Listen as Scott chats with North Shore Radio host, Mark Abrahamson, about some of the tried and true strategies and methods for staying warm and dry in cold weather.
Pack & Paddle: How to Stay Warm & Dry in Cold Weather Transcript
0:00:00.3 Mark: WTIP's feature Pack & Paddle with Scott Oeth is up next. Scott is a registered Maine guide, an Eagle Scout and Minnesota Master Naturalist. He's an instructor for the Okpik National Cold Weather Leader School. He joins us now by phone, welcome Scott.
0:00:16.4 Scott Oeth: Good morning, Mark.
0:00:18.8 Mark: Alright, I've been saying we're gonna talk about how to generate the heat within and keep it within ourselves when we're outdoors.
0:00:27.7 SO: That's right, that's right. Your body is its own heating plant, and if you understand how it works and how to optimize things, it's a whole lot easier to stay warm than to try and get warm, and there are absolutely some things to know. You think it's natural, we're born with this body, it just happens, but there's definitely some things that I like to think of as a user's guide for how to optimize your body's heat pump.
0:00:53.5 Mark: Alright, let's talk user's guide.
0:00:56.0 SO: Yeah. So I think a few things I wanna touch on. It's important to understand how we lose heat and how we gain heat, so talking about that for a moment, and then understanding that your body actually goes through some really remarkable changes in the cold to protect its internal organs in terms of blood circulation. And then some things we can do to stoke the fire, but first on the mechanisms of heat transfer. A lot of these we intuitively know, some of them we might remember from science class, but your body can lose through radiation, that's just giving off heat waves into the atmosphere, and we protect against that through insulation. Conduction, touching cold surfaces one of the key ones I know when I'm outside is your feet lose a lot of heat to the cold if you're standing on a frozen lake, that ice is just sucking heat away from you.
0:01:43.2 SO: Convection, I think that a lot of us have heard about windshield and know the importance of having wind layers, we don't wanna trap too much sweat, but we wanna block that wind, that can really, really make us cold in evaporation, if we have damp fabrics on us, it can leak away heat 25 times faster than dry fabric. So we wanna be aware, understand those, and there's a whole science to dressing well from the cold, but I think that's the first thing to understand, is how we lose heat. The body can produce heat through metabolism, eating food and turning that into energy, exercise, and the natural response it just comes up as shivering, that's kind of the first stage and actually can produce heat five times more rapidly than just staying there normally. So your body can produce heat as well as lose it, but we wanna be careful about those thiefs that steal the heat away.
0:02:32.8 Mark: And our body is a pretty amazing instrument. Here's a great word, homeostasis. How do we balance things out, but our body does it automatically, it's so cool.
0:02:42.6 SO: It's really remarkable, and I had spent a lot of time a large part of my life in the outdoors, doing cold weather activities, I studied how to dress for the cold, but I really didn't realize how much your body goes through changes to try and protect the vital organs in the core of your body and your brain. So you have your heart, your liver, your lungs in the core of the body, there's a lot of mass there, comparatively little surface area, you have your limbs, your hands and feet, and one of the reasons I think that's really important, it's that time of year again, I'm seeing in social media groups, dear hunting season, a lot of people tell, oh, they have cold feet, how do you keep your feet warm?
0:03:18.6 SO: And immediately the conversation turns to what type of boots, and that's important, the insulation and the moisture management, but your body will really... The blood flow is one of the key things you can do to manage heat, and it's... You have a neuro band of keeping those organs around 98.6 degrees, and if it starts being too cold, your body will actually shut off blood flow to the extremities and it really does this. It can shut down 99% of the blood flow to the extremities, and it keeps it around its core to try and protect those core organs. Interestingly, it doesn't do this in the head and neck, and you have very little insulation in your head and neck, your brain is there, so it maintains blood flow to the head, and that's why your grandmother told you, "If your feet are cold, put on a hat," because we radiate off so much heat from our head and neck. I was lucky enough to do some winter survival courses with a famous Canadian instructor, Mors Kochanski, and he used to say that wearing a scarf is equal to wearing a sweater on your body because it helps protect against that radiate heat loss.
0:04:19.3 Mark: Alright now, how do we use our brains to help our body do its job?
0:04:26.8 SO: Yeah, well, I think key thing here is keep your core warm, so that's one of the first places to look. You wanna dress well overall, but keep your core well insulated, if your hands and feet are getting cold, yeah, it might be your gloves, it might be your boots, but two things you really wanna look at, is your core well insulated? And that's allowing your blood to continue to flow, and is the clothing too tight? You know, we know in a first-aid situation, you get a terrible wound, you could put a tourniquet on it, crank down to stop circulation. But often times with our clothing we'll do that inadvertently, cut off blood flow to the extremities. I've guided winter camping trips for years, and I'll see people psychologically well freaked out to go out in the cold and they'll be putting on three layers of socks and try to... And physically, I've seen them grunting and stuffing their foot into their boot, and you know they're gonna have cold feet right away. And they just say, "Whoa, well back off, we want our clothing to be loose to allow good circulation and blood flow." So understanding that is very important.
