Snow Outing

I took my troop up to the snow again this year for a campout. I’m not sure why I continue to do this. In general, snow camping is not too pleasant. The wind made this outing particularly miserable. Burr, it was cold.

Before I went to bed I told the boys that if they get cold they should come shake my tent to wake me and I’d give them some extra blankets. All night, the wind came intermittently causing the tent to shake and thus woke me up. Every time I woke up I thought there was some poor, freezing kid standing outside my tent needing a blanket—I can’t count the times I called out “hello?” just to make sure no one was there.

Fortunately the boys all stayed warm enough, but unfortunately I didn’t get much sleep.

The boys (as always) had a lot of fun. The Wednesday before the outing we started making snow shoes (with branches from my dad’s tree that I partially trimmed for him). We finished them off Friday night and tried them out. Next year we need to rethink the strap that holds our feet to the shoe because they kept coming off our feet. Still, it was a fun thing to do, even though we didn’t get to use them very much.

Friday we dug a snow cave, snow tunnels and played a little in the snow. We went sledding a little bit, but the deep snow made it hard to move around so we didn’t venture to far away from camp (too bad those snow shoes didn’t work out).

It was fun, we had warm food Friday night and Saturday morning, there were no injuries and the boys are excited to go snow camping again next year. Another great outing.

I definitely can’t complain.

One of the boys in the snow tunnel

Digging the snow cave:

One brave group: That's Brandon, resting.

Trying out the snow shoes:
Putting the snow shoes together before the outing:

Digging the snow cave:

The weather cleared up a little late Saturday morning: Our Campsite: