2 Night Winter Snowshoe Bushcraft, Camping in the Snow.

Oh man, Pushing that button. Well me and my buddy Sean are out here in Northern Ontario snowshoeing through powder. We've been pulling our sleds behind us for about two hours now trying to find a good camping spot. The idea of this trip is tonight we're gonna tarp it. We're gonna tarp camp. Supposed to get negative what 25? Yeah minus 27 maybe with the wind chill. And that's Celsius so pretty pretty cold. And then so tonight we'll tarp it and tomorrow we're gonna build the Quinzee. For those who don't know Quinzee is basically an igloo. We build a big old pile of snow hollow it out literally sleep in the snow tomorrow night hope you guys enjoy this video being able to pull all your stuff behind you in a sled is very convenient in the winter time but it's not very easy going through the thick snow in the woods but it's a good trade-off regardless I was able to fit all of my stuff in this duffel bag as opposed just not my little stuff I got a little hidden woodsman day rock that I have on my back but the The whole system is working out pretty well. I've used this a couple times like this. So I got a big negative 30 degree sleeping bag and I've got a Silnylon tarp I'm gonna set up right now. So I've got my tarp up in an A-frame configuration and I need to stake it out, but stakes might work but it's not gonna hold it very taut and I need this to stay taut. So I'm gonna try with snow anchors, see how that works. Basically all I'm gonna do, I'm gonna measure where I want my tarp to come out to, right around there. I'm gonna start wrapping this and stopping it there and then you want to come down and bury it again And that will freeze overnight and keep it taut Well, she's all set up now nice and taut good a-frame style lots of coverage lots of room underneath relatively flat ground I think I'll be good put a ground sheet down my sleeping pad my sleeping bag Everything will work out. But now I feel like I need to go help Shawn because he's been working while I've been putting up a tarp. Doing all of the work over here like usual. Like five seconds, come on. Next time Jill begs me to go out, I might say no. This guy, he might, but he won't. You got your snowman almost built? Almost, yeah. How many sections would you like? So what are you doing? Tell the folks. I'm making a big fire pit here. Of course, in this winter, there's actually more snow than I thought there was, like I said. Look, I started digging and my back's sore from digging down so deep. guess I could help. No, you're never going to help. I know that. I know not to even bother asking. So we did find some nice rocks as a backstop here trying to get rid of as much stuff as possible. The beauty, what I really love about campfires in the open in the winter is you get to use all that snow as a bench. So I'm going to let this solidify. I just walked on it, packed it down and then I'm going to actually carve benches and tables out of it. You have a great little seating area here we might want might not want to leave tomorrow okay well keep at it stop talking and do it yeah let's go get some firewood the closest we get to doing banjo see our water on just melting some snow and then sean packed in a deer backbone for us that bad boys give me a good supper oh we're a little foggy we're a little foggy now So now that we're at camp and we've been walking around, we've developed these trails where we've been walking with our snowshoes. You can see Sean walking there, how he's kind of not sinking. So it's okay to walk without snowshoes on the stuff we've already packed down. But let me show you what it's like with just boots off trail. I've got to go get some firewood, and I don't feel like putting my snowshoes on. I already did this once. Oh, a chickadee. A chickadee that's acting like a woodpecker. Okay, I get distracted easily, sorry. so let's show how deep the snow just is you can see how this could take some time to get anywhere walking on snowshoes isn't the most efficient either but it's much better than struggling like this every time okay there we are just because I know people are gonna ask again it's called the boreal saw by Agawa Canyon the boreal 21 by Agawa Canyon the sunset oh yeah Yeah, that's that whole no snowshoe thing. The sun set and it's super pink in the sky. And we're trying to hike out to this point we know of, following our old snowshoe tracks, trying to get there before it all fades out. And we didn't make it in time. Really needed that exercise though. I'm really glad we did that. Burned off all that food. Oh yeah, and all that water. This is where we're planning on setting up for our Quincy. Big open area right here, so lots of snow to fall, so we can gather it easily. Great view, it's gonna be pretty epic. Crease drip, come on. I think I'm just gonna make up some rice tonight to go with this deer backbone. Seems like a nice combo. Usually when you're in restaurants, backbone comes with Uncle Ben's rice. That's how you know when you're a classy joint. Yeah. I think I got a little too much water in this one, though. I'm gonna put the seasoning packet in right now, sometimes I wait till later. Getting a little dangerous today, a little dangerous. All right, some backbone, sans spinal cord. Would you guys like to see the spinal cord? I wouldn't give up the spinal cord to do that for myself. So that's smoky. That's pretty good. Eat that, and I got my full pot of rice. Things are looking up, looking good. I'm ready for bed. Just melting the last of my snow. Gonna boil it up, pour it into my hot water bottle. I'll change my clothes and put that at my feet as I get into bed. and probably be pretty toasty. Good night folks, I'll see you in the morning. You gotta love seeing the sun on a cold morning. Good morning folks, had a great night's sleep, slept for about 10 hours. Now we're up, just stoking the fire a bit, grab some breakfast and we're gonna move on our way. So this trip and any other cold weather trip I'm gonna be doing, I like to bring two pairs of gloves. By cold weather I mean if it's gonna get down negative 15 Celsius or colder. So my leather gloves are good for just wearing as I'm hiking or