Doesn't this look like fun? Except for the "fun" part.
I’ve read a bunch of articles about winter camping in the last couple of months. Most of the articles make winter camping sound great, what with the uncrowded campgrounds, pristine air quality, and beautiful winter wilderness. I admit that the wilderness in winter is spectacular. A single walk through silent snow-frosted woods can change my mood for months. If I’m feeling spry, downhill skiing is one of my favorite sports in the world. Even when I feel like crap, I adore sitting in a window watching a storm blow in from the ocean.
But camping in it?
Been there, done that…here’s what winter camping really means, travel writers’ hyperbole aside:
Step 1: Drive out to a suitable campground, probably in the woods or by a beach. If there’s weather, drive through it, getting as tense and stressed as necessary to navigate treacherous slick roads, four-wheel drive and chain snow conditions, and low visibility.
Step 2: Exit the car warm, dry car into whatever weather conditions prevail. No umbrellas–it’s time to set up camp! Assemble tent and sleeping bags, secure food, and arrange anything else that’s needed for the trip.
Step 3: Build a fire. Hopefully I remembered to pack some dry wood and tinder, because reasonably combustible materials don’t always abound in soggy forests in February.
Step 3: Then it’s time to cook up a meal and eat it! Outdoors in the cold or rain or snow, I fire up my Coleman stove and heat up a nice can of beans or soup. Then I take a seat on the provided slab of chilled wood (aka picnic bench) and chow down on my feast.
Step 4: Find the bathroom. If I’m shivering my way across a formal campground, a charming concrete block building or a smelly little outhouse will be someplace within a couple hundred yards. If I’m doing the dispersed camping thing, the “bathroom” will consist of some sort of camp toilet perched behind a tree.
Step 5: Go to bed. That is, crawl into my nylon dome tent and zip myself into a super-arctic-uncomfortable-mummy-style sleeping bag that sold for cheap at the big-box discount store. The cold seeping up from the ground, the hard ground, and the sharp rocks and sticks ares not quelled by the 1/2 inch foam camping pad that lies under my sleeping bag.
Step 6: Repeat steps 4 and 5 several times throughout the night.
Step 7: Slog out of the tent, make coffee, drink coffee, eat a cereal bar. Attempt to hike, fish, or do some other outdoorsy activity. Shiver a lot.
Step 8: Over the course of several hours, curl into an exhausted, pain-racked, frozen ball of misery. Repeat steps 3, 4, and 5.
Step 9: Go home, with an optional stopover at the nearest ER for a refreshing bag of warmed IV saline and a couple of hits of Toredol. Spend the next 5 days in bed recovering from my weekend getaway.
Winter camping is NOT a viable lodging option for most travelers with chronic pain. I don’t recommend even trying it–the potential is far too high for brutal misery during the trip, followed by days or weeks in bed recovering from the so-called vacation. For that matter, winter camping doesn’t work too well even for the fittest, healthiest of female travelers. If you can’t pee out of a 1-inch unzipped gap in a tent door while your sleeping bag and jammies cover 99% of your body, winter camping sucks. Trust me.
Winter Camping? I’d rather drive skewers under my fingernails with a sledgehammer. I don’t have chronic pain but I like to think I have common sense, and camping in the snow? We’re humans – we invented houses and hotels and room service so we wouldn’t have to!
Enjoyed your article, thanks!
It’s nice to read a counterpoint to all the gushing stories on winter camping I’ve been reading. I can see why this wouldn’t work for you but I don’t think able-bodied women should be put off on account of gender. It might be worth trying.
For that matter, winter camping doesn’t work too well even for the fittest, healthiest of female travelers. If you can’t pee out of a 1-inch unzipped gap in a tent door while your sleeping bag and jammies cover 99% of your body, winter camping sucks. Trust me.
I am lucky because it’s extremely rare that I have to get up to pee in the night even once, whether I’m at home or camping. So if night-time peeing is the main reason not to go winter camping, I’m willing to give it a go.
Not a fan of winter camping myself, unless it is “winter” camping in the Bahamas!
I like to be able to feel my fingers and toes, and not have to fear frostbite. However there are fans out there who lavish in this sort of extreme sport.
I guess each to their own.
I like the Bahamas idea. Winter camping in Hawaii might work out okay too.
While some folks definitely get off on challenging the elements, I feel that the travel writing establishment has become a trifle one-sided in their coverage of winter camping this season. Winter camping is recession-friendly (read: super-cheap) for sure. But then again, you get what you pay for…
I’m a healthy female who never gets up in the night to pee, but I’d indulge in winter camping only at gunpoint.
In fact, winter camping sounds suspiciously like my vision of Hell on earth.
JMHO
What I really want to do is go winter walking and then retire at the end of the day to a lodge with a raging fire and hot tub.
Now that’s a level and style of winter recreation I can get behind!
my legs started acheing and cramping at just the thought of how cold and crappy that would be and my pain is chronic pelvic pain.
Camping i used to really enjoy, in the summer but now even alot ot its enjoyment is lost on me with the inability to drink booze, the constant need tor the toilet, the inabilty to get comfertable, the lack of foods i want and am familer with. The nights feeling to cold so i bundle up then waking up in the sun feeling as though i am in a sauna does nothing it make me happyer. i have always had issues with the sun, but now if i get a sunburn its one more place causing me pain (i can apply 60 sunblock halfhour before going out, and reapply every hour and still burn if in the shade an hour and a half… or 20mins if in the sun). Theres no microwave to heat up my heat pad, and all the lotions i use to help with mucel cramps help the dirt stick to me…..
“camping” for me i now think will continue to mean going to a cottage where i have a bed as i did last year the weekend we normaly camp.