Winter Camping Tips

Overnight hikes are one the most popular and interesting activities. During such hikes we manage to overcome long distances, see much more, find new friends, completely relax from city life and enjoy leisure in nature. Overnight in a tent implies increased risks, the highest level of responsibility and caution for each participant of the hike. We have touched on some of these topics to some extent. This time we decided to reveal to you a few tricks in order not to freeze in the tent at night and get a good sleep. The knowledge of these winter camping tips will help you during trekkings to Ararat, Northern Aragats or Geghama mountains.

During the day, a long walk takes a huge amount of energy from us and overloads our muscles and other organs. All this must be restored with proper nutrition and sleep. We have already talked about nutrition, and now we want to show you some winter camping tips.

Not getting cold is the main guarantee of a good healthy sleep. When the body freezes, it begins to expend more energy to protect against hypothermia and frostbite. As a result, you can’t sleep well and in the morning you feel sleepy and exhausted, instead of being healthy and full of energy.

Get Prepared for an Overnight

• First, you need to carefully study the area where you plan to hike. You have probably noticed that this advice is the first one in any situation. You should always study the area first. Even if you take a tour and a professional guide accompanies you, you still have some responsibility for the successful and safe hike. Therefore, do not sign up for a hike without knowing anything about the area and relying only on a guide.
• Choose equipment suitable for the terrain and conditions, especially the tents, sleeping bags and mattresses. If you have the right sleeping bag and mattress, then you will not freeze, so you can stop reading this article. Okay, this is just a joke. Be sure to read it as you always need to be competent in the matter of safety, regardless of your camping equipment.
• Warm up your body before entering the sleeping bag. The sleeping bag does not have active particles for heating; it simply isolates you from the outside world, with your own temperature. And if you enter the sleeping bag frozen, you will get warm much later. Roughly speaking, instead of heat, the sleeping bag isolates your “cold”. Therefore, before entering the sleeping bag, you should do a light workout or drink hot tea. However, after drinking tea, you will be forced to wake up in the middle of the night due to “natural needs”.

• Take care of your natural need before you go to bed, so that you do not have to leave your newly warmed sleeping bag.
• Have a special bottle with a wide neck for emergency cases when it is impossible to get out of the tent due to the extreme cold. You can leave it in the vestibule of the tent. Just be careful and sign this bottle, not to confuse it with a bottle of water.
• Sleep in warm clothes. Although this is an arguable point. The thing is that if the clothes are too thick or too tight, they can interfere with free blood circulation. In addition, thick clothes leave very little space for air, and we warm ourselves thanks to the warm “air pockets”.
• Protect your head and legs from the cold. You can wrap your legs in a fleece towel or a fleece, not too thick jacket. Make sure to put on a hat, because with frostbite of the head, the consequences can be very unpleasant and dangerous for your health. However, you should not wear a tight balaclava or hat that will press on the blood vessels. It is better to wrap your head in a scarf than to put on a tight hat. There are light fleece hats that work well for an overnight in tent.
• Protect your sleeping bag from cold ground. If your mattress is thin, spread an extra rescue blanket, and put an empty backpack, jacket, and any soft thing around your legs and waist to keep you away from the cold ground.
• Eat frequently. Food gives our body a burst of energy, and then heat. Eat foods rich in carbohydrates and proteins, drink sweet liquids.

• It is advisable to have special clothes for sleeping. It should be soft and comfortable. In this case, fleece material is ideal. It is always more pleasant to sleep in fresh, warm clothes. And the thermal underwear that you wore all day will have time to dry before the morning.
• Ventilate the tent. If your tent does not have small windows for ventilation, then slightly open the entrance zipper of the tent from the top. If you do not ventilate the tent, with each exhalation, condensation will accumulate on the walls of your tent, and the resulting moisture will contribute to freezing more.
• Use heating pads. You can use special salt heating pads, or pour warm water into a plastic bottle and place it in your sleeping bag.

* Be careful to remove the bottle from the sleeping bag as soon as it cools down.

* Do not pour boiling water into a plastic bottle: it can melt. Water should be hot, but not boiling.

• If there are several people in the tent, lay close to each other. This way you will warm each other. If there are three of you in a tent, then the person who freezes the most should lie in the middle. This way he will be better protected from the cold. If necessary, you can connect sleeping bags and lie down together. This provides a lot warmer conditions than if you sleep separately.

In general, here is a piece of advice: overnight in a tent is a sacrifice of your usual comfort zone. Anything can happen during a trip, and you may be forced to face challenges that require other people to invade your personal space, regardless of gender or your relationship. Especially if you need to provide emergency assistance to a person, or if you need help. Let’s not go deep, the idea is clear.

Never heat the tent with a gas burner. Gas burners for camps emit a large amount of carbon dioxide, which is a threat to life in enclosed spaces.

You can turn on the burner for a very short time only after you have properly ventilated the tent.

One more tip for your gadgets. To prevent the batteries of your gadgets from being discharged too early, place them in your sleeping bag during the night in a tent, or store them in a backpack, wrapping them in warm clothes.

We hope that these winter camping tips will help you stay warm and have an unforgettable outdoor experience.

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