- Joined
- Feb 28, 2007
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Hi WS&S's!
Rick, his cousin Scott and I took a 4 day weekend and did some back country camping out in Eastern, Ontario last weekend. It was a great trip but challenging due to the ever changing conditions. Our site was a 7 h drive and we left the Thursday night at about 11:00 pm driving through the night. It was pretty hellish driving through freezing rain and then dense fog on the last leg through the backcountry roads. Arriving at about 5:30 am, it was still fully dark on site so we took a 2 h nap in the truck to wait for the light. We awoke at about 8:00 am to fog + freezing rain and commenced our hike out. Open waters kept us off the lakes and flowing waters to some pretty rugged terrain and fortunately frozen wetlands. We had anticipated hiking in about 7.5 km to a remote lake site, but the driving rain and accumulating wetness of our gear forced us to deviate from the plan and we chose to set up a base camp at a much closer lake.
The rain was unexpected, being both uncharacteristic of this area at this time of year as well as out of tune with the weather forcast update just before we left. Our outerwear, optimized for dry cold kept us warm enough during the hike, but needed to be dried for the uncoming deep freeze which was predicted to come the following day. After selecting a site nestled into some white pine located off the south shore of Puzzle Lake, the rain turned to a heavy wet snow. Rick made a really great shelter, pooling our tarp resources between us. Two tarps were used to construct a communal shelter framed with wood. The basic construction was of a center pole/lean to configuration, but then Rick bolstered that with an X-pole configuration made of spring saplings to help with snow loading on the tarps. One tarp covered most of the shelter (big enough to sleep three) and a second tarp covered the front part plus provided a draping of material over the front to act as a door. Another tarp was set up as an overhead awning to give us a place free of rain and driving snow. We gathered copious amounts of firewood and commenced getting a healthy fire going to help dry out our outerwear as much as feasable knowing the deep freeze was coming soon.
Having stayed up the entire night driving, we hit bed at 6:00 pm and slept until 7:30 am - a full 13.5 h sleep! All that rain and snow played havoc with tinder availability for the rest of the trip, coating all the small twigs with a layer of ice. The first night, temperatures dropped down to -18oC but it was cozy in the shelter perhaps contributed by all the hot air coming from Rick's back side....We woke up to a good ice glaze but fortunately we had stacked up a good supply of firewood from the previous evening efforts to light our breakfast fire. Under these conditions, primitive fire techniques were replaced with modern ones. Zippo and bic lighters and in some cases artificial tinder (Coghlan's fire sticks) were used to help us minimize fire building time and get the warmth we needed.
On Saturday, after breakfast, we took a hike scoping out the lake chains that we had planned to camp out at. At this stage, we invested enough time and resources into our base camp that we decided to stay there rather than move the base. It was much nicer walking without the heavy packs. The ice was solid enough to walk around the edges, although there was open water at the stream and creek outlets that we had to keep a look out for. One of the lakes (Loyst) also had a lot of slush, a thin crust you breakthrough into some slush over top solid ice. This was from all the freeze/thaw cycles happening since New Years day. Anyhow, it was slow going on the slush which had a habit of sticking and freezing to your boots. We were almost at our destination lake (Norway Lake) crossing a small lake called Mud lake and in the marshy fringe when Rick went through the ice. He must have hit some air pockets created by the vegetation and he sank one leg up to his knee and immersed his second foot past the boot. He was able to get out pretty quick, but not before soaking the liners of his mukluks. This resulted in us having to track back to base camp in order to get him dried back up. Point of fact, this was a good thing since going much further would have caused us to get back to basecamp much later in the day. As it turned out, we were back at camp around 2:30 pm in the afternoon giving us about 2 h to forage for fresh wood and give Rick the needed time to dry out his gear by the fire (it took about 4.5 h to dry everything out). Even with that long sleep of night one, we all hit the sack at about 7:00 pm waking again at 7:30 am. Yes, we had 25.5 h of sleep in 2 days, although this made up for having no sleep the previous night.
