Winter camping in our experince is a very enjoyable activity. There are less people, it’s more quiet, you can witness animal activity by looking at tracks and you can learn new skills and combine fun activities such as ice fishing, snowshoeing or cross country skiing.
Before you plan a winter camping trip one of the first thoughts that may occur to you is what to do about your food. How do you keep your food from freezing?
So, how do you keep your food from freezing in winter camping? Store the food items that you don’t want frozen in a collapsible soft cooler with a hot water bottle. You can also purchase freeze dried food meals or bring dry meals where hot water can be added to rehydrate.
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Our Personal Experince Winter Camping
What we have found is the easiest when winter camping is to bring a cooler that collapses down. This way when you are travelling, skiing, snowshoeing to your campsite your cooler will collapse down. When you arrive at your campsite you can immediately heat up some hot or warm water in an aluminum bottle (non-insulated) and put all of your food items that you don’t want frozen in the cooler. This cooler will insulate your food from the cold and keep your food from freezing.
Dinners
We also buy freeze dried meals for our dinners. Yes they are not the cheapest option but we don’t need to worry about them freezing and they are satisfying and quick to prepare. When combined with instant potatoes I feel full after every meal.
Lunch
For lunch we generally bring nuts, bars and other quick eating items. We are usually away from camp during the day or busy chopping wood, ice fishing etc. and don’t want to fuss around with cooking unless we catch fish of course.
Breakfast
For breakfast we keep it simple with instant coffee, bannick style mixes, and instant oatmeal. We are able to eat quickly and most of these items with the exception of the cocunut milk that we use does not need to be kept in the cooler.
Be Smart About Food Choices For Winter Camping
We prefer to limit what foods we need to store in the cooler. This way we don’t really need to bring a large cooler at all. There are certainly other methods to keeping your food from freezing, however these are the methods that we use and it works fine for us.
Some other items that we put in our cooler overnight are our phones, battery packs and other batteries that we don’t want drained when we wake up in the morning.
The Power Of An Insulated Thermos
We have found bringing a thermos on our trip is really useful. In fact we bring 2 we like them so much. A thermos is useful to save energy. If we are boiling water on the wood stove in our hot tent then whatever hot water we don’t use we put in the thermos. This way when we need hot water again we can either just use the water in thermos or the length of time it takes to re-heat is cut down substantially. This energy savings is even better when it comes to using our propane our butane stove. Whatever boiled water is unused is placed in the thermos.
What we are thinking of doing on our next winter trip is to bring some dried food such as lentils and various beans that do not require long boil times. We are going to try cooking these foods slowly by placing them in a hot water thermos. This way the heats energy is contained in the thermos cooking the food slowly. We should be able to substantially cut our fuel usage for these items and also increase the eating of unprocessed food.
As we do more and more winter camping we will no doubt figure out better and more efficient ways to keep our food from freezing in the winter and still eat well, which is a big part of what winter camping is all about.
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