Tips & Gear for Backpacking in a Blizzard | WINTER CAMPING SURVIVAL |

hey guys justin here i'm about to start a winter backpacking overnighter and this one could get interesting the forecast is calling for a record blizzard so there's three different factors that are going to be contributing to this being a pretty potentially extreme backpacking trip first is it's supposed to get down to minus 20 degrees fahrenheit tonight so very cold there might be 60 mile per hour winds as well so extreme wind conditions which might put a stress in my tent tonight then the third factor is there's gonna be up to two feet of snow potentially so those three factors could make this a pretty intense trip even just that snow factor could get me stranded out here for a couple days luckily i do have a bunch of stuff with me and i'm prepared for these circumstances so if you're interested in the gear that i brought with me in order to stay safe and some of the approaches i'm gonna take to knock it into really sketchy circumstances then come along this journey with me we're gonna go across that bridge over there follow the river for nine kilometers and then get to the campground so for all you map nerds out there this is the area that i'm in right now little elbow sheet valley trails and we're gonna be starting up here and then going down the trail following the river and hitting the big elbow campground down there so it's starting to snow a little bit this is the first taste it's about one o'clock in the afternoon and this is when the forecast the snow would start so forecast is right on schedule one of the questions that i get asked a whole bunch is how i navigate especially in the winter time right now there's no snow on the trail but other winter trips i've done there's been snow on the trail you can't see it so what happens if tomorrow i'm hiking the trail it's covered in snow and you can't see it the way that i navigate and this is my favorite option is i have a garmin fenix watcher so i load the maps up onto the watch and then i'm able to follow it and i have a little marker on there and it shows me where i am and i'm able to follow the track and make sure that i'm staying where i need to be so what happens if my watch dies and i also have my phone with maps loaded on there what happens if my phone dies so now we're getting into more extreme circumstances but when you're winter camping you need to be prepared for these things especially today and tomorrow with 60 mile per hour winds and that much snow i could potentially be in circumstances where i can only see a couple meters in front of me and that's where a compass comes into play and i know that if i head east at any point in time eventually i'm gonna hit that river that would cross a little bit sooner then if i head north along that river i'm eventually gonna hit the parking lot and my car so that's kind of my worst case scenario everything dies i get lost in widow conditions i head to the river and then follow the river back to my car [Music] so we just got to one of those spots where if it was white out conditions it'd be a little bit hard to follow the trail not a lot of signs for the trail here as well i just passed a family told them what i was getting up to they said i was insane maybe i might be insane but i think i'm well prepared for this trip i have the gear that i need to survive under the extreme conditions that could potentially happen today and one of those critical pieces of gear is my shelter so i have with me a pretty slick mountaineering shelter that i'll show you once we get to camp as well i have an emergency bivy as backup so if the tent fails i still have that as well as the emergency bivvy is good if i do break my leg run into some sort of incident on the trail that i can bust that bivvy out my sleeping bag is also right at the top of my pack get inside both those things and then call for help and the way that i'd call for help is i use a garment inreach i carry it right in my chest pocket here that way if i need to call for help i can press that sos button and then hopefully within a day or two someone comes and rescues me [Music] the snow is starting to fall a little bit more heavily [Music] which is cool it's getting really beautiful in here so starting to accumulate on the trees we're about two thirds of the way to camp so i'm gonna hammer this out get camp then i'll walk you through a whole bunch of the gear that i brought with me for this trip [Music] and we made it big elbow campground so here we are a little bit windy that only took us two and a half hours so pretty good pace but something to keep in mind with winter hiking and backpacking is that if it's deep snow or you're snowshoeing then it might take two or three times as long to do a trail in the wintertime compared to what it takes you in the summertime i did have to book this campsite so i booked it last night at the time of booking no one else had booked a campsite so i might have this all to myself we'll see if anyone else shows up but we're gonna go find a place to set up the tent