Winter Camp 2014


Trough out my whole winter camp experience I found that the three things that we did well was, prepare a great meal, maintain a good size fire to keep us warm , and keep warm throughout the night.

For our meal for the night we made our own pizzas out of pita bread, tomato sauce, shredded cheese , and sliced pepperoni. It was a fast cooking meal and it worked out well , it was a great tasting meal and it was filling and held me off for the rest of the night. We all kept warm through the night and came prepared, we all had at least 3 extra pairs of socks, came with great sleeping bags, and layered well, no body was complaining that they where cold or wet. The fire we had built was a long lasting fire, we started it off a little small to cook our food on and later on in the night made a larger fire to sit around and keep warm. We prepared in advance for making a fire by gathering a large amount of dry wood and birch bark to make a great fire.

  

The that we could have improved was the platform of our Quinzhee and the vent hole too.

The platform of our Quinzhee was a little bit slanted towards the entrance and could have been a little more evened out, it was like when we dug out the entrance and dug down and back up, we kept on digging upwards, so the platform could have been more leveled. We could have made a larger vent hole to allow more air circulation.

   5 things to recommend:

The 5 things that i wold recommend to someone who is going winter camping for their first time is to , make a good leveled out platform inside so you dont slide to the entrance of the Quinzhee , have a decent size vent hole not too big or small so you can have just the right amount of air flow through your Quinzhee while still staying warm, bring extra blankets just in case you get colder through out the night you can just throw another blanket over top of you or in your sleeping bag, put down a tarp and the right amount of mats so you dont get cold from laying on the ground and the mats will separate you from the cold, and the last thing i'd recommend is to cover your entrance before you go to sleep.




   My vision of our Quinzhee before we stated building was that it was that it was going to be very tall and wide with lots of space inside and could fit 1 extra person and have good large entrance, and also have big thick walls around the fire pit. The outome of the Quinzhee wasnt far off from what I expected it to be. It wasnt as wde as i thought it would be but was taller than I thought it would have been. We just had enough space to fit every person in the group making for a comfortable space between each of us and to have a good sleep.

   Staying inside the Quinzhee for the night was better than i thought. I ended up getting a fair amount of sleep and i was comfortable in my sleeping bad so i fell asleep pretty quick. I did wake up in the middle of the night a little bit wet because i slid out of my sleeping bag a little but i just switched sweaters to solve that problem. From what i have heard my experience of a sleep wasnt really different than everyone elses, most other people got around the same amount of hours of sleep and remained warm through out the night.

   I think that the improvements that should have been made are that the walls around the fire could have been a bit bigger, we could have had a bigger vent hole to let the air circulate a bit more, and have a more level platform.

I defiantly enjoyed winter camp and sleeping in the quinzhees and would for sure do it again.