Cold Weather Skills – Hot Tent Trip #1 AAR

Winter is a fact of life in my region and it takes special skills and equipment to work in it. It’s been a goal of mine for a long time to be able to operate as effectively in the winter as I can in the warmer parts of the year. I decided to invest in a hot tent and stove to help facilitate training and refining the TTP’s I need to so I can achieve this goal.

For those unfamiliar with hot tents they are a tent with a section of heat resistant material that a stove pipe can be inserted through. Having a hot tent gives me a lot of flexibility when it comes to winter training, giving me a safe haven of sorts that I can then practice other skills from. For instance if I want to test different improvised shelters in single digit weather, I can now do it without risking death in case my improvised shelter isn’t up to snuff. The hot tent is also a great way to get others involved in winter training, as I did this last weekend, and it gives me a good base to hunt from next hunting season. While a hot tent isn’t a tactical shelter, having the capability to operate in temperature extremes and terrain that others may not be able to does have its benefits at times.

Because of the different varieties of winter my region experiences I had to be careful with the hot tent and stove I decided on. Ultimately I wanted a setup that could be packed in on my back should we have cold weather without any snow, this meant it had to be light weight. If I’m lucky enough to have snow then I can use my snow shoes and pulk to pull my gear in so weight isn’t as much of an issue in that situation.

I also knew I needed to invest in a quality setup since I don’t want the sewing to fail when I’m miles back and in cold weather. Both of these factors meant I was going to end up spending a decent chunk of change, but I think the trade offs are worth it. I finally ended up settling on the Lite Outdoors Plateau with their 18” titanium stove. I also added their carbon fiber center pole and their condensation liner. For a tent that’s going to be used in the cold a liner is important for managing condensation and keeping it off the inhabitants.

This past weekend a friend and I set out to do an overnight winter training trip. We had a few objectives which included:

• Familiarizing ourselves with the nuances of setting up the hot tent and stove
• Familiarizing ourselves with the nuances of living in the hot tent and operating the stove
• Testing different pieces of insulating clothing and sleeping gear
• Testing different pieces of cold weather mobility gear
• Evaluating different methods of carrying line 2 gear while snow shoeing and pulling a pulk

The weather was pretty mild for winter with highs around 35 and lows around 20, partly cloudy and not too windy. We chose to go to a training area that we’ve used many times that we knew was very sheltered should bad weather show up, was easy to get in and out of, and had lots of resources for us to use. The terrain is mainly rolling hills, prairie and wooded creek bottoms.

We set out at about 1100 on the first day, the sun was shining and it was a perfect day for snow shoeing. We had a lot of snow in December, but it’s been warmer since then so the snow had an icy crust built up. This made pulling our pulks very easy. It’s amazing how much more weight you can carry this way than with a pack on your back. My pulk is a homemade one, and I’ll be detailing it’s construction and features in an upcoming article.

The snow shoes that I use are surplus USGI Maglines, with some modifications. In this trip I was trying out a new set of bindings, the third set I’ve used on these snow shoes. These come from a guy in Maine and they are very heavy duty. I like the fact that instead of a bunch of webbing and straps it uses heavy duty hardware. Once bolted into place there’s nothing to come out of adjustment like the other webbing based bindings I’ve used before. These worked excellent the whole trip.

The first leg of our journey was down hill. My partner who was new to using a pulk for his gear really only had a sled. He had planned to use a rope and carabiner to hook it to his belt, and while this worked well in the level surface of his yard, once we got on this slope it became apparent that this was far less than ideal as his sled kept sliding forward every step and hitting him in the back of the leg. In the future he’ll be adding a set of poles like mine.

We continued on down the hill until we were in a wooded creek bottom. This route was actually taking us in a completely different direction than the one we wanted to go, but since we were observed unloading our gear by people driving by we thought it would be good to do a button hook into our camp.

We continued for a ways, observing lots of animal sign as we went. We arrived in the general vicinity of the area we wanted to camp but we still wanted to scout around to pin point exactly where we wanted to camp. At this point we unhooked our sleds and I shot an azimuth to a distant landmark and recorded this in my notepad. This could serve as a means for us to find our sleds again if need be. While the odds of us getting lost enough to need it were remote, it’s good practice.

We shot an azimuth from our sheds to this hill top. This gives us useful information and techniques to locate the sleds in the dark or if we get lost. We cover these skills in the Fieldcraft Course.

