Camping Under the Snow in Survival Shelter

Luke here at the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel and it's wintertime here in the Alaska mountains and I'm going to be camping in deep snow. I'm going to be building my own shelter, cooking good food. I'm going to be using snowshoes and skis to explore these mountains and I'm bringing you guys along for the ride. I think this is a good spot. This sled right here is called the Polk. A couple weeks ago I was having loads of trouble with it flipping on me. I think I solved it. I went ahead and got a second sled and I bolted the two sleds together at the mounting brackets and now if it flips over it doesn't matter. Additionally I put all my heavy stuff in the Polk and all my big bulky light stuff like my sleeping bag, I put in my backpack to help keep the center of gravity of my Polk lower. Those two things have really helped. I haven't had any trouble today. Looks like the snow is 180 centimeters or six feet deep. Oh I'm getting hungry. I need a little snack break. I think I'm gonna indulge a little bit. I have myself a cherry fry pie. Oh these are good. All right I put my snow saw down right over here and I can't find it. Where did that thing go? Okay I'm gonna review my footage and see where I put it. Okay I think I know where it is. When you can see light through the snow that means you got less than two feet to go. to come down. But I need to go ahead and seal up the edges. It's almost 4 p.m. It's getting dark. Can't leave anything on the ground. I'll get buried. So you can see right here this is going to be my bed tonight. But it's not exactly flat and I'd also like to push that wall back a little bit so I'm not right up against the ice. Filled up my sled full of snow. Now I gotta take it out of here. That's looking pretty good. All right we're gonna use my probe and we're gonna measure the bed. Make sure it's long enough. All right so the bed looks like it's about eight feet long and that's the minimum length I can handle. I'm kind of a tall guy and I want at least a few inches of air in between me and any of these ice walls. If my sleeping bag rubs up against any of the ice in the middle of the night it'll get so cold. Okay I'm not moving around as much. It's starting to get cold. I think I need to put my down jacket on. I gotta tell you it is luxurious having a shelter you can stand up in. Oh if I had this tarp pitched on the ground like it normally would be I'd have to be kneeling in the snow and ice and it just sucks the heat out of you. Not to mention it makes it really hard to change your clothes. I'll tell you what I really love these Exped sleeping mats in the winter time. They are so warm and it comes with this pump sack to help inflate it. That's a really common feature in all the major camping brands here in the U.S. There we go. Got plenty of space. I don't have to worry about rolling off the edge or snuggling up to the ice in the middle of the night. This will work. This is an emergency bivvy in case you get caught in a snowstorm and you need a quick shelter. It also works good to protect your sleeping mat or your sleeping bag if you're sleeping in a shelter rather than a tent. I had a lot of trouble with my stove last trip. I went and cleaned it out really good. It seems to be working well now. It takes a little while for these sleeping bags to fluff up in the cold given time. Wow that boiled so quickly. All right got some boiling bag rice and we got these curry packs to let them get warm. All right got some instant Japanese curry here just heat and serve. Piping hot curry just sounds so amazing right now. All this hot water and hot curry is just steaming my shelter up. I can tell a real temperature difference between my head and my feet. My feet are kind of cold my head's nice and warm. All that hot moisture is just rising to the top of my shelter. Got to eat fast in the winter time. Your food gets cold very quickly. You know that crazy thing is this whole packet of curry and a whole packet of rice is less calories than that one fry pie. Man that hit the spot. I think I'm going to make some dessert. Check it out this is bread pudding. I just mix all the ingredients raw into the bag, vacuum sealed it, froze it and now I just boil it for about 15-20 minutes and it'll cook in the bag and then I can eat it. There we go did the dishes. My little cooking table is a bit sketchy but I really appreciate not having to cook on the ground. The reason why I'm using it is I don't want to have to be down on the ground. It's hard on my back, it's hard on my knees and it gets you so cold kneeling on the ground. There's probably a 10 degree difference between up here versus down here. Temperature's dropping quick. I'm going to use some of these body warmers. These things are magic. I love them. They last about 12 hours and they have a sticker on the back. Slap one on your chest, one in your lower back. These things do work really well. I want some vanilla ice cream to go with my bread pudding. I just need one key ingredient. Nice fluffy stuff that's what you'll want. All right we're going to make vanilla ice cream. We just need sweetened condensed milk and some vanilla extract. There we go got a little cup of homemade vanilla ice cream. All right oh yeah that's looking good. There we go a delicious bread pudding. Well if you guys