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The morning after

Here is what our shelter looked like in the morning. As you can see the pine boughs did a fine job of keeping the snow off me. All I did was weave them in and out of each other and then lean some more heavy branches up against them. Next time, I going to make the whole shelter out of natural materials. My son and I both had zero degree sleeping bags. I had a thin sleeping bag insert for each of us that's supposed to add another 5 or so degrees of protection. Plus we each have a sleeping pad and as I've mentioned before I had a couple of those thick survival blankets for each of us. You can see me holding one in the previous picture. The bottom line is that with all this light and easy to pack (expect for the sleeping bags) gear we were able to go pretty light and with the layers we stayed warm all night even though it went below zero.

The difficult part is getting out of that warm sleeping bag in the morning. Also, it was pretty hard getting some of the layers off at night and climbing into the then, very cold sleeping bag and hoping it would warm up. That's why I brought some of these Handwarmers. At first my son complained of very cold feet in the sleeping bag and of course I got a little concerned. I just threw in two of the handwarmers and he was sound asleep within 5 minutes at 8:00, toasty warm. The cool thing about these handwarmers is that they are reusable. Once you use them, just boil them for about 10 minutes and there reayd to use again once they cool down. This can be done out here while camping even with just a fire and the canteen cup we each had in our packs.

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