Duane Thomas Posted December 21, 2006 Share Posted December 21, 2006 For a story on which I'm working, I need to know a lot about cold weather survival. Can anyone recommend a good book that would answer questions like: In sub-freezing weather, if you had to be out in the woods for an extended period of time, how would you stop your water supply from freezing? If you were running an electronic sight, how would you stop the batteries from freezing and still have the sight On for instant use - or could you? How do various weapons - and weapons lubes - perform in sub-freezing weather? And so on. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tightloop Posted December 21, 2006 Share Posted December 21, 2006 While there is lots of knowledge on the forum...don't think there are many with the skills you seek....LOL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shred Posted December 21, 2006 Share Posted December 21, 2006 My primary experiences with sub-freezing are camping/mountaineering-based (well, and living in a house outside of Denver, but that doesn't really count) Lithium batteries are the answer to cold batteries. At -5F they're only down 20% in power as opposed to 60+% for alky or silver cells. NiMH might also be ok. If you need more cold than that, run a wire and keep the batteries inside your jacket (IIRC the antarctic guys do this) If there's snow or ice around (and there usually is in sub-freezing weather), your water supply is much more convenient since you don't have to carry much.. just thaw some out when you want it. Bring a lot of fuel. Not sure how well that works for very extended periods of time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nik Habicht Posted December 21, 2006 Share Posted December 21, 2006 Duane, Not directly on point but nature photographer Galen Rowell did a couple of photographic expeditions to antarctica ---- some of his books might be a start, though I don't remember specific titles. I think I also remember reading about this in his articles in Outdoor Photography (Photographer) magazine in the 90s..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EricW Posted December 21, 2006 Share Posted December 21, 2006 Duane, Go to REI and head for the books section. Also, there are the Seattle Mountaineers in your area. Don't think they can help you with the gun portion, but for everything else, they have the experience you seek. I would avoid survival "experts". For water in the winter, you keep it close to youir body, or pour warm water into a Nalgene container and put that into an insulated bottle cozy. Your water source in very cold weather is generally melted snow, so a quality stove is an essential piece of gear. I have had the same Peak 1 stove for going on 25 years now. It's not sexy, it's not high tech, but it is reliable. Generally, you don't go anywhere remote in the winter without a stove, a metal pot and a handle. As for the gun thing...pretty much any lightweight oil will do. I think the bigger issue is to select proper gloves that will keep your hands warm but still allow you to operate the firearm. For batteries, pretty much the standard mountaineering trick has been to relocate the batteries via a cable to somewhere inside your jacket. At least when all there was were alkalines. Like Shred says, lithium batteries have changed everthing. Also, CMOS technology has really expanded the voltage operating range of most electronics. That obviously doens't alter the forward voltage characteristic of an LED, but it does help with the supporting electronics. It might be worth putting an Aimpoint / C-More / Holosight into a deep freezer and see what happens. My guess is that they all still work. ======================= BTW, I don't think the problem is "sub-freezing" - it's really sub-zero F. Why not go climb McKinley with an AR and do some shooting off the summit? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
38supPat Posted December 21, 2006 Share Posted December 21, 2006 http://www.amazon.co.uk/SAS-Survival-Handb...7173208-4278831 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duane Thomas Posted December 21, 2006 Author Share Posted December 21, 2006 Not directly on point but nature photographer Galen Rowell did a couple of photographic expeditions to antarctica Strange that you should mention Rowell. I'm a huge fan. When I had to do an oral report in my college photography class on the photographer of my choice, I chose Rowell. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nik Habicht Posted December 22, 2006 Share Posted December 22, 2006 Not directly on point but nature photographer Galen Rowell did a couple of photographic expeditions to antarctica Strange that you should mention Rowell. I'm a huge fan. When I had to do an oral report in my college photography class on the photographer of my choice, I chose Rowell. Sometimes I read something of yours and swear you were poking around in my head...... Rowell got me into photojournalism, really influenced my thinking about what I wanted to say at different assignments, and got me out of it --- photojournalism --- when I realized I wasn't having fun anymore and had lost my sense of wonder. I consider him to be one of the most important photojournalists of the 20th century ---- and wonder how many of my former colleagues see him in that light. He showed me worlds I'll never get to visit --- and others I'll appreciate more because he will have illuminated the sights. Yosemite comes to mind --- saw it for the first time in 1982, as a surly teenager, and wasn't that blown away; saw it again in 1994 and having been schooled by both Rowell and Adams, was absolutely stunned by the beauty. I know I'll regain my passion eventually, but for now I'm really happy just seeing and noticing and absorbing and digesting things ---- which may have something to do with new house, new surroundings..