Winter Survival
The key to Winter Survival is to stay dry and warm making fire and shelter your priorities.
When you are surviving in the cold dying of hypothermia is a real possibility when you make even a small mistake. If you slip and fall into a stream or the snow and get your clothing wet, you have to know how to quickly build a fire to keep warm and dry. If you cannot get a fire started you still need to get the wet cloths off. It is more dangerous to keep wet cloths on than to be exposed to the cold.
Fire:
Although it is possible to light a fire using primitive tools like a fire saw or bow, it is a lot quicker and easier to use a match, lighter, or flint and striker. The flint and striker is great because you can’t run out of it like matches or run out of fuel as with a lighter. Take two or three different fire starting methods when a winter survival situation is possible, they are small and light. Keep two different fire starting methods in the glove box of your car and obviously at your house. Begin practicing fire building in the cold. Tinder that works even when wet includes birch bark and sap from pine and spruce trees and it is essential that you practice lighting a fire because in a real winter survival emergency you may only have minutes before your fingers get too cold to function.
A winter shelter should protect you from precipitation, wind, and the cold of the ground. All these elements can be creatively put together with small sapling trees that are easily bent and secured with cordage of vine or grasses. Tear off small limbs with leaves or pine branches for a thatch roof and wall as well as insulation on the ground for bedding.
If in a heavy snow area you can build a shelter of snow blocks. You can either build the shelter completely of snow blocks or use a wall of snow blocks to protect your shelter. Cut the blocks out of the snow with a shovel or practice using your feet to stop out blocks.
In serious winter survival where there is only snow and you have sloped hillside dig a snow cave about three times the size of your body. This will be small enough to keep warm but big enough to not condense around you as it settles. In the back of the snow cave cut in a shelf for a bed. This will allow the coldest air to settle on the floor of the cave and give you a smaller area off the ground to heat with your body. Run your hand along the top of your shelf bed to smooth it or else as it warms you will end up getting dripped on.
When it is not raining and you need shelter immediately you can use dry leaves to make a temporary shelter that will keep you warm until you can build something sturdier. You should be able to collect enough dry leaves to make a pile several feet thick in 30 minutes or less. Use half of the leaves on the bottom and the other half on top. You can sleep warmly in the middle of the pile even in freezing conditions.
Additional Tips:
The answer to winter survival is to stay moving. Even when you are wet in below freezing condition you can stay warm by being active. Once you stop moving your body will begin to lose heat and hypothermia can set in. Once you get cold it is extremely difficult to get warm again, so stay moving as long as you can.
It is essential that you get dry before you go to sleep. You should put on dry clothes if you have them and use a fire to dry and wet clothes. If fire is not a possibility then hang wet clothes from your pack during the day; cold air tends to be dry.
Another danger is sweating, which can happen even in cold conditions if you are exerting yourself. Adjust the layers of your cloths to make sure you do not get to hot or cold. Sweaty cloths will cause your body to start losing heat once you stop moving.
Eating fatty foods will help your body produce heat. You also need water, but in the snow that may be hard to find. If you have a fire use it to melt snow into water; hopefully you are prepared and have a cooking pot. If you must eat snow you have to eat it very slowly to avoid cooling your body down.
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