Chilled Christmas Camping in the Minus 20's... Brrrr!

Hello

I hope your holidays have been treating you well and that Santa gave you everything you'd hoped for. We had a rough start to the holiday weekend but it ended on a pleasant, if not very cold note. I would have waited to update the blog for a couple of weeks after posting two updates back to back, however I felt I needed to get it down on paper (at least the digital kind) before my fingers lost their memory from the weekend. Suffice it to say that after a very snowy Christmas day and a dark, gray Friday, we needed to get out of Anchorage.

Since I gave Chris a -20 degree rated Mountain Hardware sleeping bag for Christmas, we opted to do a little gear testing. REI would be proud. I have a somewhat less bulky Sierra Designs women's specific bag but over the years I've tested it to it's limit and know how warm it really is, which is adequate for sub-zero temps. Just adequate.

The temperatures Friday night had a steady downhill drop and by Saturday, they plummeted down to minus 25 or 30 over night. Either way, our brief expedition into the ice box was on. With our minds set on cooling our heals under the stars, hoping for a good auroral display, we set out quietly 30 miles north of Anchorage, then 10 miles up the curvy, snow covered road into the Eklutna lake and glacier system in the Chugach mountains. Once at the trail head after our final gear check, we set off on foot a mile and half up the trail in the dark to find a good lakeside spot to camp. Mind you, the lake is VERY frozen over, but the gentle slopes of the banks make for relatively flat and protected camp spots. There are a couple of notables worth mentioning for this type of camping. One, this is not the type of camping for the tender footed or warmth loving souls from places much farther South. The other is that this is a relatively remote, unimproved and roadless area. No outhouses, no phone service, no nothing - just the brilliance of the night sky in the Chugach.

It is also necessary to say that we are well equipped for such outings. I DO NOT recommend trying a winter outing in the conditions we were in unless you are fully prepared. This is no joke and people who are unprepared can and do freeze to death. When the ambient outside air temperature falls just below freezing (+32 degrees F), the human body still can handle things with relative ease. Engines still start, malleable plastics still keep their form and suppleness, metal still holds itself in tact and most things continue on without much trouble. When the ambient outside air temperature falls to the single digits, a few things start to suffer. Engines become sluggish in starting, malleable plastics start to lose their softness, ice becomes less dense and more brittle, but still, with a warm layer of clothing, the human body remains warm.

Now... drop from the single digits to the minus 20's and minus 30's. Something happens at these temperatures that forces the body to sit up, pay attention and take note. Think quickly, think correctly, be decisive and don't dilly dally! You'll freeze quickly. Exposed skin takes minutes (not hours) to show signs of frost bite, Hypothermia is practically guaranteed, plastics become rigid, basic cloth becomes stiff, metal becomes very brittle, easily shattered by too much force and engines just don't start if left for more than a few hours. Our decision to go out into the woods was not taken lightly or planned haphazardly. So, please, DON'T try this on a whim (not that many sane people would, but still).

Once we double checked the gear, suited up the dogs and finished hiking in, we picked out our spot. We had to break some fresh trail to get to it, which involved quite a bit of effort. The snow is about 3 feet deep and it hides traps. Downed trees, buried willows, fallen branches, and all things that succumb to winter are hidden in the snow. Once we arrived at the spot, laid out a trail to it, Chris went on a mad wood gathering mission to supplement the wood that we had packed in. It's work. Hard work and it's exhausting. While he built up our wood cache, I started getting things in order- digging out a pad for the tarp and pitching the tent.

The tarp keeps snow melt from leaking through the bottom of the tent when warm bodies are in the tent. I mentioned that plastics and metal become different beasts in super cold weather. The tent is made of a synthetic cloth, A.K.A Plastic and the tent poles are metal which translates to a lot of work for basic set up. In summer, setting up the camp takes me about one minute. Our tent is practically a pop-up tent, light weight and very easy to set up under normal conditions, but minus 20's and minus 30's are not normal. It took me nearly 35 minutes to stretch the plastic-like tent material into shape and place the poles through the sleeves, being mindful not to over stress them and avoid snapping them. No tent = no shelter = BAD, VERY BAD.

All movement in this kind of cold must be deliberate. If you must remove your gloves for anything requiring fine muscle movement like lacing boots or zipping a bag or some other non-glove friendly activity, you do so at grave risk to your digits. Exposed skin is not safe. So, we stack things, meaning we take care of the stuff that you can do with gloves and stage the small stuff in a line, carefully planning how long each task will take. Thinking quickly, thinking correctly, no oopses and don't drop anything in the snow. Snow eats small objects. Even with a blazing fire, it only takes a few feet of distance to realize the invasiveness of the cold. Getting wet shoes or wet anything can be disastrous as nearly all liquid (sweat, breath, snow melt) freezes solid in minutes. We even attempted to take pictures, but the camera froze and refused to work.