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BritinUSA Posted December 22, 2006 Share Posted December 22, 2006 Military manuals will have what you are looking for. I can guarantee that no matter what the survival question, someone in the US Military has thought of it and written a procedure for it... Useful starting point here Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vlad Posted December 22, 2006 Share Posted December 22, 2006 When it gets really cold, I move my hydration blader under my coat. That way the water doesn't freeze. As for the rest .. I'm no expert but the simple answer is stay warm, without overheating. I know this sounds stupid but pleanty of people put on 20 layers, sweat, and then freeze to death in cold wet clothes. On the weapon lube question, all I have is what my now gone grandfather related to me. He spent some time as a artilery officer on the eastern front during WWII (on the Axis side). When it got cold they used to remove ALL grease from their gear as the it would turn to rock. They would use the lightest grade of lubricants or nothing at all. When it got really cold you didn't stop your engines, and you lit fires under your cannons. Metal gets brittle at very low temperature and you don't want to apply torque to a transmission which cooled down overnite in -30C and sure as hell you didn't want to fire a cannon shell through a 80mm barrel which cooled down to the same overnite. You never touched metal with your bare hands, EVER even if the cannons have been in the sunlight all day, the wind is still at -20C or so and the metal stay cool too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kimel Posted December 22, 2006 Share Posted December 22, 2006 Count me in the Rowell fan club as well. The man just flat out KNEW how to see. For color it is Rowell, for B/W it is Adams. BTT... Like others have said, lithium batteries are the shjt for cold weather. I would be far more worried about optics fogging in the cold. One stray breath and you have glazed optics which aren't going to be simple to clear. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sam Posted December 22, 2006 Share Posted December 22, 2006 (edited) How do various weapons - and weapons lubes - perform in sub-freezing weather? Duane, Mobil SHC824 Synthetic Turbine oil works great on 1911 and AR15 down to -20 deg f. Probably works great at colder temps too. I just haven't tested it any colder. I Keep my water supply from freezing by wearing my Camelback under my top layer of clothing, but not next to my hide. Assuming you can build a fire, melt snow and re-fill as needed. Same story with flashling batteries, I keep them in an inner coat pocket. Good gear like North Face will have inside pockets for GPS and radios. And I don't even think of wearing anything cotton. COTTON KILLS! Merino wool is more comfortable than cotton any day. And there is absolutely no itching. It feels like fleece. Google NASAR. (National Search and Rescue.) They have really good info on staying 98.6. I look forward to reading another of your excellent articles! Edited December 22, 2006 by Sam Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nik Habicht Posted December 22, 2006 Share Posted December 22, 2006 Count me in the Rowell fan club as well. The man just flat out KNEW how to see.... .....and how to convey what he saw and felt to the person looking at his photographs..... A colleague of mine summed it up this way years ago: Do you want your photos to show that we cared enough to send a photographer to the event/place, or do you want them to make the reader feel that he'd gone to the event/place? Rowell, Adams and a host of others regularly took me to places I might never get to..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loves2Shoot Posted December 22, 2006 Share Posted December 22, 2006 Freedom of the Hills Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shred Posted December 22, 2006 Share Posted December 22, 2006 I'd be real careful about books unless you know the source via other means.. the reason I say this is I have a friend that got a contract to write a book on surviving extreme weather.. and about the worst weather survival they've had to endure involved getting back into the car... The publisher made no effort to find anybody that could do anything except write. In this case they were lucky and got somebody that would do research, but that wasn't actually required or anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EricW Posted