People hear "winter camping" and picture suffering. We understand. We pictured it too, before a friend dragged us out in January of 1988. Here is what we found instead: no bugs, no crowds, no mud, a silence you can't get any other time of year, stars like you've never seen them because the air is dry and the nights are long, and the deep, specific satisfaction of being warm and comfortable in a place where you're not supposed to be able to be.

The key word is comfortable. This page is not about toughing it out. Toughing it out is how people get hurt. It's about doing it right: the clothes, the sleeping system, the shelter, the water, the food, and the handful of things you must know about cold and your body. None of it is complicated. All of it matters.

We're not guides, we're not selling anything, and we're not experts on anywhere but the north woods where we go. Where we say "ten below" we mean Fahrenheit, and we mean it. Read this, then find someone who has done it and go with them. That's the last rule on the page and it's the most important one, so we'll say it twice.

The rule of winter clothing is that you're managing sweat as much as cold. Wet insulation doesn't insulate. So you dress in layers you can take off before you get sweaty and put back on before you get cold, and you're constantly adjusting. If you're hot on the trail, you're overdressed; stop and take something off. Stopping for thirty seconds to shed a layer is always worth it.

Base layer: next to the skin. Polypropylene or one of the other synthetic long underwear fabrics, or wool. It wicks moisture off your skin and dries fast. No cotton, anywhere, ever. Cotton holds water and stays cold; "cotton kills" is a cliché because it's true. This includes your socks, your underwear, and the T-shirt you were going to sleep in.

Insulating layer(s): fleece, wool or down, in whatever combination lets you add and subtract. We each carry a fleece pullover, wool pants over the long johns, and a big down or synthetic-fill parka for camp that we'd never wear while moving. Down is warmest for its weight but useless when wet; synthetic fill is heavier but still works damp. In the dry cold of a Minnesota January, down is fine. In wet cold, think twice.

Shell: wind is the enemy. A windproof (not necessarily waterproof; in deep cold, the snow is dry) shell jacket and pants over everything. Big enough to go over the layers. Zippers you can work with mittens on.

Head: a wool or fleece hat, always, plus a balaclava or face mask for wind, plus the parka hood. You lose a great deal of heat through an uncovered head, and a hat is the fastest way to warm cold hands and feet: put on the hat.

Hands: thin liner gloves for working, big mittens over them for everything else. Mittens are warmer than gloves because your fingers keep each other warm. Carry a spare pair of mittens. Tie them to your sleeves like a kindergartner if you have to; a dropped mitten at ten below is an emergency.

Feet: the hardest part. Ordinary hiking boots freeze. We wear mukluks (soft, roomy, felt-lined boots) with wool socks and felt liners, or big insulated pac boots for wet conditions. The rule is roomy: a boot that's tight cuts off circulation, and circulation is what keeps toes alive. Two pairs of wool socks in a boot that fits with two pairs. Take the liners out and dry them (or sleep with them) every night.

The bag. A real winter bag, rated to at least twenty below for where we go. Ratings are optimistic; figure the bag will keep you comfortable about ten to fifteen degrees warmer than the number on the tag, and buy accordingly. A mummy shape with a hood and a draft collar. Down or synthetic (see above; same argument). If you can't afford a winter bag, put your three-season bag inside a cheap second bag; two bags nested is a legitimate system and it's what we did our first three winters.

Two pads. This is the thing most beginners get wrong. You lose more heat to the ground than to the air; the snow under you is a giant heat sink, and the bag's insulation is crushed flat under your weight, where it does nothing. So: a closed-cell foam pad on the bottom (cheap, indestructible, can't leak) and a self-inflating pad on top of it. Two pads. Not one thick one. Full length, so your feet aren't on the snow.

How to get into a cold bag. Eat something first. Go to the bathroom first (your body spends heat keeping a full bladder warm; yes, really, and yes, it's cold out there, go anyway). Do a couple of minutes of exercise to get warm, then get in the bag warm and dry, in dry long underwear you've kept for sleeping only, with a dry hat on. The bag doesn't make heat; it keeps yours. Get in with none and you'll shiver for an hour.

