The Top 11 Questions I Get About Winter Camping

in this video I'm going to go over the top winter camping questions I get and I'll lump those into three categories genuine curiosity person thinks I'm a liar person thinks I'm an idiot let's start with this one an easy one why can't you see your breath if it's so cold it's minus 10 out right now and they'll show you what I mean [Music] nothing I think it has to do with relative humidity but I really don't understand the science behind it all I'm saying is I'm not lying next question is similar because people think I'm lying about the temperature when they see water or slush on top of the lake or even elsewhere open streams snow is a great insulator so if you have lots of snow several feet of snow perhaps on top of Open Water it'll stay liquid it won't freeze just because of Snow's insulating power that question is a good segue to the next one which is why do I collect liquid water instead of just melting snow snow is all around people say why are you drilling using the auger to get water from the lake I'm I know that there's snow everywhere I can see it too but you have to pack in snow into a kettle or a pot and even if you pack it as densely as you can you're probably going to get 20 percent of the volume of the container of actual water once it melts down then you got to go out and pack in more snow into that water and that's it's just not a nice process not to mention snow is full of debris unless it's really fresh snow so it'll have pine needles in it Snowshoe hair droppings perhaps fur droppings liquid water from the lake could have fish pee and poo as well but highly diluted as opposed to potentially scooping up a bunch of snowshoe hare poop just under the snow that you didn't see next one what is the temperature inside the hot tent I often show the temperature outside so I've had this sitting right here beside me for quite a while just to make sure it's leveled off and it's about 10 degrees Celsius 5 degrees Fahrenheit and that's probably a good representation but it varies so widely it's kind of a hard one to answer because the top of the tent could be 40 degrees celsius 100 degrees Fahrenheit more or less and the floor could be freezing because the the ground is an endless cold Source right and the heat rises from the stove so there's a huge disparity and it also depends on how quickly you want to burn up your firewood if I open the dampers and let this thing rip then it can get really hot in here 40 degrees Celsius for sure but if I want to conserve my firewood which I do because it's harder and out here then I'll usually use it slower but even 10 degrees Celsius is much nicer than -10 outside or minus 30 outside sometimes I get asked a much more fundamental question why winter camp at all that looks awful looks like so much work it is a lot of work but it's incredibly beautiful I just had a wonderful day out here in fresh snow nice temperature for hiking through it winter here in Northern Ontario Canada is about six months I mean there's snow on the ground for six months November through May you can expect snow even into October so you just got you have to embrace it otherwise it's a miserable half a year and with right gear winter can be so enjoyable you don't have to have a hot tent in a wood stove though that is in my opinion the nicest way to enjoy it there are tons of ways you can enjoy winter why aren't you wearing snowshoes is a question I get a lot and the reason is I'm probably on a packed Trail a Pax snowmobile trail for instance which is hard I don't need snowshoes and snowshoes add strain to your your leg muscles so there's no need to use them if you're not sinking in or I'll just go without them for a short distance sometimes or consider that I'm I'm filming I'm trying to illustrate the depth of the snow sometimes and sinking in is an effective way to demonstrate that how do you poop when it's that cold out it's a good question when it's in the -30s if you wake up in the morning and you have to go it sucks it really does like you feel like you're gonna lose your fingers by the end of it anyway the process is to find somewhere well away from any streams or water source or Trail or campsite way away you can only do this in Wilderness areas like I I camp in but you can leave your poop there animals poop all over the place so don't worry about that as long as you've gone somewhere where No One's Gonna set foot again that's not an issue the toilet paper is the issue the poop will go away quickly but there's nothing nastier than coming across a wet pile of TP in the spring this can either be burned on the spot if you poop beside a big birch tree with lots of bark like so you can just create a little small fire there on top of the snow with some Twigs incinerate your your TP or if you have the stove going if you're camping with a wood stove bring it back and incinerate it in your stove speaking of the stove I'm often asked aren't you afraid of carbon monoxide yes but I carry a carbon monoxide alarm battery powered but this has to be kept Untold well off the ground to work properly and its operating temperature is I think like four degrees Celsius so it has to be kept to a reasonable temperature if the stove's going you should be able to do that fine but if it gets too cold it might not work properly it shouldn't happen someone might tell you oh no I've been camping with hot with hot tents and wood soaps my whole life never had an issue with carbon monoxide do you want to stake your life on that I don't another one about fear aren't you afraid of animals attacking you in Winter we have black bears here lots of them but they're in a state of torpor and in winter it's very unlikely to see one I don't think I've ever seen a black bear in Winter though like most things Murphy's Law if it can happen it will happen and they do come out sometimes but it's extremely rare and I would say that's more likely to happen if they if there's a known food source around like if there's a garbage dump that they can break into then they might have a reason to get up but a bear in the wilderness has no reason to get out there's no calories to be found wolves I I've never heard of a wolf attack in this area again we have wolves we have coyotes as well I've never heard of it happening there are also cougars though very rare one was spotted on trail cam here last winter and it was a big deal because it's so rare so that's not really something to worry about aside from that unless a moose decides he doesn't like the cut of my jib and mows me down there's nothing to worry about with animals in the winter however I do carry bear spray in the summer and a lot of people say that they wouldn't do this without a gun that's fine but I can tell you from my experience and experience of a lot of camping veterans I know in this area that's totally unnecessary it gives you comfort and you're legally allowed to go for it next one how do you keep filming equipment charged I carry one or two twenty thousand milliamp power Banks along with many extra batteries and a lot of people ask why don't you use a solar charger I own one it's just it's really not practical to bring out here in the winter there's often cloud cover and very low angle Sun so you're not going to get much juice out of that and most power banks are receivers for that energy can actually be charged in cold temperatures it'll damage the batteries so that's really only a summer option but even in the summer I use the same setup because I have to buy all these batteries for winter I might as well just use them in summer and not have to trouble myself with setting up a solar panel as I travel each day another thing that gets people is when they see snow on the on the ground there's no floor to this tent a traditional canvas tent like this has no floor and you can use Spruce bows for instance to line it but it's not strictly necessary and it's higher impact so I often don't and if I'm camping on a spot that might get used frequently then I definitely won't use Bruce bows you don't it's not necessary as long as I have an insulated sleep system which I do close cell phone pad and the sleeping mat then you really don't have to it can get slippery in here especially as the snow gets melted by the stove there were some ferns outside still for some reason and I grabbed some of those and threw them down as like non-slip mats and that works perfectly fine some people have these Russian bare tents or whatever and they have an insulated floor built in those tents are way too heavy for me hauling in on foot a few people use foam tiles much lighter but still very bulky to cover 80 square feet 8 by 10 tent and that's this is my smaller tent so I just get by without it it's really it's not an issue could even just use a tarp which doesn't take up too much room but then Embers fly out of the stove or a track in snow and it melts and then it's pooling in a tarp nice thing here is everything just sinks down into the snow or Earth anyway those are some of the most common questions I get if you have any others just let me know hopefully the satisfied your curiosity or if you think I'm a liar or a fool hopefully you don't anymore

Channel: Lost Lakes

Views: 47,458

Keywords: lost lakes, camping, fishing, ontario, canada, bushcraft, backcountry angling ontario, winter, wilderness, solo

Id: a_nrGUte8dM

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 12 2022