Ultralight winter camping?

I just read a report on a winter NOLS outing and they carried 50-lb
packs and pulled 50-lb sleds and had 3-man cooking teams, etc.

That was the load.

Then there was the workload. These folks were shoveling snow for HOURS
a day. Shoveling for an hour to make camp-pads. Shoveling for 4 hours
to make a quinzee. The report made it seem like even more shoveling
than I describe.

Now, they were doing mountain stuff but it seems like overkill to me.

I wonder if there are ways to even make snow shelters, even in the
mountains, that take less time, for one thing. And ways to set up a
camp area in the snow that take less time, for another thing. And ways
of carrying far less weight for a last thing.

I see people bike touring with the kitchen sink and I know that I no
longer need those kinds of burdens. I don't even have any ultralight
gear. If I take only what I use/need for a week for 3-season
conditions on a bike I only need 20 lbs, max. Ah, but that's not
hauling all my own food.

Somehow it seems that hauling a couple sets of wool clothes, parka,
booties and an extra-puffy sleeping bag plus a buncha food picked with
weight in mind just shouldn't weigh 50 lbs a person or require "teams"
for the cooking. (Bring a canister stove for some uses, but add a twig
stove to the mix, for instance.)

Ideas, links?

--JP

jeff potter wrote:
I just read a report on a winter NOLS outing and they carried 50-lb
packs and pulled 50-lb sleds and had 3-man cooking teams, etc.

That was the load.

Then there was the workload. These folks were shoveling snow for HOURS
a day. Shoveling for an hour to make camp-pads. Shoveling for 4 hours
to make a quinzee. The report made it seem like even more shoveling
than I describe.

Now, they were doing mountain stuff but it seems like overkill to me.

Almost certainly so.

I wonder if there are ways to even make snow shelters, even in the
mountains, that take less time, for one thing. And ways to set up a
camp area in the snow that take less time, for another thing. And ways
of carrying far less weight for a last thing.

Digging a proper snow cave does take a long time, but an emergency style
shelter, using the skis and poles across/atop the shelter and with a
small lightweight tarp to make it snowtight can be done very quickly indeed.

Somehow it seems that hauling a couple sets of wool clothes, parka,
booties and an extra-puffy sleeping bag plus a buncha food picked with
weight in mind just shouldn't weigh 50 lbs a person or require "teams"
for the cooking. (Bring a canister stove for some uses, but add a twig
stove to the mix, for instance.)

Jeff Lowe, who used to design climbing gear and then shifted to
long-distance trekking and photography (_all_ serious photographers
carry their cameras in some sort of Lowe bag/backpack, right?) figured
out that by reducing weight, you could get _much_ longer in each day.

When climbing big walls this is a really critical issue:

As soon as you need to carry anything except the very minimum gear, your
climbing speed suffers:

One example from personal experience: Back in 1981 nearly all teams were
still taking two days to climb the NW face of Half Dome, spending the
night on Big Sandy ledge, after pitch 17.

This allowed them to be rested and fresh before the next pitches which
are the hardest on the route, and they would usually top out in the
early afternoon of the second day.

July 1981 was a very worm period in Yosemite, so my friend Dag and I
realized that we would need a lot of liquids to be able to climb the
wall while exposed to the sun. Instead we decided to strip our gear to
the minimum, keeping just a single small daypack to carry our sneakers
and some crackers. We also simulclimbed some of the easiest pitches in
the first half of the route.

The end result was that we started about half an hour after sunrise,
flew up the wall alternating leads all the way (we had a small double
set of wire nuts and Friends, so the follower would just leave the
protection gear on the rope, letting the former leader put it back in
place during the belaying of the next pitch), and overtook three guys
who had spent the night on Big Sandy.

We topped out after a little more than 6 hours, just as the sun was
starting to hit the wall in earnest. :-)

I've done exactly the same in wintertime, on all our Telemark trips, but
not to the extent of my father who would take a hacksaw to his
toothbrush to reduce the handle length. He also replaced his wallet with
a very small (sandwitch-size) clear plastic bag.

We always had a pre-trip meeting about who would carry which parts of
the common gear, like two spare ski tips, which waxes and klisters, a
gas-burning wax heater etc. I seem to recall we also decided on two
tooth-paste carriers, as well as two copies of every paper map needed
and a pair of compasses plus a small tool kit, sufficient to replace a
broken binding.

I never carried more than about 10 kg on those trips.

