On Saturday I decided at the last minute to go camping in the White Mountains. I arrived at the entrance to the trail around 5:30pm. On my hike in, there were patches of half melted snow all around with moose and deer footprints everywhere.
That's when I heard a stick crack and looked to my left. Standing not more than 20 feet off the trail and totally oblivious to my presence was a huge 8' tall female moose. As I stood there admiring the huge creature, a sense of fear quickly settled in when I realized how screwed I was if she decided to charge at me. This was a seriously big animal. She noticed me standing there after about two minutes and after that she didn't take her eyes off me. When she made a grunting sound, I knew she was nervous and uncomfortable, so I slowly started walking away. Much to my relief, she too turned around and walked in the opposite direction. From that point on, I made noise (made up songs and talked to myself) to help prevent any further accidental run ins with big game wildlife.
The rest of the evening was quite uneventful. The place I camped was next to a river where huge ice shelves had formed. Without much daylight left, I quickly started gathering wood and material for a fire. Using a magnesium fire starter, my knife, and a small piece of birch bark, I had a fire going within thirty seconds. The fire didn't last long after I stopped feeding it and laid down to sleep.
The night was cold (<30 degrees) and constant gusts of wind made it worse. I woke up several times during the night from the cold, but managed to get about 5 hours of sleep. I awoke at 6:30am, shivering and freezing. It started to snow. I did some jumping jacks to warm myself up and then collected wood to get a fire going. Once again, the magnesium fire starter with some birch bark did the trick. I spent the next few hours feeding the fire and keeping warm before finally making the short one-mile trek back to my truck. I didn't bring a camera, but I took a couple of pictures with my iPhone. (This is the picture of the moose, but she's extremely well camouflaged. She's standing behind the clump of trees in the long patch of white snow.)
Backwoods Indiana PROTIP:
Assuming that you followed The Man’s procedure for building a campfire (in a shallow fire pit of some sort), when you’re ready for the fire to be over with, fill the pit with the dirt that you removed from it (hopefully at least a few inches). You now have a rather warm spot in which to sleep, provided that you’ve a sleeping bag or some such to keep from burning your bits.
Granted, jumping jacks are fine and all, but hypothermia really sucks.
Rocks warmed around the fire also retain heat for a while after the fire has gone out. My problem with either method is how do you prevent your sleeping bag from being burned too? I have a Snugpak Sleeper Lite sleeping bag that hot coals would definitely burn through.
Generally speaking, a few inches of dirt on top of the former fire pit should be enough to keep your bag from burning. Sake of argument, I’d suggest doing a little experimentation with a cheaper bag to make sure that everything will be cool.
I guess that’s assuming I don’t use a tent? It was raining/snowing both weekends I’ve gone up this month, and I’m sure sleeping without a tent and being exposed would create a greater risk of hypothermia.
Just looking at your sleeping bag I get claustrophobic. I need a sleeping bag where I can move my legs apart from each other.
It’s not that bad… but I definitely can’t bring my knees up to my chest when I’m sleeping inside it… that was sort of a problem this past weekend, as my feet were the only part of my body that was very cold… I couldn’t do anything to get them warmer because I couldn’t move them closer to my body, haha.