Dressing for Standing Still, Which Is a Different Problem

I have got this wrong in most of the ways available. Eight winters later, here is what has actually held up.

01The order of failure

It is always the same and it is worth knowing so you can act before it happens.

Feet go first, usually between sixty and ninety minutes in real cold. Not because the boots are bad but because there is no muscle activity down there to produce heat, and because standing puts your soles in contact with a very large cold object.

Hands follow, and they fail faster once you have started operating anything. Every time you take a glove off to work a small control you lose most of an hour's accumulated warmth in the fingers, and you do not get it back by putting the glove on again.

Then the core, quietly, and the sign is not shivering. The sign is that you start deciding the light is not going to improve after all and it might be time to head back. That thought is a symptom rather than a judgement, and recognising it as such has kept me out for the good half hour more than once.

Hiking gear is built around a body producing heat. Take the heat away and a very good jacket becomes a bag that holds cold air against you.

02Feet: volume, not thickness

The single largest improvement I made was buying boots two full sizes larger than my shoes.

The reason is not the sock. It is air. Insulation works by holding still air, and a boot that fits snugly compresses whatever is inside it and stops it doing that. A boot with genuine spare volume, containing one thick sock rather than two thin ones stacked, keeps my feet warm for three or four times as long as a correctly fitted boot with the same rating.

Two thin socks is a common instruction and I no longer follow it. Two layers of sock in the same boot compress each other and the outer one drags the inner one around, which produces cold and blisters at the same time.

The second improvement was a piece of closed cell foam mat, about forty by thirty centimetres, that lives folded in the bag. Standing on it removes the largest single heat leak in the whole system. It weighs nothing and it costs almost nothing.

03Hands: two pairs, one job each

I have never found a single glove that lets you work a camera and also keeps you warm, and I have stopped looking.

What works is a thin liner glove that stays on permanently and a large overmitt that goes on and off. The liner is for the ten seconds when you are actually touching something. The mitt is for the other fifty minutes of every hour, and it needs to be big enough to get on quickly over the liner without a struggle, because a mitt you fight with is a mitt you leave off.

Fingers are far warmer in a mitt than in a glove. Whatever you lose in dexterity you gain by being able to keep going at all.

A chemical hand warmer in each mitt is not cheating. On the coldest day of this last winter it was the reason I stayed out for the last forty minutes, which is where the frame came from.

04The layer you put on when you stop

The habit that took longest to learn: add the insulating layer at the moment you stop moving, not when you start feeling cold.

Walking in from the car warms you up. If you arrive slightly warm and stay in the same clothing, you cool through the following twenty minutes and you never fully recover, because you are now trying to reheat a body from a deficit with no muscle activity available. Putting a thick layer on immediately, before there is any sensation of cold, keeps the heat you arrived with.

The layer itself should be big, easy to pull over everything, and hooded. Mine lives in the bag on the way in and comes out the moment the tripod is down.

Damp is the other half of this. Arriving sweaty is the most reliable way to have a bad three hours, so I walk in slower than feels natural and with the outer layer open.

05A drink, on a schedule

A hot drink every hour, by the clock rather than by inclination, does more than it has any right to.

Part of it is real, since you are putting warmth into the middle of the system, and part of it is that a two minute break with both hands around something hot resets the hands completely. Both effects matter. I use a plain vacuum flask, fill it with something hot and sweet, and I do not skip the hour marker even when nothing feels wrong.

Food matters similarly. Something to eat every couple of hours in the cold is a fuel question, not a hunger question, and going without shows up as the same premature decision to pack up and leave.

06What I no longer bother with

Heated insoles, which flatten under a standing weight and drain in the cold.

Extremely technical hardshells, in the absence of rain, since below freezing there is nothing to keep out except wind and a windproof softshell over insulation is warmer and quieter.

Anything cotton, obviously, and this includes the shirt you did not think about.

A second camera body carried in case, which mostly served to double the amount of cold metal I was holding.

07The short version of the whole thing

Cold is not a single problem to be solved with a warmer coat. Standing still in it is a heat budget with a lot of leaks, and the leaks are almost all at the extremities and through the ground.

Give the feet volume and something to stand on. Give the hands two pieces of equipment with one job each. Put the big layer on before you need it. Drink something hot by the clock. Then most of the time you can stay out long enough to get the thing you came for, which is the entire point of any of it.