materials and fabrics change properties, sound different and become brittle.  Batteries in electronics and electrical devices stop working if they aren’t heated by your body.  My SLR camera lens broke.  Every piece of clothing gathers moisture and gets hard after taking it off.  My fire starter sparker couldn’t light my white gas stove because there was no vapor from the gas.  Every bit of metal is ridiculously cold and will sap any heat from your hands instantly.  40% whiskey gets thick to the consistency of syrup.  The sky was intensely clear and crisp, the night sky just full of sharp stars and the day sky intensely blue.  I think it can only be this clear in the winter due to lack of vapor in certain condition from the cold. 

     And then there’s the water management.  Water is always freezing.   You have to constantly be melting snow for water and hydrating to stay warm, drinking hot beverages.  I have a double walled steel mug I brought camping so my drinks would stay warmer.  Even though there was hot liquid in the mug itself, it was at the bottom of the mug and it was so cold the lip was still frozen for my lips to get stuck to it.  You just have to shift your thinking because things aren’t the way you are used to them being.

    Another concept you have to understand when winter camping is snow sintering.  This happens when you move snow around.  The layers between flakes or granules on snow refreeze in a short period and the snow becomes hard like styrofoam.  This process is useful when crating a tent pad.  If you stomp down a square pattern of powdery snow for a tent pad with your snowshoes, it is still somewhat soft when you finish, but walk away and come back in half an hour and it will be hard enough to pitch a tent on.  The same principle works when building a quinzee (easy to build igloo) - you pile snow up, wait for it to sinter and dig out the inside.  Same with tent pegs - you push the pegs into the snow and wait a few minutes for the show to harden.
     In any case, winter camping brings it's own rewards, challenges and beautiful scenery.  If you have never been before, it's likely not as bad as you think it is, I challenge you to get out there and try it, you might just like it.

MEC Logan Mitts Review

     I typically have colder than normal hands and feet.  All through high school many of the times I went downhill skiing ended up at the end of the trip with me writing in pain while my appendages thawed out.  But these are the warmest mitts I have ever tried, I think they will be serving me on many adventures and ski trips to come, they are jam packed with features most other mitts don’t have and are very versatile..

     The shells have a generous amount of heavy leather on the palms and wrap around on the edges.  The shells also have insulation on the inside on all sides and they are protected by a waterproof/breathable GoreTex Pac-lite membrane.  I have not yet had the opportunity to test the waterproofness, as I have only used them in very cold temps so far.  The gauntlet cuffs are very long and have an easy to use cinching system and silicone MEC logo pads on the inside to grip your jacket sleeves.  With this you are able to completely seal off snow from getting to your cuffs, no matter how much snow you are in.  In addition to that it has reflective strips for high visibility, small plastic clip to be able to clip the mitts together, as well as tether strings to attach the mitts to your pack, luggage, or carabiner while on your expedition.

     The removable liners are a great feature for both adjusting the level of insulation you need, and for quicker drying.  In fact I think a removable liner is a must have when you have this much insulation, otherwise it would take forever to dry out.  The liners are attached to the shells by two pads of Velcro on each liner.  No fiddling is required to take the liners in or out of the shell, I could just pull the shell away when I wanted to just have the liners on for more dexterity.  The liner mitts feature primaloft insulation, have a textured silicone pattern on the palms for grip and are pretty warm in their own right.  They also have two internal dividers, the purpose of which I don’t know, but at the same time didn’t bother me at all.

     As I mentioned previously, these are very versatile, you could even wear liner gloves and use the shells as a warmer to remove them when you need more dexterity.  Of course these mitts have been designed for the coldest possible scenarios and therefore are a little bulky when fully together with the shells and the liners, but you just have to deal with it.  They kept my hands nice and warm while winter camping in sub -20C temps.   

      This product is clearly well thought out and designed and I am very happy with these.  I happened to get them on sale for $95 from MEC, regularly $135.

Killarney Winter Silver Peak

3 day Snowshoeing and backcountry winter camping trip in Killarney. We camped on Sandy Lake and got to Silver Peak from the south side off track.  Good adventure and stunning winter scenery.