collecting wood or really doing whatever I can do with these. But they tend to get very wet and then cold and freeze or you can warm them up and melt them out by wearing them throughout the day. But first thing in the morning, you don't wanna do that. Who wants to put their hand in a fricking ice block? But these are some old Canadian surplus mitts that I've had for, I don't know, maybe 10 years or something like that. And so they're super loose, they're leather on the outside and they have the wool liner. They might be called chopper gloves if I'm not mistaken. But anyways, working on the fire in the morning, anything really I can do with these. My hands are together like this, like a mitt in there, so they're staying warm. Yeah, I can fit my battery for my camera in there to keep warm too if I need to. So yeah, two mitt system seems to work out good for me. We're just gearing up now. Got my Hidwoodsman Dayrock. I'm gonna throw gear for the day in, some lunch, my Arc'teryx hard shell jacket, and my snow pants. Today we're wearing snow pants because we're building that Quinzee. And we're gonna be laying in the snow, digging in the snow, a lot of stuff like that. You gotta be geared up properly for it. Sean's actually got a pretty cool story on his website about how when he was 17 and building the Quinzee and wasn't geared up properly and how it almost ended badly. I can put a link in the description if you guys wanna read it. It's a really interesting read, actually. highly recommend checking it out so I'm just gonna get my snowshoes on and start trucking that way it's a beautiful day the sun's out looking forward to it we made it to our location where we want to build you can see why we want to do it here it's cooler up here because it's a bit windier but inside the quinzee it'll be totally fine the idea of the quinzee is the snow is a super good insulator in the shaded part of the woods the snow is a lot softer it hasn't had the sun baking on it so it's a nice dig in here we're more or less happy with our mound now we're just kind of shaping it and packing the snow down we've got to let it sit to let it sit for a few hours so I think we'll take a lunch break and hang out for a bit lots of work man imagine us two able-bodied men with enough gear food and water to do this kind of stuff imagine if you needed to do this we're doing this for fun this is our enjoyment imagine if you needed to do this and you didn't have anything because that's when you would need to do it exertion we're like overheating like crazy but you had it's a stiff wind so you just stop you get cold it's hard to regulate your heat so we're gonna have to make sure we strip off when we're doing the hard work and bundle right back up again yeah it's a lot lots of lots of layering on and off for sure hungry the next thing we have to do is get sticks and stick them into the Quinzee they're all gonna be about six inches long and that way when we're digging the Quinzee out we'll know when to stop so that we leave our wall about six inches I've done it a foot before we'll give ourselves six inches of snow pack as insulation so we don't go too thin so they don't have to be anything substantial you know I mean it could be just twigs like this broken off at about six inches and stabbed in so it's not rocket science pretty straightforward forward and the easiest part of the Quinzee building process so we got a let her sit for a couple hours there even though we brought our lunch out this way I think we're gonna go back down and hang out at camp less wind down there and there's chairs to sit on so maybe we'll go for a hike or something in between well this is not maybe not nice that clear water no far from it oh you're more than welcome to some can you guys hear that there's a woodpecker right above us oh there he is he wasn't affiliated probably so it's a nice day man it's starting to be a nice day oh there's birds singing sun's shining i got uh this cool little system i got a ton of leaf litter in the bottom of my pot right that happens when you're when you're melting snow there's just tons of crap in the snow but if you do a little ladle action with a little cup you're debris free just trying to warm my pita up so it doesn't crack when i open it No, I might actually warm my whole sandwich up do a little melt Not so bad. It's time to go back up to our mound of snow that we're gonna call a home for tonight It's been two and a half hours. We ate a lot of food Melted a lot of snow Melting snow is an ongoing process for water. So Filled up our water bottles got our all the gear we need we can walk on the the packed snow now because we've done a couple trip passes by on it with our snowshoes so it's all easy walking easy walking so the purpose behind leaving it sit for a couple hours supposed to solidify pretty pretty soft though so we're both gonna we're planning on sleeping lengthways with the door right in front I want to put the door in the middle try to dig down beneath the snow to get in so we'll have a little dip and in set up all that great that candle will get have to light something in there probably to ice it over faster no doubt you use a lot of the snow from the inside to build up an outer wall kind of have it bend around maybe kind of cool took a little gander shall we, what do you guys think we don't want too much room in here because we want to keep it warm with our body heat, right so if you had a bunch of dead air space it would make no sense it's got about a foot above our heads, our feet are relatively close to the top and yeah there's enough room for Mr. Sean and I. Yeah, here you can see the sticks that we put in to know when to stop, so they're just markers and they're all over. So we've got probably about anywhere from six to eight inches of snow on the outsides because some sticks are bigger than others. Yeah, but it's like quite a bit warmer in here. There's no wind at all in here obviously. I am laying directly on the snow, so that's not great. So I've carried my sleep system over here. I've got my tarp, my sleeping pad, sleeping bag, my woobie from Malcolm. Now I've just got to stuff it all in and set it up. Okay, a little snowy. So first