Getting Up When It’s -12 F… A Video

One day in January 2015, I stuck my hand out from under my sleeping bag and immediately withdrew it when it touched a layer of ice on top of my sleeping bag. It was the moisture from my breath that had frozen into ice crystals.

I had gone to bed the night before assuming it would just be another cold night of around 10 F or maybe zero, (-12.222C – -17.777C) which I was getting quite used to. I hadn’t been prepared for –12 F (-24.44C). Normally I would take some extra precautions to protect my water and items like my camera and computer if I suspected it would get below zero, but I was caught off guard on this night. These days I don’t check the weather forecast unless I’m travelling somewhere and have a specific time or date to be at my destination, I just go with the flow.

I’ve spent winters in the Colorado mountains for most of the past 20-years, and temperatures used to get to about –3 F for a couple of nights a year in January, but since 2011 the temperatures have dropped to –10 or so regularly and even –23 (-30.55C), and a couple of nights in the winter of 2014/2015 it reached a frigid –30F (-34.44C), and this has happened in the warmer months of November and December.

As many of you are aware the winter of 2014/2015 was the first time I’d actually camped in my vehicle for an entire winter at elevations of 7,000 to 8,000 feet, and I doubt I’ll do it again, but it was out of necessity more so than choice. I never would have thought I could tolerate camping through an entire winter in The Rockies, but I did and it wasn’t easy.

I decided it might be fun to record what it’s like getting up in the back of Mitzi in those temperatures.