something i need to keep in mind with this wind is i don't really want to be in a spot where there's potential for trees to be falling on me before i get everything set up as promised we'll talk a little bit about the gear that i brought so this is a mountain hardwear amg 75 pack so it's a 75 liter pack and it's made specifically for winter backpacking and mountaineering that 75 liters has been essential i have this thing packed to the brim and a big reason for that is that i have a lot of redundancy in my gear when you're in winter conditions and especially if there's a big blizzard on the horizon then you want to make sure that you have everything that you need in order to be able to survive i'll get this unpacked set the tent up and then i'll show you the tenth i brought as well as my sleep system a little bit about this tent this is the nemo tenchi tent it's a mountaineering tent it's a single wall tent and this thing seems to be bomb proof i used it a few times last winter then i liked it so much that i decided to pick it up for this winter because it's such a good winter tent it is expensive but has a lot of really awesome features that makes it excel under more extreme circumstances let's go a little bit tour and i'll show you some of the nice things about this tent first up is that there's a lot of spots for guy lines so i don't have them all guide out right now but with what i have i feel pretty confident that i'll be able to handle a lot of wind there's also a ton of vents there's three vents in the roof one vent in the back and then there's also a vestibule one of my favorite things about this vestibule is that it's detachable so if you want to drop some weight you can remove the vestibule and then just have the door on the front there and that was a really nice feature with the vestibule gone this tent weighs around a kilogram so very lightweight now let's pop inside so you can see a little vestibule we'll open it up there's another window on the main door here you open it up and you can see lots of pockets the vents up top window in the back and then another really cool feature about this tent is that it has this kind of silk thin material that you can use as a condensation curtain so that zips all the way up the edge here and then it just drapes on your chest so that you don't get any condensation in the foot or lower half of the tent while you're sleeping which is a pretty cool feature i haven't used it yet but i'm gonna test out tonight and see how it does as far as my sleep system goes in order to survive tonight i have my therm rest polar ranger again so this is a really warm sleeping bag and then i also brought you can see it just in the corner there my enlightened equipment revelation synthetic quilt so that's a 50 degree synthetic quilt and adds quite a bit of warmth on the ground i have the therm-a-rest x therm sleeping pad and then underneath it i have a decathlon foam mat there so just add a little bit more r value underneath the x therm because i find the x therm is only good to about minus 20 degrees celsius and you get some firewood get a fire going and i'll change into the camp clothes and cook dinner so we got the fire going i've all changed into my camp clothes time to eat dinner i'm starving so for dinner i have pesto chicken pasta by trail topia i love pesto chicken passes i've never tried anything from trail topia before but i'm really intrigued by this bag that they have here so it is a freeze-dried meal you boil water put it inside let it sit for a bit but they have shallow bags that are apparently a little bit better than some of the other brands as far as being able to get your spoon in there hopefully it's tasty because i bought a whole bunch of them let's see to boil the water i have uh msr whisper light universal so it has an inverted canister as well as a heating coil so that's pretty important once you get into really cold temperatures if you are getting to cool temperatures you can use just a regular canister upright stove that has a regulator that will get you down to about minus 10 degrees celsius if you get an inverted caster stove with a heating coil then that'll get you down to about minus 20 in my experience after that it's better to start using white gas the heating coil is super important because it's so cold the fuel inside of the canister is liquid and as it goes to the stove it's still liquid and what happens with the heating coil is it heats up that liquid turns it into gas and then it burns better and is going to burn better at cold temperatures so let's get this thing going and boil some water [Music] so it looks like we got a boil going let's pour this hot water this meal here [Music] and we'll let this sit for 10 minutes it's uh pretty much getting dark now so i'm going to eat dinner enjoy this fire for a bit and then head to bed we'll see what tomorrow has in store for me we'll see whether tonight where this blizzard picks up in intensity it's definitely starting to snow quite a bit more the wind has kind of died down a bit but we'll see it could get pretty