Winter Camping is a Mountaineering Skill. My Kids Wanted to Try a Deeply Cold 48 Hours Out.

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Camping gets a raw deal in the climbing community. If you are on some fast-and-light alpine missions, you might not even use camp gear at all; you might bivy with just your sleeping bag, the clothes you are already carrying, and sleeping on you pack on the ropes as ground-insulation.

Well, there is also a joke in the climbing community that goes like this: “Do you know what ‘bivy’ means? It’s French for ‘mistake.’”

the reality is the truth is probably somewhere between the two. I’m not going to question the style of serious alpine climbers who do open-air bivy camps on ledges in crazy places like Alaska, the Himalaya, or Patagonia. They really are counting every ounce. They really are pushing the edge of alpinism.

But there is plenty of room in the “style rankings” between that extreme alpinism on one hand and full-on siege tactics like were popularized in the first half of the 20th century on all the high peaks of the world. And for those of use without super-human skills and levels of fitness, it’s pretty darn nice to sleep in a tent. And if you are going to bother with all the trouble of hauling that darn think up into the reaches, you may as well know how to get the most out of it.

I’m not saying bring the biggest tent you can and all the gear you need to make it feel like your living room. Rather, my point is far more modest: your nights asleep (or trying to sleep) in high, cold places can either sap the energy from you or be an opportunity to refill your tank. So, I think you want to have enough stuff to make that refill happen. Otherwise, you are kind of making the absolute worst of it: burning more energy by hauling camp stuff, and then not getting the desired affect out of it once you use it all.

I wouldn’t take a bomb-proof, six-pole, twelve pound tent on an alpine climb. No, I took it so as to make the boys’ first truly, deeply cold camping trip a positive one. The tent is easy to live in. I know we were likely to have a storm and thus would be tent-bound for awhile. The amount of stuff I had to carry, even if going minimally, would demanded I haul a sled for no other reason than my kids can’t yet safely carry enough of their own stuff (by medical advice, most kids should limit backpack weight to 15% of their body weight) when you are talking about all the extra layers and things for a multi-day trip in the winter. So, if I have a sled, I may as well take the extra stove, etc.

Would I take an extra stove on an alpine mission? Maybe not.

Did we take extra stoves to Denali? Yes. Did they save our trip and make the summit possible? Yes, they did.

I point out these examples, not because they are exhaustive of the tradeoff considerations, but rather because they combine to be illustrative of a mindset. I believe that not every outing has the same goal. Sometimes the goal is the summit. Sometimes the goal is to experience a place. Sometimes the goal is to be with a certain partner or group of people. There are lots of reasons people take to the mountains. So, bring the stuff that aligns to your goal. In this case, we wanted 48 hours in the deep cold, and camping is a skill. It’s not as sexy as climbing overhanging rock, doing figure-fours on ice, or standing on some gnarly ridge with your silhouette against the sky. But it might make or break your ability to get to that rock, ice, or ridge. Like any skill, it is deserving of our focus and practice, from time to time. So, in this case I brough the stuff I needed to ensure we had the opportunity to get the practice time we wanted.

For those wondering, we were in the Eddie Bauer Katabatic 3, which is a palace of a three-person tent, and so good at letting in light we charged our electronics via solar panels from inside the tent on Denali. It's super durable, but heavy, though. More a thing for Camp 4 on Everest than a fast, alpine mission.