Listen as Scott chats with North Shore Radio host, Mark Abrahamson, about how to sleep warmly while camping in any weather, including the frigidly cold northwoods Winter nights!
Pack & Paddle: Sleeping Warmly While Camping Transcript
0:00:00.0 Mark: WTIP's feature, Pack and Paddle, with Scott Oeth, is up next. Scott is a registered Maine Guide, and Eagle Scout, and Minnesota Master Naturalist. He's an instructor for the Okpik National Cold Weather Leaders School. He joins us now by phone. Welcome, Scott.
0:00:16.6 Scott Oeth: Good morning, Mark.
0:00:17.9 Mark: Very suitable subject for this month as we go into the fall: How to sleep warmly when camping in the cold. Okay, talk to us about it.
0:00:26.3 SO: Yeah, I gotta tell you, I'm looking forward it, Mark. I just got back from a survival instructor program down in the Smoky Mountains, and it was hot and sticky, and I'm laying there at night and trying to fall sleep. I am looking forward to crisp, cool fall nights, and one of my favorite things is getting out there in the winter. That said, boy, there's nothing worse than a cold, miserable night and just shivering and counting down the minutes and the hours until sunrise. And so I've had a few of those in my past, I don't wanna repeat them, and I don't wish that on anyone, so I spend a lot of time thinking about how to sleep warmly in the cold, and it can be done. And there's a Minnesota author, back in the '50s and '60s, Calvin Rutstrum, he's one of my favorites, a master of old-time woodcraft, and he wrote a book with the perfect title called Paradise Below Zero. And I love that, and I think it can be found out there, but there is some skill, there's some technique, and there's some gear that needs to come into play.
0:01:25.9 SO: So the first thing I think about is preparing and practicing, and preparing mentally. You need to research and understand this. You don't wanna jump into cold weather camping, whether it's just fall season or actually in the midst of winter, without doing your homework, and understanding how you need to prepare yourself and what type of gear you need. And it also is mentally, psychologically building up your comfort level. Without that, I've found... When I'm taking people on winter camping trips, we do a lot of pre-work because otherwise, there's this natural sense of impending doom when you're out there on a winter night or even a cold fall night, and the sun's going down, and you're feeling the temperature just dropping. So practicing at home and knowing what to expect, but physically, a couple of key things. You want your body to be well-fed. This is not a time to be on a diet. You have my permission slip to eat high calorie meals, eat fatty meals, and get some... Really stoke the boiler, get some coal in the furnace there, 'cause that's what's gonna keep you warm.
0:02:27.5 SO: And stay well hydrated, and that doesn't mean caffeine, that doesn't mean alcohol. Those things do not help you. In fact, they can hinder quite a bit in the cold. So you want enough fluids. There's a bit of a balance there, 'cause nature's call comes around, but you want your body to be well-hydrated. That helps the blood flow and helps you stay warm. And go to bed warm. So physically, a lot of people tend to hunch over, shrivel up, suck themselves inwards. They're getting cold, cold, cold, and they say, "I'm gonna go to bed, I'm cold." You need to warm up, so get active, go on a night hike, go skiing, saw wood, shovel snow. There's always some camp chores like that to get the body warmed up. You wanna go into bed warm.
0:03:06.6 SO: And then one more thing in terms of preparation, you need to understand what you're dealing with here and the mechanisms of heat loss. So you're thinking about conduction, and that's touching something cold. Heat loss to the ground is a big issue. Convection, wind blowing by and stealing the warmth, a layer of warm air around you, so you need to think about protecting against that. In cold weather camping, pumping warm air out of your bag when you roll around is a primary issue. You need to think about how to seal that up and keep that trapped in. We're always radiating heat off, and that's just a matter of insulating ourselves. And then a couple of really tricky things with cold weather camping is evaporation and respiration. Moisture management is key. So you don't want to get wet breath freezing in your bag, and you need to understand that even if it doesn't seem like it in the cold, perspiration is a really big issue. And you can sweat, whether you notice it or it's imperceptible, into your bag and that can freeze in your bag and degrade the insulating qualities of your sleeping bag.
0:04:05.4 Mark: So then equipment seems pretty critical for some of those moisture issues, correct?
0:04:11.4 SO: Yeah, equipment's... We're a tropical beast, we're meant to run around at 98.6 degrees, give or take a few. And so if we're going into the cold, we need some equipment to help us out, and the equipment to fight those mechanisms of heat loss, and then knowing how to use that equipment. So the number one question I get, people ask me all the time, and I know I guide winter camping trips, so I gotta read this stuff, I've written it, "What kind of sleeping bag should I get?" And that's an important question. The type of sleeping bag, the temperature rating, the design, those are important factors, they're very important, but I really encourage people to think of a sleep system, and you can beef up almost any sleeping bag out there.
0:04:50.0 SO: I can take a summer weight bag and add to it and think about how we'd manage it to really add 20 degrees, 30 degrees of warmth, depending on how far you go. So an easy route, but an actually expensive one, is just to go out and buy an Arctic-rated sleeping bag and a sleeping pad with a very high R value, insulated value. Nothing wrong with that. There's some wonderful equipment out there if you go to high-end outdoors shops, but that equipment tends to be very expensive and a lot of people, I think you need to look and say how often are you really gonna use this? And even though I camp year round, and I lead winter trips, my warmest sleeping bag's only rated a zero. And I'm often sleeping at 20, 30 below or colder, so it's really how you build that up.