0:05:24.9 SO: And then the last thing is making sure you're well rested and you're well fueled to boost. I wrote a blog post about some military surplus boots, the Bunny boots or Mickey Mouse boots, as they're clunky, they're heavy, they look weird, but they're some of the warmest boots you can get. And I have a long-time friend, he was an Army Ranger, he said to me, he said, "I almost lost my toes in those boots, I almost froze them on a mountain, during exercise," when he was a young army ranger. And then talking to him a bit more, I think the deal was he was young, he was very thin, he had been up for like 36 hours, it was an extreme military training exercise. He'd eaten almost nothing, he had had no sleep, he was probably completely dehydrated, his body was not working properly. So food is very important, we know that's the fuel that can stoke the fire, fat, protein actually gives off a thermogenic effect as it's digested. But you need a lot of water to digest that protein and you need a lot of water overall, it's very easy to get dehydrated in the cold. We don't realize it necessarily, but that's one of the key issues, to stay well hydrated, it allows the blood to keep flowing.
0:06:32.2 Mark: And that sleep is such an important part. Boy, if you're winter camping or doing something unfamiliar, sometimes it can be hard to sleep.
0:06:41.0 SO: It can. It can be hard to sleep oftentimes. You're not at home, you're not in your bed, there's the psychological factor, I think, being outside, being concerned about being out in the cold, it can be hard to get adequate rest, and if your body's just depleted from a lot of hard work, that can make you cold. About five years ago, I was teaching at a winter camping school in northern Wisconsin, and I was out during the day, and I could just tell it started coming on. I was getting sick, and so there was other leaders there. I talked to them, and I excused myself. I hated to do it, but I bailed out and I went back to the cabin. Well, I tell you, Mark, that night, I was sleeping in my winter sleeping bag in the cabin and I was shivering. I couldn't stay warm. I was having the chills, and so if your body's not operating, functioning properly because of illness or because you're not well-rested, you're not well-fed, you're gonna have a very hard time staying warm.
0:07:35.1 Mark: Alright, we've been talking with Scott Oeth about a user's guide for body heat, how to stay warm and use your body to do it. Other perspectives, Scott, that you wanna add this morning? One thing I've been looking at lately is I've been looking at pads for the bottom of... For sleeping on. Boy, is there ever a variety of pads, and up to really, really expensive. Do you have any advice on those?
0:08:01.1 SO: Yeah, there's some fantastic high-end ones where you can go into a good outdoors shop or mountaineering shop, and you can buy thick, down-insulated ones, you can look at the R value, and I've heard people are very happy. So you can buy a nice pad. I'll say what I've done for years, Mark, winter camping and sleeping outside straight under the stars and the Boundary Waters, I'll lay down a tarp to keep myself dry and keep things from freezing to the ground, so just one of those cheap poly plastic tarps. And then I'm usually looking at two to three foam pads underneath myself, close felt foam pads, like the ride rest type. I'll often bring a wool blanket and fold that over in thirds underneath me, and one of those automobile reflective shields that you put up to keep the sun from getting your vehicle too hot, lay that underneath me, and with that combination, it's just it's a matter of insulation. And so that auto windshield helps with some radiant heat loss, the wool blanket is a nice layer, and plus I fold that out, and that's a little surface for me to change my boots and gloves and things on, and then the foam pads help block the cold, but even just adding one closed felt foam pad or a folded-up wool blanket on top of maybe your existing camping pad can go a long way.
0:09:16.7 Mark: Alright, well, that sounds great. I know from winter camping experience, boy, getting a good sleep really makes a big difference out there.
0:09:24.4 SO: Absolutely, absolutely.
0:09:25.8 Mark: Alright, well, we've been talking with Scott Oeth. You can follow his adventures at www.bullmoosepatrol.com, and I was just checking out that website, Scott, it's really fun. Anything else that you wanna add this morning?
0:09:38.4 SO: Well, maybe just I really enjoyed the conversation. We've talked about some of these related topics. Back last November, we talked about warm feet in winter on this episode and touched on some of the similar topics, and in September, we talked about how to sleep warmly in the cold. So if people are interested in some of these topics, we do have the audio files for those, and yes, at bullmoosepatrol.com I have a number of related blog posts about warm hands in winter, and tips for staying warm, and I'll be working in conjunction with the Frostbite Symposium out of Alberta, and doing some training courses coming up soon, so follow along if you'd like to hear more.
0:10:14.2 Mark: Well, thank you very much for talking with us today, Scott, and stay warm.
0:10:18.7 SO: Thanks, Mark. Appreciate it.