COLD WEATHER PREPAREDNESS

DRESSING FOR COLD WEATHER

Though a non-Canadian, I guess I am something of an expert on cold weather.

My first years in the Navy were spent between Newfoundland and Iceland.  By my mid-twenties I was a Navy survival instructor – instructing winter bush survival.  I attended two Navy survival schools and the Canadian Forces Winter Bush survival school.   My wife and I lived in rural Maine for four years off the grid and eleven years in the Alaska bush, including one year on the Arctic Circle.    Now we are back in the western Maine mountains.

Winter preparedness is simply a matter of preparation, beginning with the clothes you wear.  

I don’t bother with L.L. Bean and Cabala's when preparing for deep winter cold.   Their products are fine if you want to flash their labels on the ski slopes; but for true winter preparedness you should look to people who work outside for a living and find out what they wear.

Logging in Maine is a big business.  Hear in the mountains logging trucks are as common on the road as 4X4 pickups.   Nobody is more exposed during the winter than loggers and they shop at Labonville.  You won’t find loggers wearing silk long johns

 click here for catalog

I dress in layers in the winter.   When working outside I wear double layered wool and cotton long johns (Coldpruf from Labonville,) wool shirts (not those yuppie light weight wool shirts – but heavy Woolrich 100% wool,) I have wool sweaters, wool mixed socks, and a wool bush coat.  I do wear L.L. Bean rubber bottom boots.   For gloves I buy work gloves one size too large and a pair of cotton gloves for liners. 

Empty wine bottles a good way to dry gloves.
Drink more wine.

  

In my car I carry extra gloves, and emergency equipment including a light axe and shovel.

I love the winter, because I dress for it.   If you are cold outside it is your own fault – you are not dressed properly.

The Ol’Buzzard 

DID I RUN and AM I TIRED?

In 1963, in a very remote section of western Maine, my friend and I found an old trappers cabin.   The roof was partially caved in, the window was gone and there was structural damage.   That summer we backpacked in carpentry tools and supplies and made repairs.    For a number of years afterward we used the cabin as a hunting camp.   

The cabin was one room, about sixteen by twenty-five feet.   The door to the cabin was only five and a half feet tall, so I believe the man who built it was small.  There was also a large bed, some homemade wooden toys, an old rusted cook stove and some things that makes me think he had his wife and child with him.   When we cleaned the cabin out I found a stack of old magazines, mouse eaten and water damaged, dating from 1901 to 1903 which dated the cabin, but also proved he was literate.

On the back wall was tacked a piece of birch bark with writing that said:

DID I RUN and

AM I TIRED?

During the following winters I would take off from the cabin deer hunting and be gone all day; when I returned near dark, tired and cold, I would duck down to enter through the small door and when I stood back up I was faced with the birch bark telling me ‘Did I Run and Am I Tired?

Around 1977 the winter took the cabin.   My friend and I snowshoed in to see what we could salvage.   I took the birch bark off the back wall, pressed it between pages of a log book and brought it home. 

At that time the birch bark was over 75 years old, now it is over one hundred.

  

That piece of birch bark has always hung on the wall of my den everywhere I have lived, and the older I get the more it defines me.

 

My friend, my best friend/adopted brother, died in a car crash in 1979

The memories of the times we hunted, canoed, fished, camped and got drunk together are still vivid every time I walk through the door of my den, look up and am reminded, ‘Did I Run and Am I Tired?’

DID I RUN and

AM I TIRED?

the Ol’Buzzard