Winter Camping in a Hot Tent in Snow and Freezing Temps

We don't get too many days like this. This is a beautiful winter day and yes it's cold but we've got a nice beautiful blue sky above us. It's a bright sunny day and it's an absolute winter wonderland. All the trees are covered in snow. The small river beside me is frozen. It really is a beautiful place to be and I'm lucky to be out here. I'm going to be spending the night out here doing some hot tenting. This is going to be a fun little overnight adventure. Thank you so much for joining me. Let's not waste any time. Let's dive right into it. Now this tent is a little complicated to set up. The poles can be a little confusing and kind of there's some weird configurations but I gotta give a shout out to Naturehike for color coding the poles and that way you know kind of what goes where. That makes things a lot easier to put together. All right so above the where the stove pipe is going to come out we do have some kind of over hanging branches here but behind that is just clearing for the smoke to go. We're just gonna make sure this is relatively clear and then we'll just get this pulled back on over. Did forget to put this pole in. Okay a little eyeball around here. I don't have it staked out. I can do that very quickly however a lot of times in the past the stakes really freeze in the ground and they're really really hard to get out in the morning so if I can sometimes I like to skip that. I could guy that out. That's another option. Yeah got a fair amount of shape. This is all kind of a living area back in here. Okay I also have this pole not very long and I forget where it goes and what to do with it. Donatello. Okay I remember it goes here like this. That just gives us just a tiny bit more structure here. That's perfect. We still got all this snow in here but a lot of this will melt over the course of having our hot tent in here because it's going to get very warm. Just sitting down taking a little bit of a breather here for a bit. Next step is going to be to get the wood stove set up and then after that we're going to go ahead and procure all of our firewood. If you saw the kind of bushcrafty lean-to camp that I did where I had some leaking from the rain and stuff. It's a really fun one. I talked about it there but recently we got ourselves a new dog. He's from a local little adoption agency. He came with the name Sparky. He's such a cute little pup and he is just getting along swimmingly with my other dog Killian. They are just best buds and run around in a rough house and play all the time. They're having such a blast together. Sparky is a healthy happy pup and we have a vet that we use that's local and they have been really great to us. They've done a great job so far. 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If you want to learn more about Dutch you can follow the link in my description or pin comment to learn more and don't forget to tell them Sam Banana sent you. Thanks so much to Dutch for sponsoring this video and helping to keep me in business. All right everybody let's get back into the action. Temperatures are starting to rapidly drop here so I'm just going to get a little stick fire going in the stove so we get a little something so at least the sucker is burning and then we'll think about trying to get some more substantial wood in there as that's going along. All right this is an awesome piece here that is mostly up off the ground so this will give us a good base to make sure our stove is going while we gather the bulk of our firewood for the rest of the night. This is one of my go-to camping spots and there's just this big tipped over dead tree here that has provided me with a ton of nice dry firewood. It's off the ground and stays dry over time. It's been an excellent resource for me. So I'm just going to start with taking this branch here and we'll see how much I really end up needing over the course of the night. I'm not super far off of the trail so it's really easy even if it gets dark to come back over here and get more. I'm just going to take one more smaller piece here. Man it is just crazy when you step inside here how much warmer it is in here and you can just feel it than it is outside. The temperatures are rapidly falling outside. I'm going to go ahead and get my bedding set up. I do have a bit more wood processing to get done but I also have a fun little experiment I'm going to try. So I'll get my bedding set up and then we'll get to that portion. I'm just going to put this one big chunker in there that I couldn't really get processed up any finer and I'm just going to let that sucker smolder in there because I'm not going to be cooking for a minute. Almost forgot to do this. So this little guy here is a little spherical ice maker dealie. So I'm going to try this little experiment out. I mean obviously it should work but we're gonna see what happens. So you don't want