Keep Your Drinking Water from FREEZING! Practices from High Altitude Climbing

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Cold. Bone-chilling cold. The type of cold that freezes anything with water in it.

That sunscreen? Frozen.

Chapstick? Frozen.

Those raisins in your trail mix? Frozen.

So, of course your drinking water will freeze.

The Chapstick will be kept in a pocket. The sunscreen and trail mix, too. Drinking water is harder because the volume is so large. Can we keep that in our pockets? Well, to a point, yes.

This is the thing that often strikes me about people just getting into winter climbing: they seem to want to ignore the reality that your body heat needs to be applied to most anything you have that could freeze due to water content. So, we are going to have stuff in our pockets. A lot of stuff. We need clothing with pockets that can accommodate all of this gear and supplies. And, yes, that can be a bit uncomfortable.

But when things get slightly less cold, we can start thinking about insulation around gear and supplies that we carry inside, or even outside, of our pack. This is where insulated water bottle cases and the like come into play.

What we don’t see, though, are water bladders, Camel Backs and the like. People will talk about strategies like tube insulators and blowing the water back into the bladder after we take a drink. But we still have two issues: we will still have moisture in the tube and, in fact, the less moisture the faster it will freeze. Little droplets that freeze in the tube will then attract new water that will then also freeze, eventually creating stops in the tube. The we have the valve, itself. It will always capture and hold some water and the amount of space to fill up before it’s frozen shut is much, much smaller.

Climbers in the cold, therefore, use one - or some combination - of the tactics shown in the video.