Winter Camping

This semester Laura and I have been in a winter camping class. It's the only fun class I can remember taking at BYU. We have been learning cross country skiing mostly but also practicing principles of Leave No Trace camping and snow shoeing.

Monday was the last day off we have for the semester so we decided to try renting some equipment and cross country ski one of the routes we learned in class. Our class primarily meets in the dark and we wanted to see this route in daylight.

We rented all the equipment which took about an hour to get through the line at BYU, then we drove up the canyon. Once we got there we spent 45 minutes trying to snap my boots onto my skis. One of the guys from my class happened to show up with his own personal skis and he confirmed what Laura and I were sure of, the boots were not made for those ski's. The kid in my class then duct taped my ski's to my boots. This might have worked except that the duct tape was wrapped around the bottom of the skis and this created drag so I was unable to slide.

We decided to give up and exchange the equipment, which would mean that we would have lost about 2 and a half hours. We got back to BYU and the guy working there gave us our money back.

Afterwords we went to Macy's so I could buy a shirt for an interview I had last week. When I went to buy the shirt I saw Elder Dallin Oaks there with his wife exchanging some shirts. It was pretty neat. He was dressed the same as the last time I saw them leaving the opera when we went to see Madame Butterfly last fall.

We also had a snow camping trip last week. Thursday we put on some snowshoes and hiked a short distance to a field. When we got there we had to start piling snow and packing it down. We had to make snow caves to sleep in.

Once we had enormous piles of snow we started to carve them out. I found out there is a certain strategy to carving them in order to make all of the cold air stay below you. The process makes you sweat a lot and also involves lots of snow dripping down your clothes and melting so you get pretty wet doing it. If you don't bring clothes to change into you can be pretty cold afterwords.

This is what happened to Laura's gloves when they were used to make a snow cave.


I was warm once I got into my sleeping bag. The next day was pretty sunny.

This is the inside of our cave with our sleeping bags. There was not a lot of head room.


This is the entrance to our cave from the inside.


Laura and I crawling out of the snow cave the next day.




Getting ready for breakfast