Hello Friends!
Today I am going to get into a topic that I have found is more dangerous and finicky than any of the wildlife I’ve encountered: The weather.
Don’t worry, you won’t need a degree in meteorology to understand this blog. I will simplify the cloud types, etc to what we can all understand, and base it on what I have experienced.
The weather can ultimately make your trip an amazing, breath-taking, peaceful experience or it can make your trip miserable …even downright scary. When you are outback, you do not have the ability to simply check a radar. You rely purely on your instincts and judgement as to what's coming and what to do.
If you take anything from this blog today, remember this: Always trust your instincts. Your intuition knows when something is wrong and if you have a gut feeling that it’s time to go, listen to it.
CLOUDS
The first and most important thing to watch are the clouds. How fast are they moving? What colour are they? Are they changing quickly? Do they look fluffy or heavy? Is the colour changing? These are things you need to note throughout the day. Dark heavy clouds that are moving fast are an indication of very heavy rains coming, where as fluffy grey clouds are generally more of a light rain, or just overcast. A light rain is nothing to worry about when you are camping and can even be relaxing, but a heavy rain can ruin your tent, trip, and gear.
The biggest thing to watch out for in the clouds is severe weather, such as tornados or severe thunderstorms.
I will start to track the weather and be more aware when I see two levels of clouds going at different speeds or directions. When there are large fluffy greyer clouds way up, with slimmer clouds that are moving really fast below them, that’s a red flag for me. Normally that means high winds and a storm is coming. If the wind has already been going pretty strong for a while and the fluffy clouds are looking darker, with the lower level of clouds looking more pointed, moving fast, darker, and/or moving in a different direction than the upper clouds, then I normally pack out.
The last time I saw clouds doing that while camping I got my group out of there and we had 20 mm of rain in every area we hit on the way home as well as small tornados touching down in the area we were camping in.
Another time I saw clouds like that we decided (foolishly) to stick it out and ended up with several severe thunderstorms with extremely high winds that kept caving in the tents. We also had torrential rain that flooded all of the tents with no regard to the multiple tarps that had been set up.
TEMPERATURE
The temperature while camping/hiking is something more common to any life activity, so I won’t spend a lot of time on it.
Heat waves and cold snaps bring their own unique challenges to a trip. Heat waves can lead to heat stroke, dehydration, and more sluggish, grumpy wildlife. The best thing to do is try to plan around heat waves if possible. If you can’t avoid them then be prepared with extra electrolytes, sun protection, and a secure water filtration system.
Cold snaps can be dangerous in regard to hypothermia. A lot of lightweight sleeping bags aren’t equipped to handle anything below 12 degrees Celsius. I prefer to have one that goes down to 0 degrees for summer if I’m up north and one that goes to minus eighteen for fall and spring. I know that seems a bit excessive, but there is nothing worse than not sleeping at night because of the cold.
I also recommend extra emergency blankets. I almost always have one down under my sleeping system. When I don’t, it's because I have my foam pad with a reflective side that acts as an emergency blanket. This is so that you don’t get the cold from the ground seeping into your sleeping bag throughout the night. I promise it makes a huge difference. I also keep another one close by while I’m sleeping so that if I wake up cold in the middle of the night I can throw it over the pup and I. Then we can sleep comfortably in our crinkly nest.
SEASONAL
The summer/early fall is the most common time to go camping and on multiway trips, at least for my area. In Ontario, the summers are generally quite mild. Lately, due to climate change, we have been getting severe heat spells that dry out the whole area and put our forests at high risk for fires. After a dry spell has been with us for 2-3 weeks we get those big thunderstorms again that pick up water off the great lakes and give us torrential downpours for hours, normally with a side of tornado warnings/watches, high winds, and hail. During these first few thunderstorms, the ground is still very dry from all the heat. This means there is a lot of loose soil sitting on top. When the ground is overly dry, the heavy water can take all the loose soil with it because the water cannot soak into the ground right away. This is more commonly called flash floods. They are simply the result of a lot of water hitting very dry land. If you know the area you are camping in has been very dry, check the radar for storms before you go. Any significant amount of rain is potentially problematic.