Myself and my friend Michael were looking to go on a winter adventure.  We decided that reaching Silver Peak in Killarney would be a suitable conquest in the winter.  To me, having a proper destination or goal to reach always is more satisfying than just simply walking around the woods and coming back.  I also had not been proper winter camping before, so that would be a challenge.  I had bought a winter sleeping bag and made a pulk sled for winter camping in 2009, but I never used it as that winter was not really cold enough for lake travel.  So, there were quite a few things that would be different or a challenge for this trip.

To make it even more interesting, we wanted to get to Silver Peak a nontraditional way, and approach it from the South direction, traveling off track, which there are no proper trails to the peak.  We plotted several possible routes to get where we wanted to and would decide which one to take when we got to the area.

As the days got closer it was apparent that the temperature would make things interesting, as some nights were -20 and colder in the forecast.  The weather despite the cold turned out amazing, ultra clear and no wind for the entire weekend.

Day 0

We decided to get a head start to Killarney on Friday evening to make the most of the Saturday, especially since the days are short in the winter.  So we went up to Parry Sound which cut 3 hours off of our travel and crashed in a Motel.

Day 1

We got up at 7, ate some leftover pizza, hit up Tim Hortons for some drinks and some more breakfast and hit the road.  We got to George Lake campsite office at 10:30 to get permits .  On the way in we stopped at both Johnnie Lake and Carlyle Lake accesses to see what they were like.  We were hoping that we could get to the end of Johhnie Lake road by car in order to shave off 4kms of one of the routes that we wanted to go on, but that wasn’t the case.  Both accesses only had a small area by the highway plowed for parking. Originally while planning we wanted to leave from Johhnie Lake, over to Bunny Rabbit and base camp at Sandy Lake.  That would have been 14kms and we decided slogging through fresh snow for 14 kms seemed a little too optimistic. So, in the end we parked at Carlyle access, and tookwhat would normally be a canoe route to Kakakise Lake, Norway and finally to Sandy Lake.  This route was 7kms to base camp and I am glad we chose this route, since it took us until 4 to do just that.

We parked at Carlyle, got our gear together on our Pulk sleds and took off.  Michael’s sled was just a sled with a roe attached to a hip belt, as it was his neighbor’s kids’ sled that he borrowed for the trip.  Mine I attached some PVC pipes together to form more of a proper pulk.

As we started off we were following some tracks from someone else pulling a sled.  The slog across Carlyle is a lot longer than you expect, around the corner and to the portage to Kakakise.  Up to the portage I was wondering who was in front of us.  I was hoping whoever was in front wasn’t going to Sandy Lake or Norway, so we could lay fresh first tracks ourselves.  Soon we found out that whoever was in front of us set up camp with a canvas tent and stove on the portage to Kakakise, so after that we were plowing through the snow.  Good for the scenery, but the going was much tougher than on an established trail.  I love the freedom of being able to walk across lakes in the winter to areas you would normally require boats to access.

The sky was brilliant blue and very clear.  Every time we rounded a corner we were amazed by the beauty of the Landscape.  There was an ice storm a few days prior, followed by some snow, so it was a winter wonderland we were looking at.  Some of the portages had quite deep snow, you could make out some very old tracks in some places that were snowed over long ago, but other than that it was pristine.

We got to the place we wanted to camp at 4 ish, still had a bit of light.  We camped in a sheltered spot at the tip of the lake.  Michael proceeded to stomp out a pad for tents.  I started to pile up snow for a quinzee, but we quickly ran out of light and I decided to use a tent for the first night instead of the quinzee. 

When the sun went down it got really cold really fast.  I guess that’s the downfall of having a super clear crisp sky.  I should have changed clothes and put on multiple layers immediately after I stopped doing high output activities, and I got cold quickly, but drinking hot liquids and getting some high energy foods into me helped tremendously.  I slept well and was actually sweating in the night, since I put my summer sleeping bag as a liner inside my -20 rated winter bag.  I also slept on a reflective tarp, on top of which I put a zlite sleeping pad, and on top of that a Thermarest guidelite sleeping pad.  Before bed, I filled up a Nalgene with boiling water, put them in a sock and put them in the sleeping bag, and changed into perfectly dry thermals for sleeping in.