December 22, 2006 Share Posted December 22, 2006 Freedom of the Hills FOTH is to the backcountry what PSBF is to shooting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duane Thomas Posted December 22, 2006 Author Share Posted December 22, 2006 It might be worth putting an Aimpoint / C-More / Holosight into a deep freezer and see what happens. My guess is that they all still work. Cool idea. Pun intended. At 6:30 PM yesterday, I turned on an Aimpoint CompM2 to my preferred dot intensity and put it into my fridge's freezer. At 6:30 PM today I'll pull it out and see (1) if the battery's still working, (2) if I've still got dot intensity. If I do - and I get the feeling I will - I'll outfit my character with an Aimpoint. In my storyline he only has to be out in, like, 15 degree temp for about eight hours or so. If the Aimpoint with lithiums can take 24 hours in a freezer, certainly it could meet his needs. Anyone know what the temp is in a typical fridge freezer? I have to admit, I did pull it out to peek a few times last night, and so far so good. The exterior of the CompM2's looking all nice and frosty, too. Duane, Mobil SHC824 Synthetic Turbine oil works great on 1911 and AR15 down to -20 deg f. Probably works great at colder temps too. I just haven't tested it any colder. Interesting. I was thinking locksmith's graphite for sub-freezing weather. Never even thought of any sort of oil. And I don't even think of wearing anything cotton. COTTON KILLS! Why? You've got me fascinated. Merino wool is more comfortable than cotton any day. And there is absolutely no itching. It feels like fleece. Unless you happen to be allergic to wool. Which unfortunately I am. But my character needn't be.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EricW Posted December 22, 2006 Share Posted December 22, 2006 "And I don't even think of wearing anything cotton. COTTON KILLS!"Why? You've got me fascinated. Go skiing in cotton clothes sometime. All will be revealed. More seriously, a lot of mountaineering deaths in the days of yore really could be traced due to being just wiped out physically and mentally due to hypothermia caused by wet cotton clothes. As soon as they become wet, they lose all insulation value and only serve as heat sinks, sucking the heat out of your body. The #1 piece of outdoor survival gear really is proper clothing. Goretex and modern outdoor-oriented synthetics don't come cheap, but I really don't think too awful much about the price because the performance is so exceptional. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
geezer-lock Posted December 22, 2006 Share Posted December 22, 2006 Can’t say enough about the usefulness of “The Freedom of the Hills”. I am looking at a 2nd edition (7th is out) and it has a good piece on alkaline batteries and their useful life. Getting water, batteries, food, matches etc. under your clothes is discussed along with a number of technical pieces on insulation value of various materials and required equipment for snow camping or ice climbing. I am headed out this afternoon to look for the new edition to see what has changed in the 40 years since this was written. Probably the most significant change has been in the technical improvements in clothing, as EricW points out, but some things are still true: cotton is useless altogether, down is useless when wet and in the cold you must have sufficient fuel (food) to keep your core temperature up. If you spend any time in the outdoors Freedom of the Hills is a must-have reference. The title comes from this sentence: “Freedom of the hills lies largely in the ability to cope with every problem of travel and living, and every emergency, with nothing more than what a party can carry conveniently on its shoulders.” David C Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vlad Posted December 23, 2006 Share Posted December 23, 2006 "And I don't even think of wearing anything cotton. COTTON KILLS!" Why? You've got me fascinated. More seriously, a lot of mountaineering deaths in the days of yore really could be traced due to being just wiped out physically and mentally due to hypothermia caused by wet cotton clothes. As soon as they become wet, they lose all insulation value and only serve as heat sinks, sucking the heat out of your body. Eric knows what he is talking about. Various materials have different insulating qualities at different water saturations. Cotton drops to about 20% of its original insulation when it gets wet which is to say it gets friking cold and sucks heat away from you. Most people have experienced this without going to some cold corner of the earth, by sleeping in a tshirt, sweating, and then waking up shivering. Wool is the traditional super cloth from this point of view. Even sweat soaked it retains about 80% of its insulation, it sorta has to if it is to keep the sheep warm. Some of the more recent fleeces come close, there is however a big difference between cheap fleeces and the better ones. The various sweat wicking materials also help move the moisture to the outer layers and keeping the chill factor away from your body. In my opinion, things like underarmor and such others are even more important when its cold then when it is hot, specially if you are mixing medium or high intentensity activities with stationary ones. Overheating and freezing in your own swear is a suck way to die. