Winter Camping in the Ghost Range Through a Snowstorm! 4K

Well, we're driving somewhere near Sudbury in Northern Ontario right now. The plan is to, the plan was to hike up a mountain in the snow tomorrow, in a snowstorm and camp on the top, because that sounds epic. Sounds like something real fun to do. The problem is, it doesn't get too cold until very late tomorrow night. We're supposed to do it tomorrow morning, all day tomorrow, and it doesn't get too cold until tomorrow night. It's supposed to get like negative 15, negative 17 degrees Celsius tomorrow night, but all day, it's going to get plus one and rain, 100% chance of rain all day. So hiking in that and then camping in negative 15 is just a hypothermic situation waiting to happen Snow till 10 in the morning and then after that It only shows till 3 but 90% chance of rain the rest of the day, that's not good Oh, just going up to hike up the Ghost Range Peak That sounds promising Everything has a name for a reason, doesn't it? Okay, so, kind of funny We are here right now We weren't going to go here but now we're going to go right about there there's a spot there's a spot we can see through nice i can't see really well my windshield right now uh i ran out of windshield wiper fluid about a half an hour ago and luckily there was a gas station right there so we stopped got some more fluid got it got it in there and have driven for maybe 35 minutes and we're completely out of windshield wiper fluid again. It's negative 14 degrees Celsius outside right now, so everything that hits the windshield is just immediately freezing. Off to a great start. Yeah, I guess so. This is the second bottle I put in in a half an hour. No joke. Are you kidding? I don't know. No, it's all that highway. We're all squared away with our windshield wiper fluid now. Got a few bottles of that. The problem is, it's not really, it's kind of lacking on its own. My jets aren't jetting very good. I don't know if it's frozen in there or what's happening, but there's little squirts every now and then, but I'm holding this thing down. Oh, oh, oh! There we go. Come on. See what I mean, though? It freezes right up as soon as it stops. We've got to be getting close now. I can't really tell you because we've lost all data, and we are headed into the abyss. It is just a crapshoot. I know from looking at the maps last night, we're going up this highway, and then there's gonna be a T at the top, a 101 highway 101 and we have to hang a left. The weather today is uh pretty cold, we're sitting at around negative 15 right now, uh expected to hop down to negative 19, a little bit colder than we were expecting. Well, we found the snow so that's good i'm excited to get out of the car and start hiking. I've never been here at all, i'm hoping that my truck can push it as far as it needs to go because it looks like it's getting quite snowy, oh yeah i I can see her now. She's definitely a ghosty, rangy peak. Oh, look it. Okay, we got our intersection here, the T. It's a good thing that all of the signage is covered by snow. That's really helpful. Quebec 23, I can see that, that way. No logging trucks barreling down this one. And west. Okay, so now is when we have to really start figuring out how to get where we need to go because this is the end of the road. There's a sign over there, too. we found where we believe a couple entrances are to the trailhead the problem is i can't access them one said no trespass and we think that might just be going the other way but regardless the the plows come and piled up a couple feet maybe two or three feet of hard pack snow right at the entrances of all of the places you can leave your car and if i drive down it at all it's gonna get stuck i know it it's quarter after one almost right now we have light until probably 4:45 at best and it's no joke she's a hill plow goes by we wave them down they were nice enough to stop and come back and see if we need to help but said they couldn't plow us a spot in there but that a lot of the people that come around here to go ice fishing in these back lakes they plow this this road extra wide so we can get off to the side without being in the way of anything and if you look it's quite a distance so i feel fine leaving my truck here overnight and especially with the okay from the local we got a little pellets of precipitation that might turn to snow they're a little styrofoam volleys right now but that's a good thing we're just hiking down this highway huh trying to find the trailhead oh man this is gonna be a long hike this is gonna be a long hike look at this you can tell we're north there's all jack pine here this is all I can see is jack pine you can tell the small needles so pretty in here all these trees are jack pine they're actually pretty large examples of them normally I've I've seen them a lot more stunted. You can tell they're jack pine by the double needle, the small short fat needle, and the tight cone. They're a serotinous cone. Serotinous means they don't open until they get fire. Heat opens them up and then the seeds disperse and that's how they reproduce. They're a fire-driven tree. Very good example of being in the north, jack pine and black spruce. You see a large track here. I love the snowshoe hair track. They're named for their feet, obviously. Their super wide spread toes act like snowshoes. better than these things. And they can hop on top of the snow. So they're two front feet, boom, and two back feet together, and off they go. I'm feeling really good, I'm excited to be here. It was a long time in the making, trying to find different places to go, trying to escape the rain all day, and trying to find snow. It gives me a sense of adventure. I feel like I don't know what's around the next corner. And that's what I really enjoy about being out in the woods, It's like always exploring around what that next corner has to show you. Whether that be climbing a peak of a mountain in the wintertime or canoeing through Algonquin Park in the summertime, that's part of what keeps getting you out there, that unknown that anything can change. You're gonna have somewhat of a plan of what you wanna