I have been in that situation before while on a solo trip in the early fall. It had been extremely dry and we were about the get three days of 25mm of rain, daily. This wasn’t supposed to come till 2-3 days after I had finished my 5 day trip. On day three I woke up to odd winds and dark clouds. I gave myself an hour to get up, move around, and watch the clouds. After 20 minutes I noticed the winds picking up a bit more and a lower layer of clouds moving in quickly, which were getting darker by the minute.
I decided to pack out. This was a hard call to make because I had looked forward to that trip for a while. 9 km later I came out of the bush exhausted with feet covered in blisters and a sense of urgency to get on the road. I washed up, got changed, and hit the highway. By the time I arrived at the first city about 2 hours later, there were severe thunderstorms and rainfall in every town I went through. Once I got home, I checked what the weather had been in the area I had been camping in, just to see if I had judged it correctly, and there were flash floods in that area within a couple hours of my departure.
I had been camping on the edge of a 40-foot drop into a lake, with at least an inch or two of dried, loose dirt/debris. A flash flood would have likely taken my tent and all my gear right over the edge. I would have been forced to either fish it out of the lake or go home without gear.
If you do get caught in a flash flood, find high ground. Get away from the edge of a drop-off or cliff and find a boulder, a hill, or something to get on top of.
Another seasonal concern is forest fires, which go along with low water levels. Having a dry summer can also mean low water levels, so make sure you have a few different options for drinking water. For example, Ishkuday Lake in Algonquin is more of a marsh area and when it is very dry it will evaporate quite a bit. The closest water from that site is 1.5 km back towards the entrance or 3 km down the trail the opposite way. A heads up to plan for this, or having another water option makes a big difference.
On the other hand, you can also get damp trips where you have some rain every day and it doesn’t really get warm, or sunny enough, to dry things out. This becomes dangerous when it gets cold at night. Wet and cold is a bad mix.
If I know it's a wet area, I always take 2 pairs of socks for each day to keep my feet dry, and normally a backup outfit which I call my “warm clothes”. If I’m hiking into a site and get wet and it's cooler out, then once I get to the site I can change into my warm backup clothes before setting everything up. That way I am not freezing as my body temperature comes down from hiking. This is more than a comfort thing. Hypothermia can happen very easily, especially at night.
Always keep an emergency blanket with you for every person and if you have the ability, take an extra one to go under your sleep system.
However, trying to get ahead of the cold at night can be taken too far. Putting on extra layers and crawling into a warm sleeping bag, while wearing a jacket and hat, with an emergency blanket under you might sound wonderful right before bed but you will wake up damp with sweat and need to take layers off within a few hours. …Just in time for the coldest part of the night to come by. Being damp or wet with sweat is going to drop your body temperature faster and will speed up the hypothermia process significantly.
My recommendation is this: If you are always cold at night, get a sleeping bag that gives you a buffer of six to eight degrees between what is expected and what the temperature rating of your bag is. Then, if it’s a colder season, wear leggings, or thermal long underwear to bed. Put on socks as well, and a long sleeve if it's a colder season, or a loose t-shirt if it’s not. Then, just keep your jacket or sweater near you. That way if you wake up cold you can put it on. It also helps to wear a beanie or hat to bed, because we lose so much heat through our heads. Also, if you pull the hood of your sleeping bag closed halfway you can keep some of the heat in. Then you can pull it closed the rest of the way if you need to during the night. Always keep an emergency blanket under your sleeping bag and give the bag a few minutes to retain some body heat once you are in it. Normally this is enough to keep you warm but not sweating.
If you get too cold, you will wake up and then you have the jacket near by that you can wear during the coldest part, but I recommend trying a sweater or hoodie first and pulling the hood on your sleeping bag to it’s smallest opening.
Always pack something easy and warm to eat and drink with you while interior camping. Not in the tent (because bears) but in your food bag so that you can get up and drink something warm after a cold night or so that you can warm yourself up during a colder day.
That’s all for now on the weather and camping! Stay safe, active, and healthy. The next post will be up shortly!
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