Snow Camping in Hammocks

This spring two of my sons and I backpacked up a trail in our area, and ended up making it up to snow level!  Guess we should have waited a couple more weeks before making this trip.  Well, that's ok.

We brought up hammocks we had made and wanted to try them out on a colder campout, with backpacking supplies.  Our hammocks have a pocket below you that you can put a sleeping pad inside - I've slept in one at 19°F with a 3" foam pad and survived.  See HERE for my post on that.  This time we were backpacking so we brought only our 1/2" blue foam pads, so it was going to be a challenge.

It was snowy due to a late snow storm - it was interesting seeing green leaves and snow on the ground.

Looks cold, doesn't it?

There's something magic about sitting around a campfire and watching the glowing coals.

Long story short, we survived the night.  It was a bit cold, but nothing we couldn't handle.  I did however find that my hammock was tied to a dead tree that was rotten at the bottom.  When I went to climb into my hammock at night to sleep my hammock dropped down low and I could hear the tree coming towards me.  Luckily it didn't go the whole way and I was able to tie to a different tree nearby.  The next morning I was able to push the 16" diameter tree over with one hand!  I think I'll be more careful what I tie my hammock to in the future!

Snowcave Camp 2017

For our annual snow cave campout this year we decided to stay a little closer to home and drove up to a parking lot up the canyon with high enough plowed hills to dig in.  It was behind a locked gate (one of our leaders is in charge of plowing it) so we knew we were safe to dig and not get plowed while inside.  We had 9 boys and 7 leaders on the trip!  It got down to single digits, but we stayed warm enough.  The boys are getting pretty good at digging snow caves!

Some of the caves, like this one, was pretty tall, and had a large opening (larger than I would have liked), but they still stayed warm all night so it worked.

Camping Nights - One More Year!

In March of 2011 I set the goal to camp a total of 365 nights by the time I turn 40.  (see the post HERE)  Well, I'm a little more than a year away from when I'll be 40, and I thought I'd look to see where I'm at.

If you'll look at the camping stats on the left side of the blog, I've got the following:

That means I only have 11 more days to go!  (For reference, when I set the goal I had only 259 nights, so I've come a long ways)

So I only need 11 more nights in the next year to make my goal!