Inside the bag: tomorrow's socks and liner gloves, your boot liners (in a stuff sack), your water bottle (see Water), anything with a battery, and any wet gloves you're hoping will be dry by morning. It's crowded. You get used to it.

Don't breathe into the bag. Your breath is wet, and by morning the inside of the bag is damp and the insulation is worse for it. Keep your nose and mouth outside, breathe through the balaclava, and pull the hood tight around your face. Yes, your nose will be cold. That's the deal.

Shake out the frost in the morning. There will be a layer of frost on the outside of the bag and the tent walls from your breath. Brush it off outside before it melts into anything.

There are two ways to do this and we've done both. They're different sports.

The four-season tent. A sturdy, low, double-walled tent with strong poles that can take snow load and wind, and minimal mesh. You carry it on your back. Inside, it's about ten degrees warmer than outside and out of the wind, and that's all; you are living in your sleeping bag and your parka. You cook in the vestibule (never fully inside, on account of carbon monoxide and fire), you get in the bag at seven because it's dark and there's nothing else to do, and you stay in it twelve hours. This is real winter camping and it's what you do above the tree line or on a long trip where weight matters. It's also what beginners should not start with at ten below.

The hot tent. A canvas wall tent or a wedge tent, with a stove jack in the roof, and a small folding wood stove inside. You haul it on a toboggan, because it's heavy. Inside, with the stove going, it's sixty or seventy degrees. You sit in your shirtsleeves. You dry your mittens on a line over the stove. You cook real food. You go outside at night and see the stars and come back in to a warm tent. This is the northern tradition, from the trappers and the Ojibwe and the Cree who've been doing it forever, and it is the way we recommend beginners in the north woods start, because it removes most of the suffering and leaves the good part.

The trade-offs: the hot tent is heavy (ours, with the stove, is around 45 pounds), so it's for trips where you're pulling a sled on flat, frozen lakes, not climbing. You need dry firewood, which means a saw and an axe and an hour of work every afternoon. You have to keep the stove fed, which means somebody gets up at 3 a.m. (we take turns), and the tent is cold by morning anyway. And a stove in a canvas tent is a fire, so you're careful: a spark arrestor on the pipe, nothing flammable near the stove, the door never blocked, and no sleeping with the stove roaring. But on a January night in the Boundary Waters, with the stove ticking and the lantern lit and a pot of something on, there's nowhere we'd rather be.

You'll get dehydrated in winter faster than you'd believe, because the air is dry, you're breathing hard, you're sweating under all those layers, and cold water is unappealing so you don't drink it. Dehydration makes you colder and stupider. Drink on a schedule, not on thirst.

Getting water. If you're on a lake, chop a hole (an ice chisel or an axe; keep the hole covered with snow so it doesn't freeze over as fast). Otherwise, melt snow. Melting snow takes a lot of fuel and a lot of time, so plan for it, and put a little water in the pot first before you add snow. A pot of dry snow on a hot stove scorches, and scorched snow-water tastes like a burnt pan. Add snow a bit at a time as it melts. Pack the snow in as tight as you can; snow is mostly air, and a full pot of it is a cup of water.

Keeping it liquid. Water freezes, starting at the top. Wide-mouth plastic bottles (the narrow-mouth kind freeze shut at the neck). Store them upside down, so the ice forms at the bottom and the lid stays clear. Insulate them in a wool sock or an insulated cover. On the trail, keep a bottle inside your parka.

Sleep with the bottle. Before bed, fill a bottle with hot water, make sure the lid is on tight, and take it into the bag with you. It's a hot water bottle for the first two hours and it's unfrozen water for the morning. Make very sure the lid is tight. We say this from experience.

Don't eat snow for water. It's mostly air, it chills you from the inside, and it takes more energy to melt in your mouth than you get from it.

Your body is a furnace and in winter it's running hard. Pulling a sled at ten below, you can burn twice what you'd burn on a summer hike, and you need to eat like it: more than you think, more often than you think, and a lot of it fat. Fat has more than twice the calories per ounce of carbohydrate or protein, and it burns slow, which is what you want at 2 a.m. in the bag.