We scouted up and down the creek looking for an area that would serve well for our camp. Some of the things we were looking for were:

• A site that was out of the wind but in the sun
• A site with minimal underbrush to clear
• A site that had no dead large overhanging tree limbs or standing dead trees, also called widowmakers
• A site that was large enough for the hot tent, the tent covers a 10’ x 10’ area, so ideally I wanted something about 15’ x 15’
• A site that was off game trails

We scouted a handful of areas and selected the best one, so we returned to get our sleds and haul in our gear.

The first thing we did was clear the area for the tent. One nice thing about having a good partner that I’ve trained with is we’ve developed unofficial SOP’s through the training we’ve done. One of these is that we always bring our E-Tools. We busted them out, as well as a small collapsible snow shovel I brought, and within 15 minutes had a large enough area cleared to set up the tent.

Having a partner that is equipped and capable to help with these sorts of chores is invaluable and would continue to prove it’s worth the rest of the trip.

The hot tent is a teepee style tent, pyramid shaped with four sides. It has one vertical center support pole and multiple stakes around the perimeter. I brought a hatchet and large steel spike to help drive the stakes in. The hatchet was to use as a hammer and split firewood, and the spike was to create pilot holes in the frozen ground to drive the more flexible aluminum stakes into. Luckily the ground was not frozen enough to need the spike. Next we installed the condensation liner by hooking it to the loops inside the tent that are made for this. Everything lined up really good and it was pretty intuitive to put together. The final thing to do was to pile some snow into the snow skirts of the tent to seal the bottom of the tent against the cold.

Snow skirts buried

It only took a few minutes to get the tent set up once we had the ground cleared and then it was on to setting up the stove. The stove is built out of sheets of titanium foil, like really thin sheet metal. It stores disassembled with everything rolled up, and has to be assembled on site. I laid out my heavy tarp and set down to assemble the stove. It took a few minutes to get everything assembled, and once again having another set of hands was awesome.

Once it was assembled we poked the stove pipe through the stove jack and set the stove inside. I brought along an old aluminum cookie sheet my wife wouldn’t miss to set the stove onto. This helped to keep the stove from settling a lot as the snow under it melted from the heat it was putting out. A lesson learned for us was to lay the pan on a couple large pieces of wood to further help with this.

A front was starting to come in at this point and we only had about an hour of daylight left so we started gathering firewood. I wasn’t sure how much wood we would need, but based upon experience from other trips I planned on a log roughly 16” x 3” every half hour. That was experience based off of using a campfire in the open, so I figured if we planned for that we would have plenty of wood for the 14 hours of cold and dark we were about to go through.

My partner and I went to work gathering the required materials. I worked on gathering kindling with my large drum liner I always carry, and he worked on sawing small and large fuel. Small in this case being anything from thumb size up to about 2” in diameter, and large being anything bigger than that up to 4”, which is the biggest that would fit in the stove. We chose not to go after anything bigger than this since that would require splitting and we had lots of material on hand that wouldn’t need to be split.

We found a large Y shaped limb that when placed in the Y shaped trunk of another tree worked really good for a saw horse and my partner went to work cutting larger fuel with the bow saw I brought in my sled. While I always carry my Bahco Laplander, having a full size dedicated saw makes cutting lots of large fuel much easier. While he was sawing pieces I used my Bahco to delimb larger limbs and drag them to him to saw up. Once I had enough of these larger limbs gathered we took turns sawing them up. All this wood we piled into his empty sled to take back to the tent in one trip.

Once we got back to the tent I laid my drum liner on the ground by the stove and we sorted the wood into kindling, small fuel, and large fuel. After this we got our sleeping gear laid out. I used the canvas tarp I was covering my pulk with as a ground sheet to lay my sleeping gear onto. Once we got this done we made sure any other gear we wanted was inside the tent, put our snow shoes and poles up so they didn’t get stepped on in the dark and parked the sleds out of the way. We made final trips to “water the bushes” and lit a couple candle lanterns and hung them from the center pole of the tent. We got inside and zipped the tent closed.