0:05:38.7 Mark: And as far as... So those bags that are rated for a really low temperature, how do they deal with moisture? How do you get that moisture out of the bag and into the air? And also in your tent, I've actually had frost on the inside of my tent and dripping from the roof with moisture in the winter and late fall.
0:05:57.8 SO: Yep, condensation is a big issue, and moisture management's a big issue, so it's a fine balance. You wanna go to bed warm, you want your body warmed up, and I am an advocate of wearing proper clothing to bed to boost your temperature rating, but you don't want so much that you're sweating into the bag excessively. That's the first thing, is trying to find the right balance there. And I actually often have people... And this is what I do myself, we use two sleeping bags when it's very cold. So more moderate temperatures like fall where it's cold, cool, maybe it's adding a blanket or adding a bivvy cover or something like that, but in deep cold autumn, usually using one sleeping bag stacked inside the other. The moisture management, there's a few different techniques. Some people actually do what's called a vapor barrier liner, so they maybe wear a thin base layer and then have a waterproof bag that they climb inside of. The idea is they keep all that moisture next to them instead of going into the insulation or sleeping bag. That works, but not a lot of people are excited about the idea of sleeping in plastic bags or a nylon sack, but that would let the condensation just come out up the top.
0:07:05.9 SO: What I tend to do is... You need to understand that your body is about 98.6. It's warm and moist, it's pumping out that moisture, it's gonna hit a frost point at some point where it hits the outside air. So having two sleeping bags lets it move through the inner bag it'll hit that frost point somewhere near the outer bag, or I know we've talked about this a little bit before, having a bivvy bag or a Gore-Tex shell outside of your sleeping bag, that will help let the moisture pass all the way through your sleeping bags to that frost layer, and that's where the condensation will end. In terms of in your tent, keeping it well-ventilated, a little candle lantern can help burn off some of the frost, or what's become popular now, there's a resurgence in traditional hot tent winter camping, where people are using tents made of lightweight cotton canvas with a wood burning stove. That makes life so much easier. That burns off the frost and those tents breathe, and that's luxury compared to the cold camping as they call it.
0:08:08.5 Mark: Well, let's just mention, what are some of the joys of camping out in the cold? Because there are a lot of joys, I've had some great experiences winter camping and late season camping, there's some great joys with it.
0:08:21.7 SO: For sure. First of all, it's beautiful out there, you get to see Northern Lights and you hear wolves howling across the lake, and even if you're further South, it's a very beautiful time of the year, so I like that. There's solitude, there's very few people. Our parks and our forests have been very crowded, understandably, people have been looking to get outside and be active, but in the winter, that falls off very quickly, there's very few hardy souls that are willing to be out there and spend the night out. I find oftentimes, you don't have to go nearly as far to have that peace and solitude you're looking for. And it's not just people, there's no bugs out there, which is pretty nice, but I think one of the big things that people look for, especially people that are signing up to come along with me on trips, is the sense of adventure. They want that challenge. There's an art and a science to winter camping or sleeping out in the cold, and people are often very proud of it. They'll record, they'll remember what their lowest temperature was, and it's another way of testing your outdoor skill, to sleep comfortably out at zero or well below zero.
0:09:27.7 Mark: Now, if we're looking for resources about equipment and about winter camping, you have some suggestions?
0:09:33.9 SO: Sure, there are some great books out there. The Boy Scouts have a... It's almost a pamphlet, it's called OKPIK: Cold-Weather Camping, that's the outline that we've used with the cold-weather program, out at the Boundary Waters. That is an excellent basic outline for how to manage your body and how to stay warm in the cold. So the next level up, NOLS, the National Outdoor Leadership School, they have a book simply called Winter Camping, excellent, excellent book. And two of my favorite, that are more of that traditional hot tent winter camping, Calvin Rutstrum's Paradise Below Zero, and then out of Maine, Garrett Conover wrote a book called The Snow Walker's Companion. Those two are fun and inspirational as well as the nuts and bolts. Those are great. Here out in Minnesota for over 20 years, there's been an event called the Winter Camping Symposium, their website has a forum now that has just a wealth of information from avid winter campers. That's a great one. At bullmoosepatrol.com, I've written a lot about cold weather skills and we intend to do quite a bit more, coming up soon. BullMoosePatrol.com folks, follow us there.
0:10:36.7 Mark: We are talking with Scott Oeth, you can follow his adventures at www.bullmoosepatrol.com. Scott, it's always a delight to talk to you, just gives me the itch to get out there and camp. Anything else that you'd like to add this morning?
0:10:52.6 SO: I would really encourage people to give it a try, start small. I do a lot of testing on my deck in my backyard. And build up your skills, test your gear, test your systems, what you're gonna use for a pad, what type of clothing you're gonna wear, and experiment as the temperatures get colder and colder. We live in this region. There's no sense to stay cooped up inside half the year, so learn the skills then get out there and enjoy it. It's a lot of fun.
0:11:18.6 Mark: Thank you very much for talking with us this morning, Scott.
0:11:20.7 SO: Thanks, Mark.