have never had bread pudding it's basically french toast. You basically take eggs and cream, sugar, vanilla, raisins, cinnamon, mix it all up, pour it over chunks of bread and then bake it or steam it. Yeah and it tastes really good with vanilla ice cream. You can use the same technique with a lot of different things. You can put cake batter in there, brownie batter. Oh that was good. The snow ice cream is really good. It's a fun one to try at home if you ever get a snow day. I got some powdered tang. Hot tang on a winter camp out man that's nostalgic. That's what we used to drink growing up. All right we're not going to waste this hot water. I'm going to stick that into my sleeping bag and get it all nice and pre-warmed. Man I sure do love the fact I can stand up in this shelter. Makes a huge difference. All right got my puffy pants. I'm gonna put those on and uh got some down slippers. Time to hop on in. It's nice having an elevated bed. Oh well I'll tell you what guys this is cozy. I'm nice and toasty warm and and even though it's still cold in here this is a lot warmer than some of the snow shelters I've slept in. I don't know if you can hear it on the camera but it's snowing so hard I can hear it hitting the roof of the tent. The snow isn't sloughing off this shelter the way I'd like it to and so it's kind of piling up right here and that's and that's going to get heavy. We get too much snow it could cause the tent to fall down on me in the middle of the night. I don't want that so for the next couple hours while I'm just sitting here listening to my audio book I'm going to keep an eye on that. A lot of snow built up on the tent. Oh it's 2am. Oh it's really coming down now. So far I've had to clear off the tarp about every two hours. All right good night. Oh good morning. Snow stopped but it is cold. Luckily it's warm in my sleeping bag. I'm just hanging out in here because I don't want to get out. Oh my bad. Putting on frozen boots. Always a joy. Luckily my boots weren't too wet last night so they didn't freeze up bad and they're warming up pretty quick. Oh there's my gloves. Those are frozen. Ah there's my gloves. Gloves were a little bit wet last night so I put them in the bottom of my bag. They dried up nicely. Stove warmed things up pretty nice in here. You see the frost has melted on the inside of the tent. My feet are still cold but the top half of me is warm. Oh my glasses are all fogged up. Ah there you go. Nice and toasty warm. For breakfast we're having one of my favorite meals. Biscuits and gravy. Got a nice sausage gravy here. Stick that in there. Let that warm up. I'm just gonna go ahead and sit them right just like that. Let them get warmed up. I gotta warm up my plate so it doesn't chill my food. There we go. Oh I love biscuits and gravy. Biscuits and gravy is one of the easiest meals but it's so delicious. Heavy whipping cream, pork sausage, lots of pepper. Very traditional meal in the southern U.S. I'll tell you what this has not been a bad shelter at all. For the size of the tarp I'm using I'm getting a lot of space and when the stove's on it's actually kind of warm you know from about waist up. I got room to store my stuff. I got an elevated bed. The only drawback is this tarp can't support a ton of snow. If it was snowing really hard like you know six inches every hour I'd be clearing this thing off every 10-15 minutes. When the snow gets a little bit deeper though I can dig a proper snow cave then you don't have to worry about that. Oh this is pretty. That is gorgeous. I think I'm gonna do some skiing. Check it out we got a bunch of ice fog here. I think it's gonna burn off though. We're gonna have a gorgeous day today. I'm skiing in my polk tracks and it's like the best groomed trail ever. I feel so light and nimble. That sun's starting to disappear already. Not too far from the top though. I made it just in time too. It's starting to get dark. Oh wow look at that view. Check it out on the bottom of my skis I've got seal skin. It's a synthetic fur that allows me to scoot across the snow and ski uphill. Now I'm gonna take them off. Roll it up. You got to put them in your pocket. Keep them warm otherwise the stickiness will freeze up. Take this. Scoot that like that. Now they're downhill skis. Now I promise you won't laugh guys. I've only been downhill skiing once in the last 20 years so I'm a little rusty. But if you're gonna fail what a beautiful day to fail on. And I'll do it one-handed while I'm at it. So far so good. It's slowly coming back to me. All right. Just got a little bit of an uphill part to go through. Oh I'm getting the hang of it. Oh I think I got the rust off but that's it. I think it's time to switch back to my skins. We're back in cross-country mode. Took about two hours to go up the mountain 20 minutes to go down. But I feel like I got some of the rust off. I gotta tell you what this is a lot more enjoyable when you're not pulling all that gear. Well guys I hope you enjoyed that video. If you want to see more videos from the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel make sure to click subscribe. All right guys I'll see you next video. If you like this video don't forget to check out the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel where we have hundreds of videos just like this. 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