Snow Camping

Generally the first question I get when I tell people I went snow camping is "were you cold?" which I guess makes sense but to me also indicates a latent fear that many people seem to have about freezing to death.

The answer is no, not if you dress appropriately, which we all did thanks to great preparation from the group leader Steve Harrington. Steve is a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) instructor as well as a wilderness first responder and member of the US ski patrol so we were in very good hands during the entire trip.

We had a nice eclectic group of 7 folks on the trip and we had many laughs and a lot of fun. We were out for 3 days and 2 nights in the snow.

We snowshoed about 3 miles back into the mountains in Bear Valley CA.

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There was about 6-8 feet of snow on the ground when we went in and found a campsite. We were on the southwest side of the lake you can see in the map above. If you put it into terrain view you can see Inspiration point - we hike up to that ridge on the second day.

The first day we spent most of our time making camp which involved clearing and stamping areas for our tents, digging a nifty snow kitchen complete with cooking area and bench seats all made of snow, and digging a snow cave. There are pictures of all of those things as well as the Igloo that was start and finished on the second day.

When one is active it actually does not take that many layers to stay warm even in the snow. So we became practiced at layering down for activity and layering up for times when we were sitting around. Steve guided everyone to think 30 minutes ahead in terms of managing layers because it is much easier to stay warm than get warm again and this worked very well.

Probably the biggest issue for everyone was hands and feet or the extremities in general. When cooking or doing other activities it was often necessary to take your hands out of your gloves and that was when they started to get cold, touching cold metal of the pans, stove or other things.

There are many more details regarding the mini-classes Steve gave us as well as the hikes. I will fill in more details in my next blog entry as I have to cut this one short at the moment.

In the mean time here are some links to some of the pictures from the trip, enjoy! http://picasaweb.google.com/Sheueling.Shantz/SnowCamping20080315?authkey=9hEI3LoFBiM

http://picasaweb.google.com/scottp100/2008SnowCamping