Day 2

We got up around 7.  Getting dressed in four layers takes a long time to get out of the sleeping bag in the morning.  We made breakfast, I piled a bunch of more snow on my quinzee pile and we headed out for Silver Peak around 11 for another high energy day.  We brought day packs with enough gear to deal with whatever we would run into.  On the map we picked a line that had the least steep inclines.  We were planning on going up a couple gullies as seen on topo maps but on the way up we actually ended up going up some ridges instead which had a bit less snow than the gullies.  There were some quite steep sections that was hard going especially with deep snow.  The snow type/quality and depth kept changing in different spots which made it interesting.  My favorite snow texture was on the windswept ridges, where it was like hard styrofoam which the crampons easily bit into and didn’t suck your energy like the deep snow did.  On the way up somewhere, my SLR lens broke..   from the cold, ice, or both.  I could only take wide angle shots..   glad I brought my small camera, too.

We ended up at a small swamp to the southwest of Silver peak, and the views just kept getting better as we went.  A little bit of wind started coming up as we got to the top.  The ice storm from a couple days ago made for some spectacular alien-like landscape near the peak, reminiscent of a Doctor Seuss world.  This was my third time to Silver Peak, and I don’t think it would have been possible to be clearer.   Beautiful shocking blue sky and winter landscape.  You could quite easily see a horizon of Manitoulin Island and Georgian Bay to the southwest, plumes of steam from Espanola mills the othe northeast, and of course Sudbury and the superstack to the North.  It was quite chilly and windy at the peak, but we changed into our insulated jackets quickly while we ate some food before the journey back to camp.

We headed back to camp in the same general direction that we came up from, but this time we went down the gully that we were supposed to.   Going up took 3.5 hours, down 1.5.  Each step was half step, half slip in the deep snow, so we made good time. 

Close to rejoining our original path at the bottom of the slope, I noticed some moose footprints in the snow and when I looked up, we came across a fresh carcass of a young moose that was eaten by wolves.  By fresh I mean less than a day old, with no snow and sharply defined tracks.  And by carcass I mean just the ribs and backbone remained, picked absolutely clean, surrounded by blood mixed with snow, wolf tracks and several tufts of fur.  The legs and head were missing.  At least it looks like the moose was taken down quickly and it wasn’t a drawn out chase through the wolves.  The scene was quite eerie and makes you think about things and the brutal reality of the wilderness.  This scene was only about 500m from our camp, but we hadn’t heard anything despite the nonexistent wind.  Perhaps it all happened before we got to our camp earlier the day before and the wolves had moved on by the time we got there. 

Exiting the woods we saw some snowshoe tracks from others that had followed our tracks into the woods, and we wondered where these people were camping – we would find out the day after.  We made the quick trip back to camp – the sun was already going down and our camp was in the shade.  I promptly collected some firewood first, since we wanted to have one that night.  I found some nearby dead branches sticking up out of what would normally be a swamp near our campsite.  I then changed into warm/dry clothes in preparation for the approaching cold and after I dug out my quinzee.  I couldn’t let all that snow piling go to waste and not use it, and I wanted to try out the novelty of sleeping in what was essentially a snowbank.  It really didn’t take much time to hollow out a large enough spot so I could sit up and have my full length inside.  I also poked a hole in the roof for a vent, and transferred my mattresses and sleeping bag.  Michael still slept in his tent that night.

I also dug a pit for the fire, chopped the wood up and we had a welcome fire.  I placed a buch of green logs/branches at the bottom of the pit and made the fire on top of that to slow the melting of the ice underneath.  The fire was welcome and my feet were nice and warm from it.  We ate, boiled water for our sleeping bag Nalgenes and retired for the night, me to the quinzee, Michael to his tent.

Day 3

 

I woke up sweating - the quinzee’s insulation sure works.  Time to pack up and get back to the car.  The weather had changed, itwas now overcast, but still no wind.  Gentle large flakes of snow were falling vertically

We took our time eating breakfast, then methodically packing up.  I managed to pack my sled a lot better than on the way in since I put more thought into it instead of just throwing everything on and lashing it down, like I did for the trip in.

We followed our path backwards towards Carlyle, the going is much easier n an established trail with hardened snow than pushing through the soft untracked snow.  We followed the footprints we saw the other day and ran into two men camping on Norway Lake.  We chatted with them a bit and they said they followed our tracks part way up Silver Peak but turned back when it started getting late.

We continued on the paths, we came across even more tracks ad the path was pretty solid in places.  Michael going downhill with just a sled without poles was a bit awkward and he got bowled over a few times by the sled behind him.  We made good time back.  The last 1.5km across Carlyle Lake was a bit of a chore, but I took off my snowshoes and just walked along the hard trails.

