Nelson Family of 7: Winter Camping Part 1

I will just get it out of the way- if you are a wuss, don't winter camp.

There, that pretty much sums it up. Probably the best way to show this is with lots of pictures and minimal words. In a nutshell, I pulled a 50 pound sled through Northern Minnesota and up into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Way back in where the lake we were on was half US and half Canadian. We then spent 3 nights and 3 days trying to stay warm. Temperatures ranged from -15 degrees (seriously) to about 25.

The goal was fishing, but they didn't want to bite so we spent all day, every day, out on the ice chatting it up and contemplating whether we would walk across to Canada. We didn't do it because the snow was so thick and it would have been a lot of work. Actually, we really had a lot of fun, and the only time we were ever cold was climbing out of our two sleeping bags a piece, and changing clothes for the day. That part actually sucked because the head area of our sleeping bag from breathing in the super cold nights was frozen and had frost all over it. Our hands were cold the most because they would start to freeze in the really cold weather and we had to take breaks from putting our clothes on and warm them up before we could tie boots and zip jackets. Essentially we would do one thing, warm the hands, do another, warm the hands and then finally put our gloves on.

Here comes the pics:

Me in front of Lake Superior. I had no idea it didn't freeze near the shore for most of the lake.

Lake Superior

Giant tree roots

From this point the lake is about 800 ft. down, we had crazy switchbacks and rigged up a pulley system to get down a hill that was more than 45 degrees.

This is the hill that was at about 35 degrees or so. You can't tell how steep it is because of how far away the top is. We would hook up a person to one end of the rope and the sled to the other and through a pulley, and then the person would run down the hill and the sled would go up.