Snow camping is fun. Seriously.
By: Ben Schorzman
Tags: Oregon, Snow, Camping

An HDR image from Crater Lake National Park in February 2017. (Ben Schorzman)

More than a month ago at the end of February, I slept in a snow shelter for the first time.

Life at the time seemed normal. I felt the onset of a cold and I stubbornly refused to admit it. Work was beginning to pick up as my department started ramping up planning for summer programs. My wife and I had just spent a weekend in Portland and were looking forward to a vacation in Japan in April. Even the news had an unfortunate familiarity to it. Angst and bickering filled United States politics, a seemingly never-ending Democratic primary was churning toward Super Tuesday and a mysterious illness called COVID-19 was slowly spreading through China.

In the coming weeks my wife Elissa and I would cancel our trip and get caught up like the rest of the country in the ever quickening pace of closures, cancellations and life changes. But on the night of Feb. 21, I was snug in my sleeping bag in a shelter built from snow, listening to the quiet sound of a sleepy forest.

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I had planned for weeks to write about my passion for snow camping this month, but as I sit at my kitchen table, working from home for the foreseeable future, I knew I couldn’t just ignore the pandemic. It’s the thing that has ground our normal lives to a halt. It shrank our bubbles to our homes and grocery stores. It’s made us more reliant than ever on the internet.

In my day job I am helping the City put out messaging around COVID-19. I’m also trying to create small pockets of less serious content that hopefully help people still appreciate the great world we live in. I’m going to take the same approach here. I don’t want coronavirus to be the dominating topic in this space. I want this to be an escape.

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I’ve gone on five snow camping adventures now, and I think what I love about them is they’re this nexus of everything I love about going outside. It requires lots of planning because you need more gear, and you need better route finding. Every time you go out you learn more about how to make life comfortable in the snow, and when you try a new skill and it drastically improves your experience it’s magic.

Here’s a perfect example of the iterative process. The first time I went snow camping my brother, Byron, and I trudged about 1.5 miles out past Salt Creek Falls and just found a level spot among the trees right off the trail (oops). We didn’t have a snow shovel so we just used our snowshoes to stomp out a spot for our tent. Lesson №1, have a snow shovel.

The next year we took a big group of friends to Crater Lake, and three of us had snow shovels. That made the clearing of tent space easier, but my friends were too tired from the slog in that we didn’t even dig out a covered place where we could all eat. My now sister-in-law Allie would be quick to remind me that we also planned the trip despite knowing the hike out would most likely be in a blizzard, and those predictions came true. We had to quickly pack up in the morning after a cold night’s sleep and trek the miles back to the visitor’s center in a whiteout. Some of us handled it better than others. Allie and Elissa are convinced we almost died. Lesson №2, don’t bite off more than you can chew.

For trip three, I wrangled my friends Ian and Rob into the mix and we found a nice, 2-mile hike in from the parking lot at White River Sno-Park on Mount Hood. The weather was calling for gusting winds and tons of snow, but we were prepared, me having learned my lesson about the gear I needed in bad weather the year before at Crater Lake. We had plenty of daylight left to build a freaking awesome snow fort around our tent. But in an event Rob will never live down for the rest of his life, we had to abandon our fort at dusk after he started feeling ill and puked. Because it was an easy trail back and we were properly prepared, the snowshoe out was actually kind of fun (for Ian and me). It started to blizzard, but we made it to the truck and off the mountain with no problem. My mother-in-law’s hot tub and some beer helped with accepting the aborted adventure. Lesson №3, always be ready to call an audible and have an awesome mother-in-law ready to host you and your friends at a moment’s notice.

Trip four was a return to the same location at White River. Ian and I — sans Rob — were itching to conquer the trip. We made the drive from Eugene in my 2015 Honda Fit and made it to the parking lot with chains on. We spent hours building walls around our tent and digging vestibule holes for our feet. We then tackled a kitchen area with the tarp I bought two years before for the abandoned common area at Crater Lake. With beers chilling in the snow nearby, we dug out a nice bench and table for ourselves. That night we cooked our meals, sipped our beer and whiskey and couldn’t stop grinning like fools because we knew we had finally unlocked a new level. Despite a raging snowstorm that night we were cozy and warm. Lesson №4, snow camping is all about the mindset. Go in with a good attitude and you’ll have a good experience.

My Honda Fit the morning after.

I’d probably add a caveat to Lesson №4 that your mindset can only be good once you’re confident you have the basics taken care of. When you head out with the right gear, a clear itinerary and plenty of food, you can allow yourself to enjoy your surroundings in a completely different environment. Most people don’t get that far from the parking lot in the winter, but with the right preparation you can unlock a whole world.

Last month, Ian and I took a new friend into the backcountry. Our friend Tyler had never snow camped before, but that’s practically the only thing he hadn’t done in the snow. He is a fantastic skier who grew up on the east coast in a family full of skiers. In Oregon he has started working at Willamette Pass on the ski patrol, and he convinced Ian and me to cross-country ski this time instead of snowshoeing. The idea of moving quicker with a loaded pack was balanced by the abject terror of falling every 10 feet. Despite our reservations, we decided to try it out.

A shot Tyler snapped of me with his film camera in the parking lot. Notice the look of uncertainty still of strapping slippery boards onto my feet with a loaded back. (Tyler Dodds)

Which leads me to Lesson №5: Don’t snowshoe. Cross-country skiing is so much better.

Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard on skis, but not nearly as hard as I did with snowshoes. Did I fall a few times? Maybe. Did I look like a scared child on the downhills? Probably. But we covered an incredible amount of ground in a short time and we had so much more time for activities.

Like building this badass snow shelter that we slept in.

Enjoying some libations and a fire in our snow camp. (Photo taken remotely by Ian Campbell, who is contractually making me say he’s a better photographer than me so I can use his images. But I was the one that framed this shot before he used a remote to click the shutter, so I get partial credit for this one.)

The day couldn’t have gone better. The sun was out, we found the shelter at Gold Lake empty. We had plenty of beer and time on our hands. So we dug. And kept digging until we hit the ground. We made a circular bench area with a pedestal for a fire.

Gold Lake Snow Shelter. (Tyler Dodds)

Then we started digging out sleeping caves “just because.” We still planned on sleeping in the shelter that evening, but as day progressed to evening and we fitted our shelter with a tarp cover, we slowly started talking more seriously about sleeping in the snow. A couple hours of stargazing, card playing and photography shenanigans later, and we inevitably did what we knew we were going to do the whole time. We moved our sleeping pads and bags out to the snow shelter and hunkered down. Lesson №6, sleeping in the snow without a tent isn’t nearly as bad as you might think.

Aforementioned photography shenanigans. (Ian Campbell)

That brings me to the final lesson. I live in a state where an inordinate amount of time is spent glorifying hiking and backpacking in the summer and fall. For many outdoor enthusiasts they think of the backpacking season as late June to September. Even though our state is known for its rainy season, I don’t know many people who hike or camp in the rain. I know even fewer who backpack in the winter. I gravitated toward snow camping because I wanted to have areas that are typically crowded in the dry season to myself. With a bit more preparation I could again find solitude and really enjoy the outdoors in all of its seasons.

But all my memories from my snow adventures have more to do with the company I kept. That Type-2 fun is more enjoyable when you have someone to share it with.

Lesson №7: it’s always better with friends.