What's in our food bag:

• Butter. A pound of it, in a stick, in a bag. It goes in everything: oatmeal, soup, noodles, on bread, in the cocoa. In summer this would be disgusting. In winter you crave it.
• Cheese, salami, nuts, peanut butter. Trail food that doesn't freeze into a rock (well, the cheese does, but it thaws in your pocket).
• Chocolate. Both for morale and for the fat. It freezes hard; break it up before you go.
• Hot cereal with butter and brown sugar for breakfast. A lot of it.
• One-pot dinners: noodles or rice or instant potatoes, plus a fatty meat (bacon, sausage, canned corned beef), plus butter, plus dried vegetables. In the hot tent, we bring real stew, frozen solid in a bag, and thaw it on the stove. Frozen is the natural state of things in January; use it.
• Hot drinks all evening: cocoa, tea with sugar, soup. Warm liquid in the belly before bed is worth another quarter inch of bag.
• A midnight snack in the bag. A candy bar or a handful of nuts in a pocket of the bag, for when you wake up cold at 3 a.m. Eating something is the fastest way to warm back up. Food is fuel; put fuel in the furnace.

Water-based foods (fresh fruit, most vegetables, eggs) freeze into cannonballs. Leave them home or bring them dried. Anything in a glass jar stays home too.

This is the one that sounds wrong and works. Your skin gives off moisture constantly, even when you don't feel sweaty. In summer it evaporates. In deep cold, it travels out through your socks and your long underwear and your bag, and somewhere in those layers, where the temperature drops below freezing, it stops and turns to frost. Over one night that's a little dampness. Over a week, your bag has gained pounds of ice and lost most of its warmth, and your boot liners are frozen boards.

A vapor barrier is a waterproof layer next to your skin that stops the moisture from getting into the insulation at all. Your skin gets a little clammy, your body notices and stops sweating so much, and your insulation stays dry, night after night.

Where it makes sense: feet, first and foremost. A thin plastic bag or a purpose-made vapor barrier sock over a thin liner sock, then the wool socks and the boot. Your feet feel a bit damp; your wool socks and liners stay dry and warm all day and all week. On trips longer than two or three nights in deep cold, a vapor barrier liner inside the sleeping bag (they're sold; a big plastic bag works in a pinch) keeps the bag dry and adds real warmth. Some people use vapor barrier shirts. We don't; we found them too clammy while working hard.

Where it doesn't: mild weather, short trips, or anywhere you're going to be sweating heavily. Above about 20 above, we skip it. It's a deep-cold, multi-day tool.

Wipe down and air out at every chance. And change your liner socks daily regardless; the dampness against the skin is fine for a day and not fine for a week.

This is the part to read twice. We're not doctors; this is what every winter traveler is taught, and what we watch for in each other. Get real first-aid training before you go.

Frostnip and frostbite happen to the parts farthest from your heart and most exposed: fingers, toes, nose, cheeks, ears. Frostnip comes first: the skin goes pale and numb but is still soft. It's a warning. Warm the spot right away (a bare hand on the cheek, fingers in an armpit, toes on a partner's stomach; we're not kidding, it's the standard method) and fix whatever caused it: put on the hat, loosen the boot, get out of the wind. Real frostbite is when the tissue freezes: the skin goes waxy white or grayish and feels hard and wooden, and you can't feel it at all. That's a trip-ender. Don't rub it (you'll grind ice crystals through the tissue), don't warm it by the fire, and don't thaw it if there's any chance it'll refreeze; get the person out to medical care. Prevention is everything: watch your partner's face, ask about their toes every hour, and if anybody says "I can't feel my feet," everybody stops and deals with it right then.

Hypothermia is your whole body losing the fight. It's more dangerous than frostbite because it sneaks up, and because the person it's happening to is the last to know. The early signs, the ones we watch for in each other: shivering, first. Then the "umbles": mumbles, stumbles, fumbles, grumbles. Someone who's suddenly clumsy with a zipper, or slurring, or irritable, or oddly quiet, or making bad decisions ("I don't need my hat"), is a person who's getting cold, and that person will insist they're fine. Don't argue; act. Stop, get them out of the wind, get wet layers off and dry ones on, get them into a bag (with a hot water bottle, or with another person if it's bad), and get warm sweet liquid into them if they can swallow. When the shivering stops and the person gets sleepy and confused, it's serious, and it's a carry-out.

