Reconsidering winter camping
My tent was up and I’d finished dinner when the snow began. The flakes floated softly through the pines and gathered on my jacket as I brushed my teeth before crawling into my sleeping bag for the night.
The nights I spent this February at the Adirondack Mountain Club’s Wilderness Campground at Heart Lake near Lake Placid were my first time solo winter camping. The Wilderness Campground is a kind learning environment for a newbie winter camper. My car was nearby and there was even a heated bathroom a short walk away.
Many years ago, someone told me not to go into the Adirondack High Peaks after October because the weather was too unpredictable. I followed that rule for a few years without questioning it. I broke the rule on an October day on Gothics Peak when the sun was shining and the valleys below were awash in fall colors. I wondered then what other unquestioned restrictions in my life I’d accepted, what other things I was missing.
My first night at Heart Lake, I failed to vent my tent and didn’t think it mattered until I woke up sweating in the middle of the night. In the morning, condensation where the warm air inside the tent met the cold from the outside had formed on the tent walls and dripped onto my sleeping bag – a rookie mistake. I lamented my oversight until I opened my tent flap to the orange glow of morning and woods painted with fresh powder.
After I broke the seal on hiking after October, I broke other seals. Snowshoeing the High Peaks in winter and then camping later and later into fall. My breakthrough came when my wife, Gillian, enrolled me in a winter backpacking session of the Adirondack Mountain Club’s Winter Mountaineering School.
Other than my tent, nearly all my gear for Winter Mountaineering School was rented. Eight of us, six students and two instructors, spent two nights near a frozen waterfall on the shoulder of Wright Peak. We climbed in the Macintyre Range, we hacked ice to get water from a stream and we ate meals on benches we’d made in the snow. On our last night, the thermometer was pegged at -20, but I slept as well as I’d ever slept. When we woke in the morning to a crystal-clear dawn, I didn’t want to leave.
A few Christmases after Winter Mountaineering School, Gillian gave me a winter camp stove and then a few Christmases later, a winter sleeping bag. I had no more excuses to avoid winter camping; I had everything I needed except time and will.
My second night at Heart Lake was snowless and I remembered to vent my tent to avoid condensation. Summer is a warm recess but winter is a classroom that is always teaching, and its lessons aren’t always gentle.
That night, I followed the beam of my headlamp to an open place by the lake and turned off the light. The night sky unfolded in a riot of stars. My breath rose in a cloud between the stars and me. The longer I stood, the
more stars became visible — light I couldn’t see before.
You might call me a romantic, but romantics don’t necessarily see things that aren’t there. Romantics might be the ones willing to take in more, even if that means standing by a frozen lake in the cold while the universe presents itself overhead in all its frozen splendor.
I’ve been told often that I “love winter.” I’m not sure if that’s true — I like a bike ride on a warm day as much as the next guy. But I try to embrace what’s in front of me whenever possible and for part of our year, that’s embracing winter. We are northerners, that’s what we do. Looking at winter as an unpleasant chore we need to endure makes our world smaller and limits what we see. It doesn’t reduce winter, it reduces us.