Terje
--
- Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

On Feb 9, 11:32*am, jeff potter wrote:
I just read a report on a winter NOLS outing and they carried 50-lb
packs and pulled 50-lb sleds and had 3-man cooking teams, etc.

That was the load.

Then there was the workload. These folks were shoveling snow for HOURS
a day. Shoveling for an hour to make camp-pads. Shoveling for 4 hours
to make a quinzee. The report made it seem like even more shoveling
than I describe.

Now, they were doing mountain stuff but it seems like overkill to me.

I wonder if there are ways to even make snow shelters, even in the
mountains, that take less time, for one thing. And ways to set up a
camp area in the snow that take less time, for another thing. And ways
of carrying far less weight for a last thing.

I see people bike touring with the kitchen sink and I know that I no
longer need those kinds of burdens. I don't even have any ultralight
gear. If I take only what I use/need for a week for 3-season
conditions on a bike I only need 20 lbs, max. Ah, but that's not
hauling all my own food.

Somehow it seems that hauling a couple sets of wool clothes, parka,
booties and an extra-puffy sleeping bag plus a buncha food picked with
weight in mind just shouldn't weigh 50 lbs a person or require "teams"
for the cooking. (Bring a canister stove for some uses, but add a twig
stove to the mix, for instance.)

Ideas, links?

--JP

Interesting that you bring up the shelters: I was about to post about
this, too.

I guess it depends where you are traveling, for how long, and on the
weather. In Deso we slept under a tarp tent supported by our skis. The
tarp weighed ~1 lb (much better than my 9 lb tent). It was 10...20F at
night, but, however, there was no wind at all. I wonder how
comfortable we would've been under the tarp with a wind. So, a snow
shelter is probably the way to go in extreme weather.

My standard summer pack (where I dont' expect the temp to much go
below freezing at night) is ~30 lbs. Add a snow shovel, a heavy parka,
heavy pants, booties, heavy gloves, heavy balaclava, heavy hat, 2X
fuel (since it takes energy to melt snow), 1.5 x more food as a fuel
for your body - and a heavier pack to support of this - and the weight
adds up quickly.

BTW, propane gas refuses to work below 20F. So it's alcohol or
kerosene. Setting a cooking fire in snow requires shoveling, otherwise
the whole setup collapses down.

I decided to build a quinzhee for an experiment this past weekend.
This was at Royal Gorge, the Sierras. I worked alone. It took me ~1 hr
15 min to make a pile of snow ~5 feet high and 7 feet wide. Since I
dug the snow around it, it ended up being ~7 feet high counting from
the base of the trench. It was hard non-stop work, but not too hard to
prevent me from doing a 30K workout afterwards. But after skiing for a
day with a hard pack I doubt I could've worked that fast.

I realized that the smaller the shelter the better (i.e. you have to
go with the possible smallest size to fit in - I wish this was the
case with American real estate, too) - since the amount of snow you
have to shovel goes up with the cube of diameter of the shelter.

Now, I did not have the proper clothing on to dig it out (I was piling
snow in lycra, I was soaking wet from the snow), so I left it at the
pile stage. I bet it would take me easily 1 more hr of messy work to
dig it out. Also, I likely shoulda done more piling than I did, since
I did not bother packing the pile. I.e. if I had tried to dig it out
it likely would've collapsed, so, proper packing would've brought the
time up by a factor of 2.

Bottom line - you need at least 2 people for a Q: the amount of time
goes down by a factor of 2, while 2 people need only a ~20%? larger Q
due to its round shape (theoretically).

I also realized that in places with a lot of snow, like the Sierras,
digloos are much faster to build. I decided to do the Q since I was
intrigued by the whole idea.

Jeff, how about a ONE ounce (30 gram) stove??
I have the "penny stove" described here.... HOME MADE from my own materials
here at home.
http://www.minibulldesign.com/
Boils my water, makes my coffee, cooks my pasta and oatmeal very well.

try 18 pounds MAX for a short 2-3 day trip for me !!!

JKal.

wrote in message
...
On Feb 9, 11:32 am, jeff potter wrote:
I just read a report on a winter NOLS outing and they carried 50-lb
packs and pulled 50-lb sleds and had 3-man cooking teams, etc.

That was the load.

Then there was the workload. These folks were shoveling snow for HOURS
a day. Shoveling for an hour to make camp-pads. Shoveling for 4 hours
to make a quinzee. The report made it seem like even more shoveling
than I describe.

