Jeremy Campbell - Article Assignment 1 - Winter Camping Tips for Noives and Experts

Winter Camping Tips for Novices and Experts - Chantal Macartney

Rating - **** Excellent

The first section of the article is entitled “Comforts of home”. It suggests helpful tips like making sure you have a double thickness of closed-cell sleeping mat to keep warm and comfortable while you sleep and instead of using your regular pegs, tie your tent down to a fallen down branch with extra weight on it instead to reduce the weight of equipment you’re carrying. The second section is called “Safety and security”. In this section, it tells you how to handle certain instances or problems you can encounter while winter camping like being cautious about the temperature of liquid fuels or to not bring any sort of food into your tent because some animals get up to eat while hibernating in the winter. The third section of the article is named “Warmth in site”. It gives helpful advice on how to keep yourself warm. You can eat a healthy snack before sleeping to help keep warm and to keep dry clothes in your sleeping bag instead of wearing the wet, sweaty clothes you've worn all day. In the last paragraph, “Getting the bite out of frost” it helps teach you how to prevent frostbite, like with using common sense, and not drinking alcohol, and how to treat it by covering and warming up the frostbitten area.

I have been on two winter camps before, and if I were to have known about some of the tips provided in the article, it would have greatly enhanced my experience. On those camps, I made the mistake of going to bed with the same clothes I had worn during the day because I didn't want to change before bed. Both times I had woken up in the night cold and feeling terrible, but didn't know why. If I were to have been aware of the tips in this article, I would have had a much better time. There are also some tips that I had never heard of, like the one about tying your tent to a branch. This would actually be very helpful because often times, in the snow the pins slide out easily and are easily lost, but if you use a dead branch fallen from a tree, you wouldn't have to worry about either of those things. After reading this article, I’ll make sure that I reread it before our winter camp so that I’ll remember the tips that it gives, and hopefully enhance my experience on the winter camp.

Macartney, Chantal  Ottawa Outdoors “Winter Camping Tips for Novices and Experts” 21 October 2012 Web. [http://ottawaoutdoors.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=158:-winter-camping-tips-for-novices-and-experts&catid=35:adventure-articles]