We quickly ate some chow then got to the business of getting the stove lit. One thing we quickly learned was it didn’t take nearly as much kindling to light the stove and in fact if you use too much the stove will be starving for air. This was the situation we found ourselves in as fire started to shoot out of the vent on the front of the stove, desperate for oxygen. It was at this point that I wondered if having two candle lanterns and a fire belching stove inside a nylon tent was a good idea. We closed off the vent and the damper to get the fire shut down and once the excitement died down we started over with much less kindling. It only took a half dozen small pencil sized twigs and a couple pieces of small fuel to get things going right after that. I brought along a tin of Vaseline cotton balls and a lighter to assist with getting the stove lit. Once things were working properly it didn’t take long for the tent to get luxuriously warm and we found ourselves truly amazed at how comfortable we were.

We spent a few hours shooting the breeze in the candle light, adding fuel as necessary. I brought along my Pathfinder kettle to heat water on the stove to make a couple of cups of tea with.

About midnight we decided to call it a day and went to sleep. Because of the way we had laid out our sleeping gear and the position of the center pole it put the stove in a place where the door could only be accessed by one of us in the night, so I pointed it towards myself and took the responsibility of keeping the fire going. Another lesson learned for us will be to lay out the gear in a different way so both people can reach the stove. This is important because my partners sleeping gear wasn’t as efficient in the cold as mine, so I ended up sleeping much warmer than him and this meant he often was getting cold before I woke up to put a log in the stove. If both of us could have reached the stove then he could have added wood as he needed to. I didn’t mind doing this work myself though since it gave me good opportunity to learn the nuances of running the stove. Ultimately I found that one large piece of fuel (16” x 4”) and two small pieces of fuel (16” x 2”) gave two hours of consistent warmth if I closed the damper part way and closed the vent to about 1/4. This was enough to keep the tent about 40 degrees until the logs were burned up. Considering that I was using the same gear I detailed at the end of my sleeping gear article, which was rated for 0 degrees, I was sleeping just fine.

The next morning we drug ourselves out about 730. Except for the times when the fire was dead and my partner got cold we both agreed it was a relatively good nights rest considering the environment. Had we been staying another night we would have dedicated time to gathering browse and improving our insulation and padding since we both were a bit stiff from sleeping on rough spots. I used the last of my water making some oatmeal and coffee so I grabbed my 32 ounce bush pot, gathered some clean snow and melted it and boiled the water to refill my water with.

After we ate some breakfast it was time to get everything packed into the sleds and head back to the truck. Packing the tent up took a bit of time and I would like to see the maker come up with a better system to store the different components and to use better materials and sewing for the storage bags. For now I’m going to store everything in a lightweight duffel bag with stuff sacks so that it is easier to pack in the field.

Once the gear was loaded we ensured there were no hot coals left in our ash pile we made after dumping out the stove and did a quick check to ensure no small items were left laying.

Loaded and ready to move

We took a different route back to the truck and got there with relative ease. There were a couple instances where I slipped on a downward slope because my snow shoes don’t have any crampons under the feet, a situation I will be rectifying soon. Once at the truck we loaded our sleds into the back and started an AAR to record any thoughts we had about the trip.

AAR notes

Improve

• Ensure all line 1, line 2 and line 3A items are packed. We both forgot various items because we were so focused on the other new factors to going on a winter hot tent trip. Luckily we both were able to pick up each others slack because neither of us forgot the same items.
• A packable snow shovel should accompany each sled
• Having a heavy tarp as a sled cover and ground cloth was very useful
• We both need to reevaluate our sling choices. A quick adjusting sling like the V-Tac would probably work better. This is because in order to use trekking poles we have to be able to cinch down the rifle sling to secure it yet be able to get it into action quickly if need be.
• Sleds need to have pulk poles to stabilize them
• Tape muzzles on rifles to keep snow out in case of a wipeout
• Crampons on snow shoes
• I’ll be working on an improved lashing system to make gear easier to get to in the sled and to make it quicker to pack up
• Pack some chemical hand warmers for emergency use and to keep fingers and toes warm
• Improved way to pack tent
• Conduct gear inspection prior to leaving (yeah yeah… this should be ingrained in everyone by now and if we were stepping on an actual mission instead of me picking him up to go camping we would have done this)
• Bring more beeswax candles for lanterns. Figure on 1/2 candle per night
• Bring more peanut butter and hot cocoa

Sustain

• Teamwork was excellent.
• Marc’s snowshoe bindings worked excellent
• The hot tent and stove with condensation liner worked awesome.
• My new trekking poles worked good (Black Diamond Alpine Carbon Cork)
• My new belt on my pulk worked awesome (Bongo Gear Bushmaster belt)

Overall the trip was a success and I’m looking forward to more cold weather training trips.