The rules we go by: nobody goes anywhere alone, not even to the bathroom in a storm. Everyone checks everyone else's face for white spots. Anyone who says they're cold gets dealt with immediately, no toughness points. We eat and drink on the clock, not on appetite, because a hungry, dry body can't make heat. And we turn around early and often. The lake will be there next weekend.

Five days, four nights, the second week of January, the two of us and our friends Pete and Marguerite, who are the ones who took us out the first time in 1988. Two hot tents, two stoves, two toboggans, snowshoes for everybody. We're going to keep the where general, because the Boundary Waters is a big place and part of the point of going in January is that nobody else is there.

In winter you still need a permit, but you fill it out yourself at the entry point instead of reserving one, and there's no quota; we were the only party on our entry that week and, judging by the tracks, the only one in a good long while. The road in was plowed to the landing, and then it was lakes and portages, on foot, pulling the sleds. We covered six to eight miles a day, which is a good day when you're breaking trail on snowshoes and stopping to adjust layers every twenty minutes.

The cold. The high on our warmest day was about five above. The low on our coldest night, on the thermometer we hung on the tent, was nineteen below. The morning after that one we made coffee inside the tent in our shirtsleeves with the stove roaring and then stepped outside into a world where our breath fell out of the air as ice crystals and the lake was booming (lake ice cracks and groans as the temperature drops; it's loud, it's safe, and it takes some getting used to). That's the morning that makes it worth it.

What went right: the vapor barrier socks (dry boot liners every single morning, first time ever); the frozen stew (four dinners, no cooking, just thawing); pulling the sleds on the lakes, which is much easier than carrying on your back; Marguerite's idea of a candle lantern in each tent, which made the evenings feel like a cabin.

What went wrong: Bill's water bottle lid, night two. It was tight. It was not tight enough. The bag dried over the stove by morning and Bill slept in his parka and was fine, and has heard about it since. Also, one of the stove pipes came apart on a portage and we spent an hour finding the section in the snow. Now they travel in a bag, taped.

What we'd change: less oatmeal, more butter. (It's always more butter.) And one more day; by day four we'd stopped noticing the cold and started noticing the place, and that's when you want to stay.

Pictures were taken. The camera batteries died repeatedly (keep the camera inside your parka; cold kills batteries), but we got a roll and a half, and if we can find someone with a scanner they'll go here.

1. Go with someone who's done it. Not read about it. Done it. A club, a friend, an outfitter, a course; it doesn't matter who, as long as they've spent nights out in real cold and come back with all their parts. Your first trip is not the place to find out what you don't know. This is the rule we said we'd say twice, and this is the second time.
2. Start close and short. One night, within a mile of the car, in weather that's cold but not brutal (ten or twenty above is plenty for a first night). Then two nights. Then farther. Then colder.
3. Practice in the backyard. Set up the tent and sleep in it in your yard on a cold night. If it goes wrong, you go inside. You'll learn more in that one night than in a month of reading pages like this one.
4. Two pads. No cotton. Roomy boots. If you remember nothing else from the top half of this page.
5. Eat and drink on a schedule. Set a watch. Every hour, something to eat, something to drink, and a look at everybody's face.
6. Leave a plan with someone at home: where you're going in, where you're coming out, and when. And when you're going to call. And what to do if you don't.
7. Nobody alone, ever.
8. Turn around early. The whole trick to enjoying this is having enough margin that nothing is ever an emergency. If you're pushing, you're doing it wrong.
9. Don't be a hero. If you're cold, say so. If you're tired, say so. If it isn't fun, go home; the point was for it to be fun.
10. Do it again. The first trip, you'll be too busy managing everything to notice where you are. The second trip, you'll notice. The third trip, you'll be planning the fourth. That's how it got us.