Some have emailed asking what gear you can use for a winter wildcamp. Here’s my selection of gear. I’ve split it into two posts - one for the ‘big 3’ of shelter, sleep and cooking and the other for the rest of the stuff.

Freezing conditions were expected and the gear below kept me comfortable all night. There was a gusty wind that lasted till midnight, must have been caused by the pass between Rhinog Fach and Y Llethr as it certainly wasn’t forecast. The upside of this was that while wind chill was extremely bad, the temperature didn’t seem to drop as low as we expected.

Tent – Terra Nova Laser (1300g). Ideal weight to space ratio. The porch is just huge on this, but so is the space inside. I could put all my gear in the inner tent to keep them from frost and only kept my water and stove here. The awful carbon fibre pegs were just not up to the job of use on frozen ground and most were broken on removal. Either the copper coloured point remained in the ground on pulling, or the yellow cap on top came off making it impossible to remove. Titanium pegs I had with me were much more suitable, but prone to bend on removal. The tent does tend to be pretty flappy in the wind and despite many pitches, it can still refuse to pitch taut when the ground isn’t perfectly even.

Laser Competition on the Left, full sized Laser on the right.

Sleeping – Old Mountain Equipment Classic Dragon 750 (1400g or so), Exped Down Mat (1000g) and Rab Survival Zone bivvy (350g). The sleeping bag is my extreme weather sac and compares in weight/performance to something like the AlpKit Alpine Dream sac. Stated to be good to -12c it was up to the job if a little heavy. A pipe dream 1000 by Alpkit would be nice and light at 1150g and £150, being good to -17c (with other offerings of similar weight to temperature being much more expensive) but probably not worth the investment with the use it’d get under typical Snowdonia conditions and being only a couple of hundred grams lighter.

The Exped Down mat is heavy and bulky but provides a warm and comfortable night’s sleep. I’ve a ¾ length summer synthetic version (imported from the States and I forget the make!) that’s a paltry 450g but just not cut out for the winter unless you want your feet dangling over the end.

Finally, the bivvy bag might seem like overkill but it does provide an extra layer on the bag that must add a degree or two, and certainly protects the down from any condensation or moisture that’s present in the tent. Bit of a belt and braces approach for a one nighter, but a very wise precaution if you’re out for longer.

Food and Drink – MSR Titanium Kettle (120g), Pocket Rocket (85g) and titanium KFS set (life venture I think, and around 50g). Snow peak Ti mug at 70g and my’rice pouch’. The kettle needs little explanation, it does the job at a great weight but you pay for it. It hold’s 850ml, so has a practical volume of over 750ml. I’ve got a custom made pot cosy for mine, so you can keep the extra water hot for quite a while. The warm water was essential to keep my gas canister from freezing solid. Either I’d put the canister on top of the warm lid, or place it in the lukewarm water to defrost the canister. I reckon that a mild warming of the canister should be OK, but it’s probably one of those’don’t try it at home’ tricks and I’d not recommend it. The pocket rocket is a super piece of kit at a light weight and the KFS set I take in it’s entirety. Some people recommend just a spoon, but I’d rather eat noodles with a pair of tent pegs than try it with a spoon. The fork is usually used, and the knife is useful for spreading things onto oatcakes.

On a morning like this, it’s better to stay in the sleeping bag!

A mug is likewise a bit of a luxury – you can use the kettle for that – but I like to have a drink while my meal’s cooking. This was almost essential on this trip to help warm me up. I had 4 platypus pouches as well – that’s one for a litre of flavoured drinks and then a 1l and a 2l bladder so that I’d have enough water to last me the night. Word of warning though – don’t leave them full of water overnight as they’ll freeze and you’ll end up with 2 kilos of ice you’ll need to carry out! I filled my kettle with water instead and it only had a thin layer of ice by morning (the pot cosy helped this).

My’rice pouch’ cooks proper noodles a treat. I mean the egg noodles, not the nasty 9p stuff that can’t be made of anything decent for that price (add to the 9p the pack of indigestion tablets that inevitably follow and they’re not so cheap for me). These noodles were my carbs for the’look what we found’ gourmet meatballs in tomato sauce pouch. These cost £2.50 each, but are still cheaper than camping food. What surprised me was how tasty they were. I’ve had similar food eating out and you never expect that from convenience food. Compare them to a wayfarers and for a bit more money you get a complete meal, but that includes the rice/pasta. With this you get a full meal, with the addition of a dry component makes it the ideal balance between weight / palatability / calorific content. I normally take a home made curry in a freezer bag for an overnighter which also ticks all the boxes.

