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From: [email-masked] (Joseph Rudolph Gerber)
Newsgroups: misc.survivalism
Subject: Re: Very cold weather survival.
Date: 3 Oct 1994 14:43:57 -0400
Organization: Project GLUE, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
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Last January I spent two nights in the Sierras, camping on top of 3 feet
( one meter) of snow.  Don't ask me _why_ I did this, :) but my partner
and I snowshoed in about half a mile from the nearest paved road,
pitched a tent that was not rated for the weather, and crawled into the
warmest sleeping bags available.  Here are some off-the-cuff recollections
of what I learned.

I don't know what the temperature was, but it was COLD.  And being on top
of snow is a problem.  My sleeping bag was rated down to -25F, and it's
synthetic stuff that stays warm if it gets wet.  However, it does not
work well when you set it on top of three feet of snow.

We put a space blanket under the tent, and even so, I was somewhat cold in
my bag on top of that.  Not too cold to sleep, but too cold to sleep
well.  Adding a one-inch-thick foam pad between my bag and  the tent
floor made a WORLD of difference.

Back when I was on the search and rescue team, they always told us to
put two people into one sleeping bag to survive in cold weather situtations.
THIS DOES NOT WORK WITH MUMMY_STYLE SLEEPING BAGS, unless the bag is much
bigger than it needs to be for the person using it, which kinda defeats
the no-extra-air-in-the-bag concept that I thought was central to the
mummy bag.  What does work, at least somewhat, is to have two people and
two bags.  if the bags zip together, you only have to worry about
keeping the hole at the top of the bag plugged up with
spare clothes, so as not to let any air in.  Then stay close to that
other person!

If the bags do not zip together, you can unzip both bags,
hug the other person, and pull both bags tight around the pair of you.
It would help to have some blankets around, otherwise you may never get
all the gaps in this structure plugged up.  Don't forget those foam pads!
you will want one under each person.  This actually worked alright, and
was necessary one night when it got _really_ cold, below what my
partner's bag was good for.  So even though we had one "useless" bag,
neither of us froze.  And we're still speaking to each other! *8-)

One more thing comes to mind.  I am always a proponent of one-match
fire lighting in situations when you have ample time to prepare the tinder
you need to make this work.  However, any small, easily combustible
stuff I could have found was UNDER the three feet of snow.  All I could get
was branches the size of my little finger and larger... and there were two
_very_ cold people wanting a hot meal.  In such a situation I believe in
getting a fire going *fast*, using whatever tricks are available.
So despite the protests I knew I would get from my eagle-scoout friends,
I poured stove fuel all over an icy rock, lit it, and watched that all
the ice melted.  Then I pile up wood, poured _more_ stove fuel all over it,
and had a fire rather quickly.  I have also seen people burn wet-wood with
a road-flare.  Moral:  There is no such thing as "cheating" when you're
hungry; pack the fossil-fuel & road flares!

Joe

Oh yeah, REI snow-shoes make good shovels for digging in ice and snow.

And some critters can smell your food when it's burried under a foot of snow,
and they _will_ dig it up.  :(  I was glad I'd hung all but a few items from a
tree. :)