The chill really started to set in on Sat night. It was -22oC by the time we went to bed and -28oC when we woke up. At these temperatures, exposed skin starts to freeze up quite fast. Simple tasks of tying things, undoing and doing up zippers ect. can get your fingers into a numb state very quickly. But along with that brisk air was a complete loss of moisture. We hung our bags out to air out and all the ice accumulated from the two nights sublimated away rather nicely. As we did our hike throughout the much larger Puzzle lake, our activities literally drove the moisture right out of our cloths. Here the wool was in its proper element and performed to perfection. We had a nice shore lunch on an island in Puzzle Lake, saw what we think was a river otter bound across the ice about 400 m in front of us, had a grouse land in our camp and spotted all kinds of tracks - deer, fox, coyote, mice etc. It warmed again that night reaching a balmy -12oC and the next morning it stayed at about that temperature. This is a great temperature to work in - dry enough that moisture effectively wicks away from you but not so cold that you can work bare handed for extended periods of time without too much discomfort.
Monday morning we packed camp and hiked back out. The three days of deep freeze solidified the ice considerably and we were able to track back to the vehicle using the much more efficient water route.
All in all it was a great trip. The first day of rain presented us with some real challenges, literally throwing us into survival mode on camp selection and using fire to dry our gear. I really got a chance to test out my wool inner and outer layers as well as my sleep system (Wiggy's Ultima Thule bag and ExPed Downmat 7) and they behaved as hoped even under -28oC conditions. I pretty much used all the gear I brought and the team tried to eliminate equipment redundancies (one axe, one buck saw, one shovel). The Buck Saw was the wood processing king as past winter camping adventures suggested it would be.
Below is the video of the trip. The moisture wreaked havoc on my camera mic, so I had to do some voice over in spots because of interference of the sound. Enjoy!
Ken
[youtube]YTcFAzJpImM[/youtube]
Rick, his cousin Scott and I took a 4 day weekend and did some back country camping out in Eastern, Ontario last weekend. It was a great trip but challenging due to the ever changing conditions. Our site was a 7 h drive and we left the Thursday night at about 11:00 pm driving through the night. It was pretty hellish driving through freezing rain and then dense fog on the last leg through the backcountry roads. Arriving at about 5:30 am, it was still fully dark on site so we took a 2 h nap in the truck to wait for the light. We awoke at about 8:00 am to fog + freezing rain and commenced our hike out. Open waters kept us off the lakes and flowing waters to some pretty rugged terrain and fortunately frozen wetlands. We had anticipated hiking in about 7.5 km to a remote lake site, but the driving rain and accumulating wetness of our gear forced us to deviate from the plan and we chose to set up a base camp at a much closer lake.
The rain was unexpected, being both uncharacteristic of this area at this time of year as well as out of tune with the weather forcast update just before we left. Our outerwear, optimized for dry cold kept us warm enough during the hike, but needed to be dried for the uncoming deep freeze which was predicted to come the following day. After selecting a site nestled into some white pine located off the south shore of Puzzle Lake, the rain turned to a heavy wet snow. Rick made a really great shelter, pooling our tarp resources between us. Two tarps were used to construct a communal shelter framed with wood. The basic construction was of a center pole/lean to configuration, but then Rick bolstered that with an X-pole configuration made of spring saplings to help with snow loading on the tarps. One tarp covered most of the shelter (big enough to sleep three) and a second tarp covered the front part plus provided a draping of material over the front to act as a door. Another tarp was set up as an overhead awning to give us a place free of rain and driving snow. We gathered copious amounts of firewood and commenced getting a healthy fire going to help dry out our outerwear as much as feasable knowing the deep freeze was coming soon.
Having stayed up the entire night driving, we hit bed at 6:00 pm and slept until 7:30 am - a full 13.5 h sleep! All that rain and snow played havoc with tinder availability for the rest of the trip, coating all the small twigs with a layer of ice. The first night, temperatures dropped down to -18oC but it was cozy in the shelter perhaps contributed by all the hot air coming from Rick's back side....We woke up to a good ice glaze but fortunately we had stacked up a good supply of firewood from the previous evening efforts to light our breakfast fire. Under these conditions, primitive fire techniques were replaced with modern ones. Zippo and bic lighters and in some cases artificial tinder (Coghlan's fire sticks) were used to help us minimize fire building time and get the warmth we needed.
