Cold Is My Teacher: That Night I Almost Froze to Death
By: Ryan Rickerts
Tags: Backpacking, Wim Hof, Hypothermia

On my first night camping out near the trailhead by the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, even before hiking into the wilderness, I got my ass handed to me. It was a perfectly clear night with zero wind. I clambered into my 20 degree F rated bag with no tent to shelter me because I wanted to sleep under and witness the incredibly vibrant stars. We don’t have dark, clear skies at night like this back home — sandwiched between Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC, the light pollution is noticeable, even in the Mt Baker Wilderness! My sleeping pad was not very thick, and it was difficult to get comfortable throughout the night. I suffered through because I was having an intentional ‘hardening’ experience.

I woke up around 7am and found my water bottles were all frozen. My water filter was also frozen. My camp stove even had a hard time getting a concentrated flame and was just spewing fuel, wasting my supplies even before I ventured off into the backcountry. A perfectly good river, the West Fork of the Gila, flowed nearby clouded with silt, but I could not filter the water and my stove was struggling to boil it. I managed to get it working but wasted a lot of fuel. The next night I resolved to sleep with everything stuffed inside my bag at my feet. I found out later it dropped to 11 degrees F that night.

The next day, I headed about five miles into the wilderness to meet the Middle Fork of the Gila River. The rangers with the greatest knowledge and access to data of the daily water levels in the area told me plainly it was not recommended. It had rained hard about five days earlier and the rivers were still at abnormally high levels. The trail along the Middle Fork river canyon I had originally planned required 32 crossings. I packed up, walked down to take a closer look at the first crossing, and quickly abandoned that idea! I opted for a recommended shortcut up & over the mesa — the only recommended trail in the area — and down into Little Bear Canyon to meet the Middle Fork much higher up. This would trim down my ultimate objective, the Jordan Hot Springs, to only 10 crossings in each direction.

In just a few hours of easy hiking, I reached the terminus of Little Bear Canyon at the Gila. There was one couple camped out on the river’s edge in a strange tipi-like structure constructed from branches and tarps (pictured above). I asked them how long they had been there, and if they had seen anyone cross the river recently. They said about a week, and no they had not. I said, “Well, you’re about to see the first.”

I realized no other human had attempted this strange form of hiking in at least a week, evidenced by a complete lack of footprints in the soft mud left behind by receding waters. It was now Wednesday, and it hadn’t rained since the previous Saturday. The water level was mid-thigh deep and very cold, but I was safely across at least an hour before dark. I distanced myself from the other campers enough to feel truly self-reliant (I found out later they hiked out anyways, likely to resupply or simply escape the extreme cold exposure in their van). I faced another long night alone with my thoughts contrasted amidst the void.

It took a few hours to set up a cozy campsite: one-man tent, stout fire ring, and a hot dinner. Later that second night, I chose to fall asleep close to the campfire because the element of fire is fundamental to an experience of safety as humans — it cooks our food, it scares off predators, and it warms us in the cold northern winters. This connection for our species goes back possibly a million years and likely drove our evolution towards being the high-powered mentalists we are now, one that could even create a written language by which can even share this tale with you. I was in contact with a primal feeling of security akin to a father’s arm over my shoulder, even though my feather down sleeping bag encased in plastic sheathing was at risk from sparks, and my neck resting on a log was not my ideal form of comfort. With a fire nearby, I am safe.

I woke up early in the night trembling uncontrollably, yet I felt hot. Not shivering, where it seems like your body is trying to warm up. Trembling, like it is going into shock. It’s now comparable to sneezing or coughing during a pandemic — you used to not really think about it, but now you’re asking yourself a very serious question: “Am I seriously sick? If so, where am I going to go?” The fire had only recently died and I was wearing every article of clothing I had brought in my backpack. There were many hours of night left to wrangle with dark thoughts. Am I so cold I cannot properly feel it? Is this a Christopher McCandless moment from John Krakauer’s Into the Wild?

Perhaps an important backstory on my relative physical condition: I had recently completed a six-week fitness & nutrition challenge started on Jan 1st, 2020. By the final weigh in, I had dropped as much as 18 pounds from my peak weight in 2019 and, according to my trainer’s U.S. Navy Body Fat calculations, 8% of my body fat. My waist diameter was 2" narrower and I was maxing out my existing belt holes. I hit my skinniest on this trip — around 162 lbs at 5'10" height. I was proud to get to such a lean & mean state for a backpacking trip — where every pound you have to haul matters — but now I was just lean & scared!

I had recently read about Syrian refugee children freezing to death in their camps, and started to believe I knew what that might feel like. I remembered reading To Build A Fire by Jack London when I was a boy. Some poor fool gets so cold walking a few miles in the Alaskan winter that he can’t even light a perfectly good match to save his life. Eventually, he just wanted to sleep. It was a very impressionable book to me at a young age, perhaps a foreshadowing in my own life story.

What should I be doing before I get too cold and lose function? I could always hike the five short miles back out, but what if I become so debilitated I can’t safely cross the river even once? Taking a ride down a frigid river at night with all your gear is definitely not a solution for hypothermia. Furthermore, there would be no one to call and no one to yell to. I was only five miles in, but I was far from my familiar setting, and I was in deep. I needed a strategy.

I got up, rebuilt the fire, and hopped around to rebuild some heat. Primarily, I wanted the trembling to stop. I have trained in all manner of potentially hypothermic settings, from backcountry skiing in terrible storms to swimming in cold rivers in winter to taking regular cold showers, and I have honestly never felt an internal shiver like that night. It scared me. It seemed like a medical condition I didn’t have the qualifications to diagnose — like McCandless losing the power in his legs from eating too many wild plants (possibly misidentified, or just an overdose of Hedysarum alpinum):

It might be said that Christopher McCandless did indeed starve to death in the Alaskan wild, but this only because he’d been poisoned, and the poison had rendered him too weak to move about, to hunt or forage, and, toward the end, “extremely weak,” “too weak to walk out,” and, having “much trouble just to stand up.” He wasn’t truly starving in the most technical sense of that condition. He’d simply become slowly paralyzed. And it wasn’t arrogance that had killed him, it was ignorance. Also, it was ignorance which must be forgiven, for the facts underlying his death were to remain unrecognized to all, scientists and lay people alike, literally for decades.

Those who have read Krakauer’s book or watched the film know that the “Supertramp” was trapped in his Alaskan camp — his longtime dream experience — by a raging river. Had he decided to return to civilization one week too late? Did he not anticipate the impact of spring/summer snowmelt in his environment? I faced a similar dilemma — a wild river blocking my exit to civilization, and no resources on the wilderness side other than my own faculties to determine the real risks, and those could decline rapidly.

Should I stay or should I go? I worked on my mental state first & foremost. I needed to calm the ‘F’ down, as I know anxiety can only exacerbate a state of ignorance. I climbed into my little one-man tent for an extra degree or two of insulation from the night air, and assessed my condition as objectively as possible. I stopped trembling, and it seemed safe to fall asleep.