do, where you wanna go, and how long it's gonna take, but it never holds. It never holds in the woods when you're out in the wilderness. That's a good feeling. Sometimes at the time, it sucks, but that's the type two type fun, and that's what keeps getting me out there. Oh, look, how is this, like, there's a trail. Check this old GPS and make sure this is where it's supposed to be. I don't know if it's just because of all the snow that came down and kind of knocked everything down over the trail, but it looks overgrown. This is the trail. Gonna come to a bend soon, and to the left. That is crazy, it is from the snow. Look at it, all these saplings are buckled right over. These aren't, this isn't ground, this isn't like growing from the ground, this is buckled completely over across the trail. The heavy, heavy slush storm a couple weeks ago. So, just coming to terms with reality, it's 3:45 right now, I'm looking at my GPS, we're maybe a quarter of the way there. Allotted enough time to get there, like we had to hike on the road at 1.6 clicks to get to this trailhead, and we hiked that within probably five minutes, and we've been on the trail for a very long time, well over an hour and a half, two hours, and we haven't moved, like we have not moved. We have still all the way to go up and around, up on top of the mountain. We haven't even started ascending yet. So have to make the decision, the safe call, we're gonna call it, we're just gonna hike onto some crown land, we're almost there. We've got another maybe, I don't know, 15 minutes to go and be on some crown land. The problem is the snow is way too deep. We didn't realize how deep the snow was gonna be and how extremely deep and how slow it would make us walk. So like I said, on the pavement we're good, but in here it's 15 times as slow. So call has been made, have to do it. We're gonna just hike up here, look for a little bit of a clearing, shovel out a space and set up the tent. It's getting cold, I can't even really just stand here anymore, I gotta start hiking. Go to the wind a little bit. My problem is I don't see any firewood. It's all birch and soaking wet spruce. It doesn't look promising at all actually for firewood. Birch does not burn well unless you can find a dead spruce. We'll figure it out. A little behind-the-scenes action for you folks at home. We've got Miss Chris Pros trudging in here with her big old backpack. I want to say thank you to Chris and a big shout-out for helping me with this video. It was her idea. Yeah, it's been a fun time. I'm learning a lot. You can tell the difference in the quality of the video. So go check Chris's channel out. She's got an awesome channel on YouTube. Actually, you've seen her work before on my Stranded series. So go check her out on YouTube and give her a big thanks for helping this guy out. Oh, man. yeah this is gonna be perfect there's a nice flat spot here off to the side pretty decent size i think instead of shoveling it out because there's a lot of snow i'm just gonna tamp it down with my snowshoes make a big old spot enough for my tent to fit possibly a little fire pit i'll call it good there don't really have much time to do too much here i'm gonna leave my backpack on to help me with the extra weight to get this nice and solid my tent is definitely at the bottom hurts the hands i gotta keep i gotta chris graciously brought these warmers i gotta keep warm my hands up on them it's uh it hurts it's pretty pretty cold the snow is very dry oh yeah it hurts my hands got a little wet there and stuck to the pool it's hard to um my fingers don't really have too much dexterity anymore it's hard to keep keep things going uh i'm getting pretty chilled the rest of my body but it's because we stopped right when you're hiking we build it up all that warmth i didn't feel the cold at all especially with the backpack and all that stuff it's the nature of it it's the nature of it accumulating pretty quickly be interesting to see how much we get overnight here we found the storm we found the snowstorm so we uh brought our two-person tent this time it's plenty big enough for both of us we wanted to divvy up the gear a little bit chris has a ton of filming gear and stuff, it would make no sense for us to both bring our own tents. And I feel like I should mention for the people watching at home that we are both happily annoying. Yeah, that's not going to matter, that's not going to matter one bit. Please be kind in the comments. Yeah or else I'm not going to be allowed to come play anymore. We got the big sleeping bag, my trusty pillow, you never leave home without it, and my high R value sleeping pad which is important in the winter time. Only have one sleeping pad and it's laying right on well other than this tiny buffer of steel nylon right on the snow So it's got to be a warm one. It's so snowy This is about 8:30 now eating Cliff bars in the tent just living that life Wrapped up in my sleeping bag. It's pretty cold outside. It's been snowing like crazy. It's almost time to go to bed Just hoping that it doesn't snow too much so we can get over here tomorrow morning but uh yeah really appreciating my my sleeping bags right now because it is cold we're awake it's about 8:30 ice is all tents all frosted up with ice there's a bunch of snow on top just check the weather it's negative 21 right now and it feels like negative 31 so that's uh that's pretty decent and today it's not going to get any warmer it's going to drop down to negative 28 today so the high of the high of today is negative 18 celsius so it's not like it's going to get any warmer laying in these sleeping bags uh i just can't bring myself to get out yet but we got to get out tear down camp smash some cliff bars and some water and get on out of here there's like a nine hour drive between uh meeting up back up with the other car and going home and then Chris parting ways so we got a full day of driving neither of us are gonna get home until dark night white out here man this is pretty tent got buried got two pegs back too okay all right in a little bit here so we're gonna hop her into four-wheel drive and bust out of here not too shabby