Camping at below -40 degrees. Expedition training filmed in subarctic Canada

Camping in extreme cold requires a strange blend of skill, practice and perhaps a willingness to withstand discomfort to a greater or lesser extent. This film is a brief look at my experiences camping at well below minus 40 degrees. I spend considerable chunks of each year training and traveling in our globe's far north, especially in the darker winter months. For two recent winters I've trained with a small team in Canada's sub-arctic. The exact location is no secret, as there's Yellowknife nearby, the sort of town that's called a city because everywhere else in the region is even smaller. Throughout mid-winter its sub-arctic positioning means you don't get full polar darkness but instead the surrounding wilderness offers what's best described as immobile super chilled air. It's not particularly windy but you can get temperatures below minus 35 lasting for weeks and weeks without respite. This is 10 or 20 degrees colder than some maritime regions of the high arctic hundreds of miles further north. To the south of Yellowknife is the vast frozen Great Slave Lake which offers an ideal proving ground for both equipment and polar skiers. My team had a whole list of things to test and improve but the basics of hauling sledges around and then preparing camp for overnight tenting remained at the core. This was more a demo than anything else, just a short distance offshore, but that's useful as there was still daylight to see what was what and to capture clearly on film. This is a large single skin geodesic style dome shelter and it goes up pretty quickly even if you're out of practice. That for a first time in a while was a... Dusk did arrive later on and with it the more realistic prospect of erecting a tent in the dark. We were training for winter darkness so it was fortuitous really. Travelling on foot in the arctic isn't straightforward at the best of times but removing natural light adds yet another obstacle. Only once easy visibility is gone do you realize how much you miss it. There's a fairly standard routine for sledging journeys with navigation done on the move but involving some stops for food and water otherwise a sledger will run out of energy alarmingly fast. At the end of a sledging day the immediate job is to establish shelter before anyone gets on with any personal tasks. A good team should be able to do this without a need to chatter much as each person knows the equipment inside out and practice ensures you all know where to go and what to do. Some tents can go up in a matter of just a couple of minutes and when the weather is calm there's no need to use shovels to build a protective wall of snow in front of it. Generally each person has a favourite job to be getting on with next. The first piles snow around the tent on specially stitched flaps which help stabilise it. Another will organise the sledges, skis and harnesses. In the dark neatness is crucial to avoiding mislaying or breaking all your bits and bobs. A third teammate might head inside the tent to compact and even out the snow underfoot but more excitingly to get the stoves on. They are small yet wondrous sources of morale. These are a reliable and pretty aged design of Coleman's stove that can be repaired easily. They're stable and have roughly the same power output and fuel capacity as other sorts of expedition stove. They can run on most thin liquid fuels. All liquid stoves need priming in the cold which basically means lighting a small squirt of fuel on top of the burner and then gently starting the pressurised fuel flow as the generator tube heats up. When performance is critical you can use pure naphtha sometimes called white gas or aspen fuel. I find though that using premium petrol from the pump works fine and you can pass it through a It normally takes less than a minute for the yellow flaring to settle down into a clean blue whooshing flame. Large pans are efficient for melting snow for drinking and rehydrating food packs but are a pain to pour from and often release too much steam and vapour into the tent when the lid is off. On full-blown unsupported expeditions you'd never run stoves bare like this. The heat isn't doing anything useful and realistically a single skin tent won't keep much warmth in. Moisture is always the true enemy of the cold weather traveller and keeping it to a minimum is partly down to technique and experience. Generally the evening goes at pace, you're tired from hauling and you want to ease a hot supper and then get some sleep. More of the snow melting happens in the morning so that boiled water and flasks can survive the bulk of the next day. There's usually time for a chat though, talking through some plans and perhaps making repairs as the extreme cold takes its toll on even the best equipment and clothing. It's also a critical opportunity to eat Pringles. They keep their flavour pretty well in the cold and the empty tubes are useful for stuffing rubbish and wrappers into. Again, more of a training luxury than for serious expedition time but there's no reason camping in a super deep freezer can't be fun. A little trick here is a half litre Nalgene bottle. Filled with boiling water they can actively and forcibly dry things out like liner socks or boot liners from within. Or you can just let liner socks, the ones that are inside your vapour barriers all day, puff out any remaining dampness using your own body heat. One of the reasons there's such a big difference between living in a place like Yellowknife, where you might be outdoors in minus 40 degrees for a while and then back indoors or into a warm truck and living under canvas day to day and week to week, is that you get no temporary escape or respite. The cold is always there, here still well down in the minus 30s. You have to simply learn to live and get comfortable with it. Good clothing that breathes and keeps you dry is fairly central to not dying or at very least not having an utterly miserable time of it. There might be a few moments for messing around. Mustard and one foot over a stove. Hey, tell us about the trip, what's the purpose of this trip? Um, in all seriousness I'm going to stop rattling because I want to get... It's lousy for me to get better at balancing. Also to look after your dental health given the amount of sugar you might be eating and general personal maintenance, but then it's time for rest and time for the mercury to really bottom out. Yeah underneath us the lake is crunching and cracking quite dramatically but I think we'll be okay. It was the next morning that we nudged our personal records for low temperature down a couple of degrees. We woke up to an internal tent temperature of minus 44 degrees. It might have got colder but these thermometers lack a minimum setting so that morning was a little chilly. I'm definitely an evening person so need to force myself to switch off. The flip side is that my mornings are initially a little bit more sedate. You can also see here we're trialing a lightweight kettle instead of pans in an attempt to further control steam and vapor filling the tent. Luckily plenty of jobs can be done half in and half out of sleeping bags but it's best to have them packed away by the time the main snow melting operation begins. During the night moisture in the air especially from our breathing settles onto surfaces especially the inside of the nylon tent and forms hoarfrost. It can be carefully swept away but if you're clumsy hoarfrost can cause equipment to get damp or iced up. For winter travel in particular iced up gear can be nearly impossible to reverse leading to a degradation in performance for both it and of the person wearing or using it. We color code most of our belongings to avoid confusion and as I said a big morning job is to melt and boil 10 liters or so of snow and fill up food packs and drinking flasks for the day ahead. Then breakfast time. I tend to use these oversized vacuum containers so I can add boiling water to my dried breakfast powder and then leave it for 10 or 15 minutes to really puff up and get ready to satisfy. After the laborious job of booting up which means checking zinc tape is flat on the skin and donning liner socks, vapor barriers and insulating socks there was a moment for a little more extravagant stove burn. A day of work beckons outside and so the tent evacuation and clean out needs to be efficient. Everyone is keen to get hauling so as to get the blood circulating. Since the tent has a removable floor and not a sewn inversion we bang and sweep out all the internal hoarfrost before packing away. It makes the following evening much more pleasant. Then back to hauling out into the surreal sub minus 40 degree landscape. It was a bitterly cold one. I know that minus 40 doesn't sound appreciably different to minus 30, they're both cold, but there's a step change in how careful you need to be. One mistake and you can end up in serious trouble on a long journey far from help. Naturally though there was more time for pringles. It's almost like there's a slogan relating to the moorishness of these crispy denights. Well hello from northern Canada. It's minus 40 this morning the sun is just coming up. With that a late dawn slowly grew on the horizon. A reminder that we weren't up in the high arctic where there's no such winter indulgence available. So I'll let you get back to whatever it is that you were doing. If you got here via a YouTube browsing vortex, good choice. Do come back for more.