intense pretty quickly tonight so stay tuned we'll definitely be touching base in the morning and seeing how things are going [Music] good morning guys had a amazing sleep winter camping always a great sleep for me anyways i got about 12 hours of sleep so that's one of the nice parts is because it gets dark so early most of the time you're going to bed really early as well just a couple things i want to address because i think i forgot to address them yesterday was my dinner my dinner ended up being really tasty that trail topia was a really nice meal the other thing that i had talked about yesterday with this tent was the condensation curtain i wasn't sure how that was gonna perform but it blew my expectations out of the water you can see behind me this entire door is covered in condensation and that's the spot that was exposed to my breath and then the condensation curtain segregated the rest of the tent so there's pretty much no condensation in the rest of the tent other than a little bit at the top of the tent so that's a really cool feature it's really nice waking up and not having to deal with condensation all over the walls of the tent makes breaking down camp getting everything all set up a lot easier as you can see i'm using the awesome armholes of the polar ranger sleeping bag this is one of my favorite features i'm not going to get on my sleeping bag for quite a while here i'm going to eat my breakfast in the slippy bag brush my teeth it's going to be a whole morning in the sleeping bag and once i get out and get going outside of the tent then we'll address the weather i'm not exactly sure what it looks like out there right now but i can tell you what overnight was like and we'll uh we'll see how how things lived up to the that forecast of an extreme blizzard so i'm pretty much packed up 10's put away my bag's almost set so we didn't get the blizzard that was expected as you can see not a ton of snow definitely not two feet of snow it also didn't get quite as cold it was supposed to get down to about minus 20 degrees fahrenheit it probably got down to about zero so i was pretty toasty last night the wind on the other hand probably lived up to expectations you can see it blowing through right now and this is just the light wind every once in a while you get huge gusts and this just goes into white out conditions you can hear it in the mountains very very loudly luckily the spot that i had my tent set up in was pretty sheltered so i didn't experience a ton of wind but when i did get those big gusts i did feel super secure in that tent so loving the nemo tenchi so far i think it's gonna be my go-to winter tent especially if it's gonna be in more extreme conditions i'm gonna go put my boots on and then hit the trail a lot of you had questions about why i was putting plastic bags around my feet before putting in my boots during my last winter trip video so i'm gonna answer that question momentarily so why was i putting plastic bags on my feet in my last winter trip video and it's really all about moisture management i get super sweaty when i'm hiking and my feet are no exception and what that plastic bag does is it prevents my sweat and moisture from getting from my foot into my boot which is essential for what i get to camp because then i don't need to worry about drying my boot it's not filled with sweat and moisture and i have a nice boot in the mornings i don't need to worry about them being frozen i could just slide my foot in no problem they're still nice and soft because they didn't freeze up overnight on this trip i'm using something that's a bit of a step up from your plastic bag i have a vapor barrier sock made by rab here so it's a little bit more shaped has some elastic at the top and then a drawstring this worked really well on the hike in my boot is completely dry right now it didn't freeze up overnight at all i'm using the foot vapor barrier on just an overnighter it's not quite as essential with an overnighter as if you're doing a multi-day trip for those multi-day trips you really need to be cognizant of moisture both in your clothing as well as your sleep system it's essential in those scenarios and as i do more winter content we'll definitely get into vapor bears a little bit here i have a whole bunch of winter content ready i'm gonna put a playlist right there to all my winter content you can go check that out otherwise thanks for watching guys and we'll see you next time

Channel: Justin Outdoors

Views: 45,811

Rating: 4.8844085 out of 5

Keywords: Backpacking, Hiking, Camping, ultralight, backpacking gear, backpacking gear list, camping gear, hiking gear, ultralight gear, best backpacking gear, best hiking gear, Appalachian Trail, ultralight backpacking, hiking trails, winter camping, winter backpacking, winter hiking, winter camping tips, how to winter camp, winter camping hot tent, winter camping survival, how to stay warm, staying warm, winter backpacking gear, winter, how to winter backpack, staying warm in winter

Id: lCxQp9jYq3U

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020