Now, they were doing mountain stuff but it seems like overkill to me.

I wonder if there are ways to even make snow shelters, even in the
mountains, that take less time, for one thing. And ways to set up a
camp area in the snow that take less time, for another thing. And ways
of carrying far less weight for a last thing.

I see people bike touring with the kitchen sink and I know that I no
longer need those kinds of burdens. I don't even have any ultralight
gear. If I take only what I use/need for a week for 3-season
conditions on a bike I only need 20 lbs, max. Ah, but that's not
hauling all my own food.

Somehow it seems that hauling a couple sets of wool clothes, parka,
booties and an extra-puffy sleeping bag plus a buncha food picked with
weight in mind just shouldn't weigh 50 lbs a person or require "teams"
for the cooking. (Bring a canister stove for some uses, but add a twig
stove to the mix, for instance.)

Ideas, links?

--JP

Interesting that you bring up the shelters: I was about to post about
this, too.

I guess it depends where you are traveling, for how long, and on the
weather. In Deso we slept under a tarp tent supported by our skis. The
tarp weighed ~1 lb (much better than my 9 lb tent). It was 10...20F at
night, but, however, there was no wind at all. I wonder how
comfortable we would've been under the tarp with a wind. So, a snow
shelter is probably the way to go in extreme weather.

My standard summer pack (where I dont' expect the temp to much go
below freezing at night) is ~30 lbs. Add a snow shovel, a heavy parka,
heavy pants, booties, heavy gloves, heavy balaclava, heavy hat, 2X
fuel (since it takes energy to melt snow), 1.5 x more food as a fuel
for your body - and a heavier pack to support of this - and the weight
adds up quickly.

BTW, propane gas refuses to work below 20F. So it's alcohol or
kerosene. Setting a cooking fire in snow requires shoveling, otherwise
the whole setup collapses down.

I decided to build a quinzhee for an experiment this past weekend.
This was at Royal Gorge, the Sierras. I worked alone. It took me ~1 hr
15 min to make a pile of snow ~5 feet high and 7 feet wide. Since I
dug the snow around it, it ended up being ~7 feet high counting from
the base of the trench. It was hard non-stop work, but not too hard to
prevent me from doing a 30K workout afterwards. But after skiing for a
day with a hard pack I doubt I could've worked that fast.

I realized that the smaller the shelter the better (i.e. you have to
go with the possible smallest size to fit in - I wish this was the
case with American real estate, too) - since the amount of snow you
have to shovel goes up with the cube of diameter of the shelter.

Now, I did not have the proper clothing on to dig it out (I was piling
snow in lycra, I was soaking wet from the snow), so I left it at the
pile stage. I bet it would take me easily 1 more hr of messy work to
dig it out. Also, I likely shoulda done more piling than I did, since
I did not bother packing the pile. I.e. if I had tried to dig it out
it likely would've collapsed, so, proper packing would've brought the
time up by a factor of 2.

Bottom line - you need at least 2 people for a Q: the amount of time
goes down by a factor of 2, while 2 people need only a ~20%? larger Q
due to its round shape (theoretically).

I also realized that in places with a lot of snow, like the Sierras,
digloos are much faster to build. I decided to do the Q since I was
intrigued by the whole idea.

Terje, hows this for lightweight cooking?
my favorite stove !!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7yeJ...CBDE4&index=20

Go Tinny !

JKal.



"Terje Mathisen" "terje.mathisen at tmsw.no" wrote in message
news
jeff potter wrote:
I just read a report on a winter NOLS outing and they carried 50-lb
packs and pulled 50-lb sleds and had 3-man cooking teams, etc.

That was the load.

Then there was the workload. These folks were shoveling snow for HOURS
a day. Shoveling for an hour to make camp-pads. Shoveling for 4 hours
to make a quinzee. The report made it seem like even more shoveling
than I describe.

Now, they were doing mountain stuff but it seems like overkill to me.

Almost certainly so.

I wonder if there are ways to even make snow shelters, even in the
mountains, that take less time, for one thing. And ways to set up a
camp area in the snow that take less time, for another thing. And ways
of carrying far less weight for a last thing.

Digging a proper snow cave does take a long time, but an emergency style
shelter, using the skis and poles across/atop the shelter and with a small
lightweight tarp to make it snowtight can be done very quickly indeed.

