12 Tips for Winter and Cold Weather Camping

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It’s pretty hard to narrow down winter camping to some set number of tips and tricks. The reality is that there are so many variations and potential options in terms of gear, skills, and preferences… and then all of that has to be viewed through the lens of what type of camping you are doing. Are you camping near your car, so weight isn’t an issue? Are you covering ground, maybe to climb a peak or to do some snowshoeing on a winter backpacking trip, making weight a primary concern? Is this your first time out, so you need to ease in, or do you have a season or two under your belt, and you are now wanting to take it to the next level? And then, of course, there are the variables that come with our kids and their preferences and tolerances.

So, we tried to narrow our tips and aim them towards a family that done some camping, already, but hasn’t done any camping in the winter, yet. We start out with the fundamentals of the basic gear, and clothing, and then get into a few of the more nuanced points that we’ve learned from experience.

As a summary, the twelve tips described in the video are:

1) Get the right shelter gear: more on tents, sleeping bags, and sleeping pads... and tent stakes

2) Using a sit pad

3) Layers for your kids (and you)

4) Face coverings

5) What you need to stuff in the bottom of your sleeping bag to keep it from freezing

6) How to keep your sleeping bag extra warm overnight

7) What to eat just before bed

8) What to do just before bed

9) Where to face your tent

10) How to make dressing and cooking routines more comfortable

11) Where to locate your tent

12) How to progress your comfort and skills

As you heard in the video, we recommend that people just starting out with winter camping keep things simple by camping in their yard, or close to the car, near the trailhead. Having to move camps is a complicating factor; it changes the demands you place on your gear and your body, and it also guarantees a multiple night trip. In winter camping schools, we used to say that “it’s pretty easy to camp one night in the winter, but its pretty hard to do two nights.” The truth is that if we don’t know what we are doing, and spend a single uncomfortable night, our bodies are resilient enough to deal with that. But if we are out multiple nights and really make some mistakes (think of things like not airing out our sleeping bags if we get a bunch of condensation on them, so now we have a wet sleeping bags), it is equally as easy to really end up in a tough spot on night two, three, or four that no amount of “toughness” can make up for. For those extended trips, it’s much more about knowledge than equipment. You can have the best sleeping bag in the world, but if you don’t air it out…

But we still - by far - get the most questions about the gear. That is understandable. You could easily be looking at thousands of dollars in equipment costs if you were to go for top-of-the-line stuff, and that’s a big commitment. Tents and sleeping bags will be the most pricy items. So, how do we lower the risk of making a big purchase mistake?

First off, depending upon where you are located, you can rent these things. You don’t have to buy them, just to find out that winter camping isn’t for you. Given that our family lives in the US and takes our own gear when we travel internationally, we can only speak to rental opportunities in the US. Maybe one of the most trusted (but they don’t have locations everywhere) is REI. You would reserve your items and head into your local REI to pick them up and to return them. But there are also new service companies on the scene, like Arrive Outdoors (based in California) and Outdoors Geek (based in Colorado). These services ship the rented items to your door and you ship them back once your trip is over. We’ve used REI in the past and had good experiences, but we have not used shipped rentals for anything except Satellite phones - which we used for the trips to the Himalaya and Alaska. For what it’s worth, while an entirely different type of equipment and done through the specialist company Outfitter Satellite Phones, our '“mail-order” satellite phone rental experiences went very smoothly.

If you are at the point where you want to buy some equipment for winter camping, you are going to want to do your research. We’ve tried a lot of different equipment over the years, but we’ve never had the experience of trying out 20 different sleeping bags or tents or whatever just to compare them all. The folks at Outdoor Gear Lab have, and they are our go-to resource for getting compare-and-contrast information on equipment we are thinking about purchasing. What you quickly find out, of course, is that every type of gear for every type of activity comes with tradeoffs, and we like that Outdoor Gear Lab doesn’t try to gloss over that fact. Yes, it complicates things that there isn’t one “this is the single best tent for all of your needs,” but it is also very honest and forthright. You can use the tradeoff information they give you to modify your decisions from theirs.

As an example, as of this writing, they are recommending the Black Diamond Eldorado as the best four-season tent. That’s a two-person, very light weight, single-wall tent that excels when used for alpine climbing. It’s probably not something that a family of four wants while camping next to their car. But you can read the detailed reviews on all of the equipment items, and make the tradeoff selections you want based on the needs of your family.