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shred Posted December 23, 2006 Share Posted December 23, 2006 It might be worth putting an Aimpoint / C-More / Holosight into a deep freezer and see what happens. My guess is that they all still work. Cool idea. Pun intended. At 6:30 PM yesterday, I turned on an Aimpoint CompM2 to my preferred dot intensity and put it into my fridge's freezer. At 6:30 PM today I'll pull it out and see (1) if the battery's still working, (2) if I've still got dot intensity. If I do - and I get the feeling I will - I'll outfit my character with an Aimpoint. In my storyline he only has to be out in, like, 15 degree temp for about eight hours or so. If the Aimpoint with lithiums can take 24 hours in a freezer, certainly it could meet his needs. Anyone know what the temp is in a typical fridge freezer? I have to admit, I did pull it out to peek a few times last night, and so far so good. The exterior of the CompM2's looking all nice and frosty, too. FWIW, my freezer runs about -5F. If you character's only gotta be outside for 8 hours or so and knows it he could use chemical hot packs, available everywhere in outdoor stores. A while ago I met Jamling Norgay (son of Tenzing), and one of the stories he told of climbing Everest was of taping a bunch of hotpacks to his water bottle on summit day. He said it kept his water from freezing, as compared to everybody else's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Posted December 23, 2006 Share Posted December 23, 2006 I have been told by people who live in the true cold (way up Alaska) that guns like AR's are best left out of the tent at night in bitter cold weather...they leave them covered on their snowmobiles. Apparently the thaw that occurs in the tent turns into a mess of ice when taken back outside. Lithiums beat alkys all day, every way. There are some interesting threads on candleforums.com about batteries, and some problems some have had with CR123a's "venting" in tight spaces. Worth a read if you carry lights that use them...and many of the top shelf lights do use them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duane Thomas Posted December 23, 2006 Author Share Posted December 23, 2006 Well, the CompM2 came out of the freezer still working like a champ. The problem, however, was that once it was out in the warm room it fogged so heavily it took 15-20 minutes for the lenses to clear to usability. Since my story has the character coming in out of the cold into a building and thence shortly into action, I think it's an iron sights kinda day. I have been told by people who live in the true cold (way up Alaska) that guns like AR's are best left out of the tent at night in bitter cold weather...they leave them covered on their snowmobiles. Apparently the thaw that occurs in the tent turns into a mess of ice when taken back outside. If you watch the beginning of The Searchers, the farmer steps outside and takes his shotgun down off a couple of pegs set over the door - on the outside. When I first saw that scene, I thought, "What an idiotic place to keep a gun." Then it was explained to me that was very correct, that people who lived in areas where they might have to go out into a cold night with a gun commonly kept it on the outside of the house, on the porch over the door so it would be outdoors temp. If they took a cold gun back into the warm house, in short order the condensation that formed every time would rust the gun into unusability. On a different note, when I was kid I remember my father had this thing he took with him when he went hunting, it looked like this big cigarette lighter. It was filled with lighter fluid, you lit it and closed it, then it would heat up, you stuck it in your shirt pocket under your jacket and it would keep you nice and toasty. I was also told there were good examples of the breed and bad ones - that in the bad ones the metal screen inside the "lighter" would burn out in short order, the good ones wouldn't. Can anyone tell me what these things were? Are they still made? How to tell a good one from a bad? Just put Mountaineering : the Freedom of the Hills, 7th Edition on hold at my library. Thanks for the pointer, guys. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loves2Shoot Posted December 23, 2006 Share Posted December 23, 2006 I think my dad had some of those heaters. I think Patrick McManus wrote about them one, but that might take awhile to find, although it would be fun reading. This is the type I think you are talking about http://cgi.ebay.com/VINTAGE-COMPAC-POCKET-...tem140065717694 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Middle Man Posted December 23, 2006 Share Posted December 23, 2006 Still made today, Jon-E from Outers one of the Blount Sporting brands that ATK purchased several years back. http://www.outers-guncare.com/products/Jon_e.aspx http://www.amazon.com/Jon-E-Hand-Warmer/dp/B000FXV8L2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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