We hit the road and made it back to Guelph by 8:30, luckily the roads were in great condition and moving well except for near Barrie, as usual.

More photos on Flickr

Everytrail Trip with Track

 Some Tips:

-using a pulk sled helps carry more gear and is easy to make see this link: Building a Pulk Sled

-There’s no access to end of Johnnie Lake road in the winter, only a small parking lot at the end

-permits are still required in the winter for Killarney

- Building a quinzee is a warmer option than a tent

-bring lots of fuel for melting snow

Building a Pulk Sled

     Winter camping takes quite a bit more gear than summer camping.  I don’t think ‘ultralight’ and ‘winter camping’ can exist together.  Especially when it’s -20C or lower, you want to be prepared and not kicking yourself for not briniging something that saved you a couple grams.  That said, carrying a lot of weight while trying o float on the snow with snowshoes or skis is counterproductive.  The best way to get around in the winter is with a sled, or Pulk sled as they are commonly called.  The advantages are it spreads the weight out so you can float on the snow more (and also less chance of breaking through thin ice), it can carry more bulk and more weight than carrying it on your back, and it also allows your clothes to breathe more, instead of having a backpack on your back, creating the perpetual sweaty back syndrome.  
 Usually it its attached to a hip belt by some means.  There some disadvantages though – the sleds are less maneuverable through dense brush and steep uphills are more difficult as you sometimes can’t get enough traction to pull the thing, but those are more rare situations and in general pulk sleds are great helps more than they are hinderances.

     If you Google ‘Pulk Sled’, you will find thousands of variants.  A handfull are commercially built, but usually home built devices of all sizes and shapes.  Some have covers, some don’t.  The majority has some kind of rigid structure between your hip belt and the sled.  This helps a lot in traversing slopes and also downhills – it prevents the sled from running into you.

After researching many of these I made a sled a while ago.  It costs less than $100 and it performs great. The sled I made from a Pelican Snow Glider I got from Canadian Tire.  It is very lightweight, but it is made of thin material.  Due to this, I didn’t want to pull the sled through the material itself, so I made a frame of PVC, attached to the sled with Nylon zip ties/cable ties – I drilled holes in the sled, tightened the zip ties from the bottom and cut off the excess.  I ran the rope through the tubes, so the rope pulls the frame, not the sled itself.  I made it out of CPVC water pipe, which does not get brittle even at cold temperatures.  Many plastics get brittle like glass at cold temps and will break or shatter.  The sled frame tube I used ½” tubing.  I cemented the tubes together with CPVC cement.

     For the front frame (between the hip belt and sled), I used ¾” tubing for more stiffness, and put two cross tubes in it, again for more lateral stiffness.  You want to size the length of this so your snowshoes or skis don’t hit it with normal movements.  Then I ran some 3/16” rope through the front frame tubes, all the way to the back of the sled and back the other side.  I happened to use polypropylene rope, but after comparing specs, perhaps nlyon rope is more appropriate as it is slightly stronger, but I am sure either will do. 

The rope itself acts as a hinge between the front and rear frames. At the front of the front frames, I attached mini caribiners with figure 8 knots, trying to get the rope was tight as possible so there is as little slack as possible between the frames.  The figure 8 knots simple rest inside the ¾” tubes in the front frame.  For storage or transport, the front frame folds backwards.

     Finally, my old LowePro backpack top transforms into a hip belt/fanny back with a robust buckle so I used that to attach the sled to.  It has a pocket I use or water and snacks.  I hand sewed a loop onto each side of the belt with high strength thread.

     I use leftover rope to lash gear to the sled, although bungy cords would likely be more convenient if I would find the right sized ones.

      I’ve used this sled for about 30kms so far of cold weather pulling on different terrain, some off track, and it works great.  It’s very controllable on downhills, and my gear is secured well in it.  My only negative views is that mine is this sled model is a little short for carrying lots of gear.  That, and the side and front lips on my sled are rather deep and can plow some snow and make it a little harder to pull in deep snow with first tracks.  One more thing, a cover would be nice to have to prevent snow from accumulating in the sled when trudging through the deep, perhaps I will design and make a cover for one for next trip.  Other than that, these are great for winter camping and a good project to make yourself!