Somehow it seems that hauling a couple sets of wool clothes, parka,
booties and an extra-puffy sleeping bag plus a buncha food picked with
weight in mind just shouldn't weigh 50 lbs a person or require "teams"
for the cooking. (Bring a canister stove for some uses, but add a twig
stove to the mix, for instance.)

Jeff Lowe, who used to design climbing gear and then shifted to
long-distance trekking and photography (_all_ serious photographers carry
their cameras in some sort of Lowe bag/backpack, right?) figured out that
by reducing weight, you could get _much_ longer in each day.

When climbing big walls this is a really critical issue:

As soon as you need to carry anything except the very minimum gear, your
climbing speed suffers:

One example from personal experience: Back in 1981 nearly all teams were
still taking two days to climb the NW face of Half Dome, spending the
night on Big Sandy ledge, after pitch 17.

This allowed them to be rested and fresh before the next pitches which are
the hardest on the route, and they would usually top out in the early
afternoon of the second day.

July 1981 was a very worm period in Yosemite, so my friend Dag and I
realized that we would need a lot of liquids to be able to climb the wall
while exposed to the sun. Instead we decided to strip our gear to the
minimum, keeping just a single small daypack to carry our sneakers and
some crackers. We also simulclimbed some of the easiest pitches in the
first half of the route.

The end result was that we started about half an hour after sunrise, flew
up the wall alternating leads all the way (we had a small double set of
wire nuts and Friends, so the follower would just leave the protection
gear on the rope, letting the former leader put it back in place during
the belaying of the next pitch), and overtook three guys who had spent the
night on Big Sandy.

We topped out after a little more than 6 hours, just as the sun was
starting to hit the wall in earnest. :-)

I've done exactly the same in wintertime, on all our Telemark trips, but
not to the extent of my father who would take a hacksaw to his toothbrush
to reduce the handle length. He also replaced his wallet with a very small
(sandwitch-size) clear plastic bag.

We always had a pre-trip meeting about who would carry which parts of the
common gear, like two spare ski tips, which waxes and klisters, a
gas-burning wax heater etc. I seem to recall we also decided on two
tooth-paste carriers, as well as two copies of every paper map needed and
a pair of compasses plus a small tool kit, sufficient to replace a broken
binding.

I never carried more than about 10 kg on those trips.

Terje
--
- Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

On Feb 9, 3:39*pm, "Jeff and Stephanie Kalember"
wrote:
Terje, hows this for lightweight cooking?
my favorite stove !!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7yeJ...List&p=E833C03...

Go Tinny !

JKal.

"Terje Mathisen" "terje.mathisen at tmsw.no" wrote in messagenewsLOdnV6Xd5vrCQ3UnZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d@gigan ews.com...



jeff potter wrote:
I just read a report on a winter NOLS outing and they carried 50-lb
packs and pulled 50-lb sleds and had 3-man cooking teams, etc.

That was the load.

Then there was the workload. These folks were shoveling snow for HOURS
a day. Shoveling for an hour to make camp-pads. Shoveling for 4 hours
to make a quinzee. The report made it seem like even more shoveling
than I describe.

Now, they were doing mountain stuff but it seems like overkill to me.

Almost certainly so.

I wonder if there are ways to even make snow shelters, even in the
mountains, that take less time, for one thing. And ways to set up a
camp area in the snow that take less time, for another thing. And ways
of carrying far less weight for a last thing.

Digging a proper snow cave does take a long time, but an emergency style
shelter, using the skis and poles across/atop the shelter and with a small
lightweight tarp to make it snowtight can be done very quickly indeed.

Somehow it seems that hauling a couple sets of wool clothes, parka,
booties and an extra-puffy sleeping bag plus a buncha food picked with
weight in mind just shouldn't weigh 50 lbs a person or require "teams"
for the cooking. (Bring a canister stove for some uses, but add a twig
stove to the mix, for instance.)

Jeff Lowe, who used to design climbing gear and then shifted to
long-distance trekking and photography (_all_ serious photographers carry
their cameras in some sort of Lowe bag/backpack, right?) figured out that
by reducing weight, you could get _much_ longer in each day.

When climbing big walls this is a really critical issue:

As soon as you need to carry anything except the very minimum gear, your
climbing speed suffers:

One example from personal experience: Back in 1981 nearly all teams were
still taking two days to climb the NW face of Half Dome, spending the
night on Big Sandy ledge, after pitch 17.