The rest of the edibles were chocolate (usually Green and Blacks quality stuff or Lindt if I want milk chocolate) which can be melted into instant hot chocolate for a calorie rich meal in a mug! What has to be emphasised in this weather is that calories are essential to keep you warm. If I feel cold, I drink and eat a bit more. This is the only time I tend to eat pork pies, the buffet varieties packing in 300 calories of pure fat and protein. Of course, jelly babies bolster this when you need a bit more oomph on that steep uphill.

Sugar rush...mmmm.....

Fed up of it getting dark by seven. Still, there’s a way around it. Get a good head torch and get out in the dark. Here’s our five tips to do so safely.

1.Pick a walk you know well (in the daylight!) Keep it within your capabilities. Make sure your navigation skills are up to scratch, or tag along with someone who can. Put your route in a GPS as well as this may be the lazy man’s navigation, but used in conjunction with proper map reading skills can speed up your navigation and remove doubt. I always navigate in this way whenever stopping for a long time is dangerous (when it’s very cold at night or during the winter).

2.Do a half and half – Up in the light, descending in the dark.

View the sun as it sets, before walking back down.

3.See where you’re going. Make sure you’ve got a really good head torch (Petzt do a good range) and a spare in the group. Spare batteries and bulb. I try and keep going as long as I can before putting my torch on and let my night vision develop – but I always have to put my head torch on eventually. Avoid being the one who points their head torch in the rest of the group’s eyes, you won’t be popular and might find some stones in your rucksack after you stop for a cuppa.

4.Keep Warm. Might be stating the obvious, but you’ll need some warmer clothing than usual at that time of year. Check the Metcheck Mountain forecast as the Met Office unfortunately don’t give a night forecast (same goes for wild camping). In autumn, a warm day might well be followed by a frost, add a stiff breeze to that and you’ll soon feel the cold especially if you’re going up high. So a flask and a down jacket are worth taking, especially if you’re going to sit on the summit or a viewpoint for any period of time.

5.Full Moon. Try and get out on clear evenings around the full moon. You’ll be surprised at how much you can see.

Want to increase your confidence in Navigation? Click here for courses for beginners, intermediate and even a specific Night Navigation evening for those who want to take the first steps to walking after sunset. There’s a further Night Nav session for those who want to be able to navigate off path in the dark – a skill that’s useful if you do go off course.

1 – It tells you where you are. You can switch it on, and simply find out your location. Most modern GPS devices will lock onto the satellites pretty quickly and provide you with a grid reference. Just make sure that your GPS is set to British National Grid and that you can transfer your grid reference to your Map! If in doubt, check out the downloads on this page for some general advice on map reading.

2 – You can follow a route. If you want to use the GPS to navigate alongside a map, then you can upload a route to your GPS. You can create a route in a digital mapping program such as Tracklogs or Memory Map, or you can download them from websites such as (Walk Eryri). By the same token, you can swap routes with others. If you’re desperate, you can create a route on your GPS by manually entering the waypoints. There’s just not enough jelly babies in Wales to persuade me to do that. While it may be tolerable to input a waypoint or two, the tens you’ll need to create a proper route should be manually input by masochists only.

Once the route is in the GPS, set it to navigate the route, and on my Garmin, it beeps each time you pass a waypoint. Sat in my pack like that, I know I’m on the right route without having to get the map out unless I have to.

Digital mapping costs anything from £25 upwards, and if you do most of your walking in one area, can work out reasonably cheap. You can also print your routes out as Ordnance Survey maps as an added bonus.

3 – It can tell you when you’re due to arrive home. Well, at the end of the walk at least. If you’ve put a route into the GPS, then the trip computer will tell you how far the end of the route is and when you’re likely to arrive there at your current speed. On mountains, it’s a little off when you’re going up hill as mine doesn’t take the ascent into account. So a little common sense needs to be used too. I tend to take more notice of this when I’m on a descent, or where the walk is level (ish). It was reasonably accurate on my last two walks, being within 20mins of the actual time.

Even if the time isn’t accurate enough, you’ll always know exactly how far it is to your destination.

4 – Free contour maps. Ok. This depends on your GPS. You’ve got to have a Garmin that lets you display mapping. One way to tell is if it’s compatible with the rather expensive Garmin Topo software, then you can put free contour mapping by the SMC onto it. You’ll need to be a bit techy, but nothing extreme.

You will need a copy of Garmin Mapsource that may or may not come with your GPS, to install the mapping and you should add something like the Garmin Mapsource Roads and Recreation to add roads, coastlines and lakes. You can usually pick this up very cheap on eBay. Makes the GPS much more user friendly in the field. Add a waypoint in for each summit, and you’re laughing.

