A thick web of spruce and fir branches grabbed at my pack and pulled my hat off more than once. My husband and I were on the Imp Shelter spur trail, the final leg of a 4.3-mile hike in the Carter-Moriah Range.

We had broken trail with our snowshoes through 15 inches of new powder for most of the trip, so wrestling with scratchy, lichen-covered limbs seemed a fitting end to a challenging hike.

No matter, I thought, as I broke free from the final snags and reached a junction. The wooden sign tacked to a tree pointed right for the camping sites. Soon, the pack would be off for the evening, and I could revel properly in a backcountry well buried in white.  

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“Well buried” translated to a tent platform hidden underneath about 5 feet of unpacked snow in the secluded, tree-fringed clearing we chose. One advantage of winter camping is that it’s often quite easy, with enough snow, to pack down a level surface to sleep on that’s free of protruding rocks and limbs and that still minimizes impact on the area. The tent platform was a nice extra though.

Pete and I did a quick scan for widow-makers, dead trees or branches caught precariously in other trees, or limbs that appear on the verge of breaking off overhead. These can cause rude, injurious awakenings. Lucas St. Clair and Yemaya Maurer, authors of the new AMC Guide to Winter Hiking and Camping, also recommend selecting sites, particularly those not at an established shelter, where there is minimum exposure to high winds and avalanches and maximum use of sunlight and warm air. (Camping in a valley, for example, can often be colder than camping on a southward-facing mountain slope.)

Once our packs were off, we began walking around in circles. We had to tamp down the snow with our snowshoes and let the surface set for about 20 minutes before we broke out tent and poles.

During the lazy days of summer, on evenings where light lingers until after 8 p.m. and temperatures never sink below 60 degrees, you can afford to unshoulder your pack, admire the scenery, and explore your surroundings before getting down to the business of camping.

In winter, it’s tempting to do the same. A forest frosted in white—where the soft contours of powdered landscapes conjure notions of pillows and blankets—can lull one’s senses. Until the first shiver, or maybe the second. Then, unless temperatures are extremely mild (think above freezing) and there is a lot of daylight left, it pays to be efficient. Not only do you keep your body’s furnace firing with camp chores, but also food and hot drinks get made faster, and you’re diving into a warm sleeping bag before you know it.

While the snow set on our tent platform, Pete and I chose and stomped out a place to pee. Yellow snow detracts from the purity of a white winter, so it’s often best to pee in the same spot as others. It also keeps more of the surrounding snow available as a water source.

We put on more clothing after the tent was erect and the air inside was fluffing our sleeping bags. Released from their compressed stuff sacks, they reminded me of giant, warm bread loaves rising in an oven.

Moving about during camp chores doesn’t generate the same heat as hiking with a full pack, and even as I looked lovingly upon my sleeping bag, there was still the matter of cooking. On went the mid-weight fleece pullover and down jacket. Between my long underwear and Gore-Tex bibs, I zipped on fleece pants. A fleece balaclava went on under my hat. “Ahhhhh, toasty warmth,” I thought. I’d be even warmer once my base layers finished drying out from the sweat I’d worked up on the hike in.

On my first backpacking trip two winters earlier, Pete, an experienced mountaineer, had cautioned me as we packed our bags. “Whatever you take off your body will freeze,” he said. “You are the only heat source out there for drying your clothes.”

It wasn’t a scare tactic. Just a healthy reminder that I couldn’t remove a damp base layer and drape it on my pack to dry. Or stuff my wet liner gloves in my jacket pocket and expect them not to be polyester popsicles when I dug them out the next morning. Anything I wanted to wear, I had to keep close. The two exceptions, I learned, were my shells. Because they are not base or middle layers and are used only as guards against wind and precipitation, I didn’t need to wear them the entire time we were in camp.

There is a drawback though. When I wear my jacket shell between my pack and a thin base layer as I hike, I sweat enough so that the inside of the jacket becomes wet. This freezes when we are in camp, and the jacket becomes a stiff, crumpled ball of fabric by morning. It can be a chilly few moments when shedding a warm down jacket to don a frozen shell, but that’s the beauty of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It takes very little hiking for the shell to thaw and warm once it’s near your body again.

Dinner and Drinks
Any backpacker knows that food cooked in the backcountry always tastes better than frontcountry grub. This is especially true in winter, when a hot meal and steamy cider are the finale to an active day and prelude to a restful, warm night.

In their book, Maurer and St. Clair recommend packing 2.5 pounds of food per person per day, in roughly the following ratio: 50 percent carbohydrates, 30 percent fats, 20 percent proteins. They also suggest dinners and breakfasts be composed of fast, simple, one-pot meals. If it’s cold out, few people will want to dawdle over elaborate spreads.

Pete and I had packed in one of our staple meals that evening: Italian chicken sausages (protein plus fat) and a bag of cheese tortellini (complex carbohydrates plus fat). Winter is an ideal season to pack in perishable food with little worry that it will spoil. It will freeze, however, making it a challenge to slice frozen meat with a Leatherman. I made a note to myself to cut the sausage before we left next time.

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