Posted on 02/05/2022 2:44:42 PM PST by SamAdams76
Living in New England most of my life, I have some cold weather stories of my own. Not with the Boy Scouts, though I was a member and did plenty of winter camping. But our winter camping was in cabins with a large fire going!
My one really good cold weather story was posted here before and it was even longer than yours. But as I'm about to go to bed, I'll condense it in a few paragraphs.
It was the late 1990s and my wife and mother in law were taking the children to Disney World. I hated all things Disney even then and was glad to be off the hook from going.
It was the weekend of the AFC and NFC championship games just prior to the Super Bowl. My plan was to spend the weekend at our New Hampshire time share resort in the White Mountains and to go on a solo all-day winter hike on Saturday and spend Sunday in the hot tub watching the games. I'm an avid hiker and in my younger days would go on 20+ mile day hikes.
I got up there Friday night and the forecast was for a snowstorm to hit Saturday night. I figured I'd be back at my resort well before the storm hit.
Well when I got up the next morning for the hike, the forecast changed to the storm moving in mid-afternoon. I decided to take the hike anyhow. So just after daybreak, I'm at the trailhead about 10 miles north of my resort. This is an 18-mile loop trail that has a lot of hills. About 3 1/2 hours later, I'm at the turning around point where I stop to have lunch with a great view of the Presidential range in front of me. As I'm eating, I see off in the distance a wall of snow approaching. The storm actually ended up hitting even earlier than forecast.
About an hour later, the snow is so thick and heavy that it began obscuring the trail markers. I ended up going off the trail and had no idea where I was. Fortunately, I had a compass and knew I had to head east in order to hit the north-south road I was parked on.
After a couple more hours of slipping, stumbling and falling through the accumulating snow, I finally come out onto the road. Which is snow-covered. Now I have to guess whether I am north or south of where I was parked. I guessed that I was south so headed north. By now, the snow was a few inches deep and it was getting dark. I was dressed for the cold but my face was frozen due to all the snow hitting it and now my feet and hands were getting numb as well.
A snow plow came down the road and I tried flagging it down but it just roared right past me. It was almost pitch dark when I found my car and almost walked right on past it which would have been disastrous as the nearest place of business was many miles up the road and I was getting wet due to snow getting through my clothing and melting.
Now I had another problem. The snow plow that passed me threw up a snowbank that I could not get my car through. I had no shovel in the car. Just a snow brush and ice scraper. I had to spend a good half hour pushing and kicking the snow aside to get enough of an opening to get my car onto the road.
Even with gloves, my hands were frozen. My feet and legs were numb and my face felt like I had three doses of novocain. I put the heat on max and somehow got to my resort. I peeled off my frozen clothes and got into the hot tub. It was such a great feeling. After getting thawed out, I got dressed and went downstairs to the bar area where I ordered a steak dinner. I then sat in one of the lounge chairs by the fire with a book while the snow continued to fall outside. It was one of the greatest feelings of my life. I truly felt that I cheated the death-man that day.
There are three things in that story that resonate with me:
First: “About an hour later, the snow is so thick and heavy that it began obscuring the trail markers.” Whenever I hear that, I know it isn’t a good thing.
Secondly: The thing about the novocaine in the face-I get that completely...that is a great description. I have had that happen to me, and it is unnerving.
Thirdly, being able to be in a warm, comfortable, safe place after that kind of thing, have a great meal, be by a fire with a good book and watching the snow float down outside-it doesn’t get any finer than that!
I went hiking with two friends back in 1985 and we were on the Appalachian trail in New Hampshire, near a place called Smarts Mountain. We were not serious hikers, we loaded down for comfort, and at the top of Smarts Mountain, maybe a 3200 foot elevation, there was an old ranger cabin and an awesome fire tower!
Anyway, when we started out it was raining, and got worse as Gloria came inland. We were unfamiliar with the trail, and when it split we took the trail that went to the opposite side of the mountain, where it petered out in the middle of the woods, so we had to backtrack. The steeper part of the trail had white water coming down it, and we were mid-calf to knee deep there. As we got nearer the top, a thunderstorm came through, and I must tell you, it was intimidating because we felt we were right there in the thunderstorm itself, not below it.
We finally got to the top after about ten hours of hiking because we made a mistake, and the ranger cabin was in bad shape, the pouring rain coming through the roof.
But we found the one dry spot in the corner, set up our stove, and cooked up some tough steak in a frying pan, which we ate with some pork fried rice we brought up with us.
LIke you sitting by that fire...one of the most memorable evenings of my life.
Coldest I can remember being is getting soaked to the skin with my brother when we fell through the ice at the edge of a pond at our grandparents farm, in spite of repeated warnings need to play there.
We got our butts warmed for that, lol.
Oh yeah. I’ll bet...in spite of warnings!
I hope when you got inside and had blankets and such, that Grandma gave you some hot soup!
Great story! When you got to the part about blood all over your house, I expected the next sentence to start with, “And then I woke up.”
Had to go to Duck,Duck,Go for that. Nope, not the one I’m thinking of. Maybe it was a bear, elk, deer that was cut open and the warmth saved him.
Anybody??? What am I talking about? : ^ )
I seem to recall something about an Injun and a Buffalo...
In a Jack London book? Injun...London book?
Maybe not a London book; maybe an old B&W movie, or a story I read as a youth. But it (crawling inside a freshly killed animal) does sound familiar.
In To Build a Fire, the man remembers reading a story about someone who did that. Then he tries to kill the dog. It’s too late for that, because his hands are too frozen.
As I remember (we can all trust my memory) he did cut it (wolf, elk, bear) open and it did save him. We should have a prize for the one who gets the facts. Movie won’t work ...it was definitely in a book....I’m sure.
Jim...you’re getting shaky on the memory. We need to solve this...it wasn’t in a movie...pretty darn sure it was in a book and I sure thought it was Jack London.
This is from To Build a Fire. He may be referring back to another of his stories.
The sight of the dog put a wild idea into his head. He remembered
the story of the man, caught in a storm, who killed an animal and sheltered himself inside the dead body and thus was saved. He would kill
the dog and bury his hands in the warm body until feeling returned to
them. Then he could build another fire.
Age and memory are sometimes incompatible. If I recall my own name and what day it is, it’s a success!
Does The Revenant sound familiar? It came up when I Binged “fiction cut open animal crawled inside to not freeze” along with the Star Wars thing.
Bless your heart...and I mean that after reading your FR bio.
Couldn’t have been Revenant, to recent, I read this as a young person. Definitely from a book and not a movie.
I saw the same things that came up when looking online. I also went to Wiki and read plots for White Fang and Call of the Wild. Very detailed plots and didn’t find reference to what I recall. Such a puzzlement.
A Pail of Air? That takes me back. But I think Larry Niven’s classic ‘Wait it Out’ is much colder.
Thanks for your kind words...if I become aware of any other possible answers I’ll pass them along.
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