On Saturday, after breakfast, we took a hike scoping out the lake chains that we had planned to camp out at. At this stage, we invested enough time and resources into our base camp that we decided to stay there rather than move the base. It was much nicer walking without the heavy packs. The ice was solid enough to walk around the edges, although there was open water at the stream and creek outlets that we had to keep a look out for. One of the lakes (Loyst) also had a lot of slush, a thin crust you breakthrough into some slush over top solid ice. This was from all the freeze/thaw cycles happening since New Years day. Anyhow, it was slow going on the slush which had a habit of sticking and freezing to your boots. We were almost at our destination lake (Norway Lake) crossing a small lake called Mud lake and in the marshy fringe when Rick went through the ice. He must have hit some air pockets created by the vegetation and he sank one leg up to his knee and immersed his second foot past the boot. He was able to get out pretty quick, but not before soaking the liners of his mukluks. This resulted in us having to track back to base camp in order to get him dried back up. Point of fact, this was a good thing since going much further would have caused us to get back to basecamp much later in the day. As it turned out, we were back at camp around 2:30 pm in the afternoon giving us about 2 h to forage for fresh wood and give Rick the needed time to dry out his gear by the fire (it took about 4.5 h to dry everything out). Even with that long sleep of night one, we all hit the sack at about 7:00 pm waking again at 7:30 am. Yes, we had 25.5 h of sleep in 2 days, although this made up for having no sleep the previous night.
The chill really started to set in on Sat night. It was -22oC by the time we went to bed and -28oC when we woke up. At these temperatures, exposed skin starts to freeze up quite fast. Simple tasks of tying things, undoing and doing up zippers ect. can get your fingers into a numb state very quickly. But along with that brisk air was a complete loss of moisture. We hung our bags out to air out and all the ice accumulated from the two nights sublimated away rather nicely. As we did our hike throughout the much larger Puzzle lake, our activities literally drove the moisture right out of our cloths. Here the wool was in its proper element and performed to perfection. We had a nice shore lunch on an island in Puzzle Lake, saw what we think was a river otter bound across the ice about 400 m in front of us, had a grouse land in our camp and spotted all kinds of tracks - deer, fox, coyote, mice etc. It warmed again that night reaching a balmy -12oC and the next morning it stayed at about that temperature. This is a great temperature to work in - dry enough that moisture effectively wicks away from you but not so cold that you can work bare handed for extended periods of time without too much discomfort.
Monday morning we packed camp and hiked back out. The three days of deep freeze solidified the ice considerably and we were able to track back to the vehicle using the much more efficient water route.
All in all it was a great trip. The first day of rain presented us with some real challenges, literally throwing us into survival mode on camp selection and using fire to dry our gear. I really got a chance to test out my wool inner and outer layers as well as my sleep system (Wiggy's Ultima Thule bag and ExPed Downmat 7) and they behaved as hoped even under -28oC conditions. I pretty much used all the gear I brought and the team tried to eliminate equipment redundancies (one axe, one buck saw, one shovel). The Buck Saw was the wood processing king as past winter camping adventures suggested it would be.
Below is the video of the trip. The moisture wreaked havoc on my camera mic, so I had to do some voice over in spots because of interference of the sound. Enjoy!
Ken
[youtube]YTcFAzJpImM[/youtube]
Thanks for the journey...makes Afghanistan a little more tolerable. Temps have only been in the single digits (F) at night and hovering around 30 to 40 for day highs. Our trip to a remote Russian "club house" was a cold one...roughly 6500 feet in elevation and with wind-chill it had to be single digits that day...brrrrr!
I must have had a dozen regrets by the time we hit the hay that first night.... Ha!
:thumbup: I think it is a good idea to contact the appropriate authorities whenever you will be parked for several days. If the area is patrolled, that cruiser will be eventually start to wonder. They may even start to investigate, wasting valuable resources. They definately made it known to me how much they appreciate being kept in the know.