So after a fun evening of fire building, steak, chicken and playing with the dogs who were fine but otherwise unamused by the cold, we took one last good look at the spectacularly clear skies and tucked ourselves in for the night. Hmmm, this is where it gets interesting. Our tent is a two person tent. For warmth, we opted to invite the dogs (Zev at 145 pounds and Lax at 125 pounds), read: 4 adult sized bodies in a space designed to snugly fit 2 people. Well, it was crowded to say the least. At one point, Chris asked if the dogs came with detachable legs so that we could roll them around without their limbs and use them as body pillows. Later in the night, Chris started laughing out loud in some contorted knot. He blurted out that is was really good there were no bears this time of year because his bag was to complicated to get out of quickly. He said in the summer, if a bear attacked the tent while he was in his new bright orange mummy bag, that he'd simply be a twinky for the bear and would just give up. Lax and Zev somehow managed to find a place for themselves becoming hopelessly knotted in our legs and bags. It was cold inside the tent, but quite pleasant compared to the outside air.

Of course, there is that inevitable pre-dawn pee that occurs no matter how little liquid you consumed before bed. Trust me when I say that I had to think very hard about leaving the warmth of my bag and tangled dogs to venture outside long enough to strip down to pee. In fact, I was calculating how long it would take for me to accomplish the task and get back in the tent before freezing you know what beyond repair. Again- think quickly and correctly. Women have it much tougher in the cold than men do for obvious reasons. To his credit, Chris just giggled and said nothing of my rushed expedition outside the tent. He knew what was coming his way when he had to leave the tent. There was easily a 50 degree temperature difference between the outside air and body-heated tent which was still below 32 degrees, noted by the frozen water bottle that started off as liquid in the tent. So with that we managed to get a little sleep, waking up at about 11am to start the trek back to the truck.

Emerging from the tent in the morning, at the very coldest part of the pre-dawn morning (Eklutna doesn't get a sunrise in winter) we went into what can only be described as cold-shock. We were both simultaneously dazed by the severe cold. It hit us like a giant fist full of ice. My boots had been inadvertently kicked outside the tent when we were on our early AM pee expeditions and by the time we woke up, they were frozen. I mean, not a little frozen but rather cryogenically frozen into solid blocks that resembled a bronzed baby shoe. Bronze may have been more malleable.

I couldn't leave the tent without shoes so I sat on them for over an hour having Chris stomp on them periodically to loosen them up. All in all I spent a full hour arduously laboring to simply put the damn boots on which resulted in bruising the top of my foot from having to force it to bend around the frozen boot. Knowing I had to hike out, I felt inspired to move very quickly through breaking down camp, ignoring my freezing toes. I started humming "Margaritaville" to lull me into thinking I was only a few miles from Key West rather than on a frozen glacier fed lake in winter, in Alaska, in dim twilight, with no real sun and frozen boots. So much for my imagination.

Our dogs were shivering in the cold teetering from foot to foot to avoid standing on any one point for too long. After only one night in the bitter cold, it was obvious that poor Lax, the elder of the two pooches, would not be going on the next winter outing. It was just too hard on him. Zev on the other hand was cold, but fine. We all hiked back to the trailhead and parking lot to the truck that wouldn't start at first. When it finally did start, we laughed about the cold, how pretty the sky was and how much we really loved the simple beauty of it all. We may not venture back out in these kind of temperatures soon, but we enjoyed (I think that's the right word) the experience and on some level needed the experience to face us with ourselves and gain a new appreciation of the fact that mother nature creates creatures who actually thrive in such cold.

Last note: The damage report... My finger tips & toes are a little frost nipped and have not fully regained color or proper feeling. I was unable to wear my usual business attire (high heels) to work as I thought it would just be mean to my toes to try and force them into a wedge shaped shoe. Fuzzy slippers did the trick today and my boss is fine with it. Chris's finger tips have all but returned to normal and most of his toes are only slightly frost-nipped. His left big toe on the other hand is mildly frost-bitten and may take a few days to recover. My nose, lips and cheeks have the appearance of mild sunburn, but without sun it is impossible to get sun-burned so we'll call it frost-burned.

With that... I'll duck away and get back to work.

Vered

(...and a chilled Little Zev, too)