As far as our purchasing habits, if we have our minds narrowed down to a potential item, we will see if we know anyone in our community who has that item and will let us try it out before we go buy it. But, if you are new to the outdoors community, you may not have those types of resources available to you. If that’s the case, modifying your selection based on the unique needs of your family, but based from quality reviews like those at Outdoor Gear Lab, is a solid selection process.

For those who want to cut to the chase and have us list the gear we use, here it is, below. But please keep a couple of things in mind. Our primary activities are alpine climbing and mountaineering, and this impacts our gear selections. For example, we use a lot of single-walled tents while we recommend double-walled tents for those who are less concerned with weight and ease of moving camps. And, at least the parents, have travelled to some really harsh places at really high altitudes; so, we are willing to spend a pretty penny on equipment that can mean the difference between life and death. Our go-to gear won’t be right for everyone.

Family-Sized Tents

• For basecamp-level comfort and durability (long duration stays with no weight concerns) - Eddie Bauer Katabatic 3; this is a double-walled tent, and what really stands out for us is a) its strength (it has six poles instead of the usual two or four) and b) its livability. This thing is big enough for three people with all the mountaineering gear - so it can fit four people with a normal amount of gear. And this thing is so bright inside (that matters if you are going to be in a tent for days on end) that I could actually charge my phone using my solar panels from INSIDE the tent!! But it is very heavy.

• For family camping where we might be hiking in - Hilliberg Nallo 4 GT; this is a big, sturdy, double-walled tent. It saves weight because it isn’t really freestanding (you need to tie out the guy-lines for it to stand up well). But it is just over half the weight of the Katabatic.

• For trips where we will be moving a lot - Hyperlite Mountain Gear UltaMid 4; this is a single walled, pyramid tent that can have a hard time standing up to tough environments if you set it up a bit sloppily, but can be bomber if you take some care. It can be used with or without an inner mesh and bathtub floor, which won’t really help you with insulation, but will help with controlling wetness. The bathtub floor helps with snow drifts and the inner mesh helps route the condensation that accumulates on the outer tent down the sides of the mesh when it melts, rather then to the floor of your tent. We typically use the mesh and floor.

Sleeping Bags

Again, sleeping bags need to be measured against the temperatures you are going to be experiencing where you camp. And for us, given our pension for spending time moving ourselves and our camps, we’ve tended to go with the better warmth-to-weight ratios we could find. That doesn’t make these the most cost-effective, as saving weight comes from premium materials.

They typically don’t make really warm bags for kids; they also tend to be made of less quality material and are therefore heavy. Depending upon how much movement we will be doing along with how cold it is, we either use the kids bag and add a sheet to it as a liner (which improves the temperature rating by about 10 degrees), or we put them in an adult bag and tie-off the extra bag with a shock-cord. Our kids’ bags are the Kelty Woobie 30 (meaning 30 degrees Fahrenheit), which are no longer produced.

Women’s bodies have different needs when it comes to having a the right fitting bags. Women’s specific bags typically have narrower shoulder, taper the legs at a lower point than men’s bags to accommodate wider hips, and have more insulation in the foot box (and sometimes in the upper body). A women’s-specific bag may make a difference of 5-10 degrees in finding a comfortable temperature in a bag. For high-end bags that are also cut for women’s specific needs, we like Feathered Friends.

We’ve tried different bags on different people. Here is our consensus of the best that we’ve experienced for different temperature ranges:

• +10 degree bag - Western Mountaineering Versalite

• 0 degree bag - Marmot Lithium

• -10 degree bag - Feathered Friends Widgeon EX

Sleeping Pads

As mentioned in the video, we use a two pad system, and we all sleep on the same setup: we place the inflatable mattress down, first, and then place the foam pad on top of the inflatable.

• Inflatable - Therm-a-Rest NeoAir XTherm

• Foam - Exped Doublemat Evazote (note, this comes in a double width and is foldable; you can use it that way, folded over, or cut it down the middle and create two pads, as we do)

So, hopefully this sheds a little more light on the winter camping experience and gets you started with an economical way (renting) to try this out rather than having to dive in with lots of new gear purchases. But for those of you taking the plunge, maybe this gives you a decent reference point and some resources to help you avoid making purchases you wish you hadn’t.