things first, my tarp's going down as a ground sheet. Then next, my Therm-a-Rest NeoAir sleeping pad. All right, the build is done, and I'm chilled. I took off one, two, three layers of warmth. and I had on just this barrier. It doesn't add any warmth, it's a good windbreak. But now that we're done, it's definitely time to switch back as I am just a bit chilled. You can see the last of the sun just hitting the tops of the mountains, giving a nice golden glow. We're living like kings now. We've got two chairs carved in the backside of the wall with the snow that we took out from inside the Quincy. Sean just whipped up a Swedish torch, a little ambient light. We're gonna hang out here for a while, Watch the sun go down. It was real peaceful. I was sitting here. We weren't talking at all for, I don't know, a good 20 minutes. It was silent. Just sitting here appreciating the winter camping. You know, that's what I really like about winter camping is just the peace and the silence. Like, if I stop talking, you don't hear anything except for Sean's witty banter. Smoke generator, keep the bugs down. Yeah. beetles are bad this time of year. Oh, did you die? a nice uh waterfall up over that ridge right there and in the fall or summer actually in the fall i did it with my wife walked in like an hour and we tried like just cross that pond and you know these conditions are just so exhausting i think we we uh the consensus was that it takes about four times longer three to four times longer right now with snowshoes going through the deep snow and pulling that sled don't forget that that was a big part of it and we're off trail you know I mean there's trees blocking everywhere this there's saplings that we're getting hung up on so yeah Just a lot longer to travel in the wintertime, but you don't necessarily need to go as far in the wintertime either Getting pretty late. We're getting pretty hungry. We're gonna hike down back to camp and Hang out there by the fire get warm Eat some food probably hang out there the rest of the night and then when it comes time to go to bed we're gonna hike up back up to the ridge and and uh crawl in the old snow cave uh we'll definitely bring you in there with us when we go in to show how like us with our stuff in there how comfortable it can be so yeah off to make some food, my sausages are thawed, the only downfall with this I'm gonna have some sausage water but I think I can deal with it all right so those will grill up nicely now and I'm super hungry so this is gonna be good, big meal gonna be hot and gassy and I cleansed it with Joe, oh that's fantastic, nice and crispy so hungry from doing all that work today man, it's feeling real good and it's hot water, I'm just drinking hot water straight out of my my billy can, sausage water feels really really good, it's warming me from the inside, I'm feeling very good right now, it was chilly, chilly when we came over here, we got the fire going pretty good now, it'll be a good night We have a couple sips of some whiskey later on It's amazing how much a fire can really do for you out here It's like negative 27 degrees Celsius right now with the wind chill and we're sitting in the snow literally on a snow chair next to a fire and I'm totally comfortable I think it's about time for a little adult beverage This is a fun trip. I haven't Haven't had a proper winter trip in a while till we win. That's a Joe pour I haven't had a good real legit winter camp in a while. This is the first one. This is the first of this year. This is the first real legit winter camp. I think we can cheers to that. Cheers buddy Cold. Yeah she's a little cold, that whiskey And there was a point of doing this trip. There's a point of doing this video. Right, my last video I was in my hot tent and I have plans for my next trip. There's gonna be a bunch of people in a couple hot tents so this was more of a cold camping build a quincy kind of style video just to mix it up i don't want to put out too many similar videos in a row but i will be using my hot tent next trip it should be a good trip we're gonna have five guys sean will be there dustin from the first season of alone is gonna be there they'll be pretty fancy buddy mike and doug you guys haven't seen doug in a long time lots of people been asking for doug we're gonna get old Douglas on board for this trip. I think basically Sean and I are just gonna hang out here for another hour or so, then hike up back over to Quincy. I'll probably check in with you then. My batteries do not like this cold. Grandma, okay. It's like minus 100, minus, we're gonna say minus 30 Celsius. I can't even focus, my stuff's all jacked. Okay, we're in the Quincy. Maybe you can see, we're a little foggy, and uh because it's so hot in here it's so warm good night good night good night and we're loving it it's it's uh no it's a little cozy a couple more people in here would be like a dog at the foot of our bed to be all right yeah we built it a little small so it's a little low not bad for length i guess but it's a little low and uh we're making do so the only problem is a little bit sloped good night there we are morning 7 30 i slept like a tank what about you absolutely yeah lots warmer than the first night this uh quincy did its job insulation wise there's a nice crust over top of us uh last night i didn't talk about our show but sean lit an esbit tab in here not while we were in here um we stayed and poked a hole for for ventilation and stuff um just to crust it over a candle candle usually does that job but neither of us had one dropping the ball big time uh yeah great night's sleep warm the quincy was a success and i am ready to get out of here and get some food as you can see sean's got all his gear out of the quincy i'm just kind of tearing my sleep system out right now had a great trip really warm sleep last night we got a hike over back to our other gear pack that camp up hike like two hours out and get to our car and drive home so I think I'm gonna end it here at a really fun time thanks guys that was a great trip thanks Joe had an awesome time and looking forward to the next next trip for sure yeah stick around guys there'll be more yeah have a good one