to go all the way up to the top because the water will expand when it freezes. All right so at this point I'm going to process up a little bit more firewood watch the sun go down. Pretty soon here I think we're going to get ready to eat. I might even crack into one of those beers everybody's been talking about. This is going to be a nice night. I'm going to really take it in and enjoy this moment here. But before I do any of that I've got to take a little nap off of the old banana blast. New Holland's beer barrel bourbon. It always goes down smooth. All right everybody without further ado let's get into it. Okay so in order to get our fire or our stove hot enough to cook on I really got to put a lot of quartered up pieces in there because we want to get it hot hot hot. So I went ahead and processed up quite a few and this should get us through the cooking portion here. Now a lot of people seem to think that this stove should be getting hotter than it's getting. I think that a lot of those people who are are leaving me comments like that are used to using a stainless steel wood stove. That's what I think. This is titanium and titanium um well it it you know it's doing a plenty a good enough job of warming the small space. The metal itself doesn't get super super hot enough to cook on unless you really get the fire raging. So we're gonna get this puppy going. We'll get our dinner moving and it's shaking and doing it. Yes sir. Okay I did find the extra uh thermometer. I'm not sure if I told you guys that but got it hanging up here on this cord um with my keys and so far in here right now it's registering uh 38 degrees which is a fair sight warmer than it is outside. A little olive oil. Probably not a terrible idea. All right these are not fully cooked like regular like Eckridge Farm type sausages I usually get so I'm gonna cut I'm gonna dice these up anyway. I'm gonna go ahead and do it now. And then my pasta calls for two cups of water. There we go. Seems like a lot but we'll figure it out. Well it is snowing ever so slightly but it's starting to snow. It's especially hard to get water to boil like this so I put it in the kettle just to get the water to boil. And then we'll switch it to the pan. And this is what we're doing. Cava tapa tapa titi pasta with the marinara caracara. And then on the back end here just so we can get our hot beverage going. Just gonna go ahead and get a bit of some hot water. Heating up in the kettle. Do a half a kettle. See how she see how she does after that. Here's the finished product. Not too shabby to be perfectly honest. Yeah look at that. Ain't gonna go wrong with that. All right first bite. We need to be mixed up. That's hot. Little hot on the bottom. Definitely need to be mixed up. Okay let's see if we can get a good. Look at that. Goodness sakes. Wow that's good. That is really good. The pepper is like so juicy. This is a good concoction. This is actually a first time meal on the channel. Nice thing is I can just set this down because generally unless I'm unless I'm having it piping hot the stove would just kind of keep things warm. So that's nice. You could do a lot worse than that huh? For a camping meal. Not too shabby. I mean look at that. Look at that. Good generic hot chocolate. It's hot but that's tasty. Well I moved this over here. It still wasn't freezing. I opened the lid. It wasn't freezing. Yeah kind of froze but most of that was water. So mission unsuccessful. We'll try it again in the next one I guess. Kind of cool. It's something. I think it's just not quite cold enough to freeze all the way. Man the hot water bottle is warm on the old tootsies. All right boys and girls. I don't know if you can see me or not. Oh I'm comfy wampy. Oh I got plenty of firewood over there. I can reach over and restock the stove but I got a bunch of fine splits so just in case I need to relight it in the morning I can do that at two. I'm whooped. I'm hitting the hay. Check back with you in the morning. Good night everybody. Good morning. All right well it's pretty reasonably warm in here at this point. I got the stove going. I got a text from Mrs. Bananas. She's pretty sick so I'm not gonna putz around here. We're not even gonna do breakfast this morning. I'm gonna get home and take care of my wife. So I'm just gonna get the sucker torn down and get the heck out of here. All right everybody. This was a fun one. It got pretty cold last night but I was pretty toasty warm. Got the tent torn down. Got the stove emptied out and all the remnants of the fire completely put out. Bag is packed up. Everything's put away. Time to hit the road. I'll be back soon. Don't you worry about it. Big big shout out to each and every one of you. You all make it possible for me to do this. If you liked what you saw today and you want to see more I would greatly appreciate it if you would click that banana. We're gonna catch you on the next one everybody. Bye now.