As you can see from the screen grab of the MapSource program, it’s perfectly capable of being used to design or edit routes. If you’ve received it with your GPS, then you can dabble with digital mapping of a sort for free.

5 – Logging a route. This is my favourite feature, and definitely the only one that I always use whenever the GPS is on. It basically records the route you walk. You can then save it to your PC, swap it or follow it as a route on your GPS another time. For me, it’s most useful used with digital mapping as you can see your route right there on the screen. If ever you’ve walked up a mountain on a path that’s not on the map, this lets you see where it is or was.

It can also be used as a tool to improve your navigation. A number of times I’ve gone off track, relocated my position and then found my way back somehow. Looking at the recorded route on a map I can double check that I was where I was meant to be!

Of course, there are a few things you’ll need to bear in mind. A GPS is useless without batteries. That’s why all my gear uses AA batteries wherever possible, so I’ve always got plenty of spare batteries, but might have to go without my camera. My head torch uses AA batteries for the same reason.

A GPS is a useful addition to your navigation, not a replacement. Brush up on navigation here. For the same reason, a GPS won’t take you over a cliff unless you really don’t know what you’re doing. The only time a GPS tells you where to go is when you’ve put a route in. If it takes you over a cliff then something needs to be said about your route planning abilities, not the usefulness of GPS devices!

Find out more on one of these GPS training courses.

Had a great weekend with Phil George and the rest of the group. Small group, but means that contact time was maximised.

Day 1.
Met at Pete''s Eats. Didn''t know there was a flexibility to the 9am meeting time, so missed out on breakfast (will do me good). Met up with a couple who looked equally lost as me, who were also on the course; Paul and Christine. Before long, we''d met the fourth member - Fiona and most importantly - Phil. Fiona had a problem with her car, brakes dodgy, so after sorting that out we were all ready to get cracking. We all went in one car, which Phil tries to do anyway to minimise impact and the number of cars taken into the mountains.

The morning was an introduction to the scheme, and generally to why we wanted to do it. A subject that could easily be dull, but the banter and rapport in the group kept us going. We discussed gear before finally getting out onto the hill.

Moel Berfedd was the target today. Four hours of micronav - great! I wasn''t looking forward to this, i expected counting paces and so on to be really, really boring - a distraction to the enjoyment of the hills. It''s not that i get lost; often. The micronav though, wasn''t what i''d expected and i really enjoyed it. Pacing is a lot easier than you''d imagine, and in the conditions where such skills are required you''re more likely to be in zero viz and more concerned about getting down safely than the view. We looked for tiny map features, ring contours of less than 10m across and confluences in tiny streams. This really was using the maps to the absolute limit. It was good that all of the group appear to be of a decent level of competency, and the dynamic was good too. Last thing you need on this sort of thing is a clash of personality hampering your training.

We got down to the Pen y Gwryd, had a swift half (yes, just a half!) and then had a talk on mountain weather. I teach weather to A-Level, but there''s always stuff to learn. It''s refreshing to see something from a different angle too. There were loads of paragliders about too, some event (will add photo soon).

I was happy with the first day, and returned to the camp site. Gutted that i''d forgotten my rice i had to be satisfied to have just curry. Ok, so no carb loading. Then the wind picked up. We got back from the pub early, and a couple of tents were already flat and many more were due to follow suit. It was a gusty wind, building from nothing to a strong gust that was surely 40-50mph and flattened my Voyager a number of times. It popped back, but two poles are now bent (but the tent has kept it''s shape so i presume are OK).

Next morning i packed up, wind was forecast to increase (which it didn''t) and i didn''t want to risk the locally windy conditions. I was also absolutely shattered, having barely slept the night before.

Day 2 was a leadership day, so we concentrated on what makes a good mountain leader and the legal aspects. We managed a longer walk today, but Phil was happy we''d got the summit of Y Garn in. It''s more important to get the training sessions in, it''s not a fitness test. In fact, it''s not a test at all, it''s training. Enjoyed this day too, doing a bit of nav and finding out the names of some of the plants. We all had sections to navigate and lead, and i was fortunate to get one i knew some ''facts'' about too, so got a bit of that in too. I found out i was the only one amongst us who''d never climbed as we started a bit of rope work. Fortunately, it was straightforward enough and what we did today will come with practice. Next week we use the ropes for abseiling and so forth, so i''ll have a better grasp of i then.

The talk that night was about mountain hazards, and some was what we knew already, but while i might have known it, it was sketchy knowledge and it''s always good to get it fed into the brain verbally as well as reading from a book.

Looking forward to 2 days next weekend, which are more skills based - with ropework, hazards and mountain rescue covered.