And the Michiganders here seem to be incredibly wimpy in the cold department, complaining about 20 degree weather, not even cold enough to put a cap on my bald head.
One story;
And when you go winter camping and feel the urge to pee you have to go
outside and do it because holding it in makes you get cold faster. I’m
assuming because its more liquid to keep warm.I know about this because of the winter camping trip in northern Minnesota when at 3am I bundled up to do my duty and when I got outside and checked the zip-o-guage little thermometer it was below the -20F lines, probably about -30F. Checking at the local lodge that morning they said it got down to -40F.
Another story, which is the origin of what came to be called Dean and Carl trips. We used to travel to Wisconsin to tandem canoe rivers in early spring. Carls’ girlfriend dropped us off one Friday night at a bridge over the South Fork of the Flambeau River. She would pick us up 40 miles downstream late Sunday. It was the very end of March, next morning newly formed ice was floating down the river. We successfully ran numerous rapids including one where there was still ice covering the whole river at the bottom. No problem, we just ran the canoe up on the ice and did the one foot in the canoe the other pushing it along until we would fully jump into the canoe as it entered the water. At the end of the day we came to Cornsheller rapids where we were going to camp. It was so much fun running it we carried back up and ran it again. This time we hit the sidecurling wave and filled the canoe with 6 inches of freezing water. Luckily we made it to shore with all that unstable water sloshing around. We hung our wet gear on lines hoping for freeze drying. We woke up the next morning to 6 inches of snow on the ground and still snowing hard enough we couldn’t see across the river. Luckily we found most of the gear buried under the snow. We had 24 miles of paddling to do to get to the takeout, after a couple of close calls we got to the next bridge where we walked ahead to check out the worst rapids of the trip. We decided that trying to run them would be death and portaging them only broken legs. The decision was made to call Kathy and have her pick us up at this bridge. We walked the other direction down the road to find a house and entered the first driveway – Flambeau Forestry Prison Camp. The guards were amazed to see us out in this weather. We got hold of Kathy but she was snowed in in northern Wis. and wouldn’t be able to get to us until Mon. morning. In total it snowed 15 inches. On Monday morning, April 1, Kathy picked us up and since I had to call into work to tell them I wouldn’t be coming in, we stopped at the nearest bar. No one at work seemed to question what should have seemed to be an April Fools joke.
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