Winter Backpacking Tips

Winter backpacking can mean your footprints are the only ones out there. That adds to the beauty of the experience, but additionally to the danger. Alone and in a cold environment, it’s crucial to know what to do in an tragedy adversity. Learning a few simple cold weather survival capabilities can save your life.

Fire Making

Imagine slipping into a stream and soaking everything with you, when you are more than a day from the nearest road and it’s below freezing out. What would you do? come out a fire, for sure, but can you?

Always carry rainproof matches, and practice beginning a fire in the cold BEFORE you go winter backpacking. Learn which tinders work even when wet. Birch bark, for example, will burn when wet, and so will sap from pines and spruces. You may have only minutes before your fingers get too cold to operate, so speed is of the essence.

Winter Backpacking – Survival Shelters

You’ll possibly have a tent with you, but you still would like to learn shelter building using snow blocks. occasionally you can stomp out blocks without tools, utilizing your feet, and then lift them from beneath. Just play around in your backyard until you get the hang of it. In an tragedy adversity, or if the weather turns highly cold, you would like to put your tent behind a wall of snow blocks, to stop the wind.

If it isn’t raining, a rapid survival shelter for warmth is a pile of dry leaves, grass, broken ferns or other plants. I once amassed enough dried grass from a frozen swamp in thirty minutes to come to a pile many feet thick. I slept warmly in the center of it (half the insulating grass above, half below) with just a jacket, regardless below freezing temperatures.

Staying Dry

You may be wet and warm when it far below freezing, as long as you are active. The moment you stop moving, anyhow, you come out to lose your body heat. Once you get chilled by ways of, it is complicated to get warm again. Hypothermia (a reduced body temperature) kills numerous people once a year.

If you get wet, try to get dry before you go to sleep. Put dry clothes on if you have them, and use a fire to dry any wet clothes. previously in the day, you can be able to hang damp clothes on your pack to dry in the sun. Often once it is coldest, the air is dryer.

Try not to sweat. Adjust your layers, removing and adding shirts, sweaters and jackets as needed to keep from getting too hot or too cold. Sweat, and clothes damp with sweat, will cause you to lose body heat quick once you stop moving. hold on dry to hold on warm.

There are numerous other cold weather survival capabilities that you would like to learn. (You can produce heat by eating fatty foods, for example.) You do not need to know hundreds of capabilities and formulas, but why not learn a couple of basics, like the ones above, before your next winter backpacking trip?