This allowed them to be rested and fresh before the next pitches which are
the hardest on the route, and they would usually top out in the early
afternoon of the second day.

July 1981 was a very worm period in Yosemite, so my friend Dag and I
realized that we would need a lot of liquids to be able to climb the wall
while exposed to the sun. Instead we decided to strip our gear to the
minimum, keeping just a single small daypack to carry our sneakers and
some crackers. We also simulclimbed some of the easiest pitches in the
first half of the route.

The end result was that we started about half an hour after sunrise, flew
up the wall alternating leads all the way (we had a small double set of
wire nuts and Friends, so the follower would just leave the protection
gear on the rope, letting the former leader put it back in place during
the belaying of the next pitch), and overtook three guys who had spent the
night on Big Sandy.

We topped out after a little more than 6 hours, just as the sun was
starting to hit the wall in earnest. :-)

I've done exactly the same in wintertime, on all our Telemark trips, but
not to the extent of my father who would take a hacksaw to his toothbrush
to reduce the handle length. He also replaced his wallet with a very small
(sandwitch-size) clear plastic bag.

We always had a pre-trip meeting about who would carry which parts of the
common gear, like two spare ski tips, which waxes and klisters, a
gas-burning wax heater etc. I seem to recall we also decided on two
tooth-paste carriers, as well as two copies of every paper map needed and
a pair of compasses plus a small tool kit, sufficient to replace a broken
binding.

I never carried more than about 10 kg on those trips.

Terje
--
- Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Any small container (~50 ml) can be used as an alcohol stove. Take a
tiny beaker, fill it with EtOh, and lit it. When lit, alcohol burns
slowly on the surface (as opposed to gasoline which explodes). People
use bottoms of Al soda cans as alcohols stoves.

Jeff and Stephanie Kalember wrote:
Terje, hows this for lightweight cooking?
my favorite stove !!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7yeJ...CBDE4&index=20

Go Tinny !

Very nice, but I don't see how it can be that mich lighter than the
normal spirits stoves we sometimes use here?

The main advantage is in having the reservoir separate, allowing
refilling while operational.

Terje

--
- Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

Hey, JK, those stoves look neat.

About the improv shelters, I was thinking that there might be another
approach from the start than a quinzee which might take 2 people 1+
hrs to erect (or more if you let the snow set up). To take a non-
digging approach I would think you'd need to work with the landscape
more. Same for cook stations: you'd want to find a place out of the
wind that's already cleared down to the ground. Basically, I'd think
there'd be some sorts of land and tree and stump formations in many
countrysides to have let nature do most work for you.

I suppose the skills are very good to have and that there are some
desolate moonscapes where you'd need to use them. It seems like the
mountaineers end up doing the most, hauling the most, many times
(winter especially). But there's not a mountain w/in 500 miles of me,
but plenty of winter camping.

Maybe using a tarp in combination with landforms (brush, hollers,
undercut banks) is a decent strategy in typical mixed-terrain.

I wonder what the further twists might be. I suppose there are
primitive skills resources that go into winter skills. I'm thinking of
things like heaping up piles of cattail rushes or other brush. Don't
know what comes next but I'm thinking it's not hours of sweaty
shoveling or huge loads on my back...

--JP

Double up the sleeping pads - one foam one air core then your sleeping bag
right on top of the snow.
Been there done that no problem.

JKal.


"jeff potter" wrote in message
...
Hey, JK, those stoves look neat.

About the improv shelters, I was thinking that there might be another
approach from the start than a quinzee which might take 2 people 1+
hrs to erect (or more if you let the snow set up). To take a non-
digging approach I would think you'd need to work with the landscape
more. Same for cook stations: you'd want to find a place out of the
wind that's already cleared down to the ground. Basically, I'd think
there'd be some sorts of land and tree and stump formations in many
countrysides to have let nature do most work for you.

I suppose the skills are very good to have and that there are some
desolate moonscapes where you'd need to use them. It seems like the
mountaineers end up doing the most, hauling the most, many times
(winter especially). But there's not a mountain w/in 500 miles of me,
but plenty of winter camping.

Maybe using a tarp in combination with landforms (brush, hollers,
undercut banks) is a decent strategy in typical mixed-terrain.

I wonder what the further twists might be. I suppose there are
primitive skills resources that go into winter skills. I'm thinking of
things like heaping up piles of cattail rushes or other brush. Don't
know what comes next but I'm thinking it's not hours of sweaty
shoveling or huge loads on my back...

--JP