Winter Gear: What You Need to Know

Traveling by dog team doesn't require really a whole set of specialized equipment. You just have to protect your gear. And I think the single most important part is you have to be able to try to keep your gear warm when you're out traveling in minus 30 degree weather like we were doing this morning. So, there's a couple of little tricks that you can use. One, I kind of use this low backpack which is kind of an insulated backpack. It's semi waterproof, but it's fairly well insulated. And so I will use this pack both on my summer backpacking trips cause it's comfortable to wear. I can hoof around. I can carry a decent size amount of equipment with me. But one of the keys to it is that when I'm inside the bag, you know, you can buy these hand warmer devices which are good up to 10 hours of heat. And so one of the things that I like to use with these 10 hours to heat is I'll take a couple of these packs and I usually stick one back here in the back. And I'll wrap it around my extra battery. So rather than carrying the battery next to my body which is another way to keep them warm, I'll put one of these 10 hour bad boys and I'll actually stick it inside this sleeve and it'll help keep it warm. The other is that I don't keep my cameras out. When your dog sledding one of the worst things you can do is have the camera around your neck waiting for a shot because most of the time you're bouncing around and you're getting all this activity and you want to have some kind of padding. But you don't want to have the camera on your neck because if you thump a tree, you hit a tree, deer runs across the trail, the dogs go after it and you thump piece of tree. You know, you're going to fly off the sled. And if you do and you've got a, you know, 10 pound piece of glass in camera, you're going to lose some teeth. And so I always try to keep them in the bag. And then I keep the bag right in front of me on the sled which is accessible, but it's not around my neck. So that said with the battery charger being wrapped in a 10 hour piece of warming material, I usually take another one and I throw it on the bottom of my camera bag. So it just sits there all day long and it keeps my camera warm. This is okay. It's not warming it up to the point where I have to worry about when I open up the bag that I get condensation on my equipment. Like you will if you're out all day long in zero degree weather, you come back into your warm cabin and you open up your cameras. You're going to see them get wet instantly. Bad news. So what you do when you come back in, you make sure you keep your camera bag closed when you come back in after being outside all day long and let your equipment slowly warm back up to room temperature, which you've been out all day long, in a closed bag will take several hours. So don't wreck your electronic gear by letting it get wet, by allowing condensation to get on it. So that's one of the tricks of the trade of trying to keep your camera equipment warm because when it gets cold, especially people that like to carry iPhones, there's a certain temperature where it just simply says too cold and it doesn't work. So keeping your cameras as warm as you possibly can while you're out and about is a good idea. Some of the other essential items. Winter has days about that long, so I always carry a headlamp. When you come back in late, it's late in the afternoon, the sun is back. You're in the forest. You can't see well, you have a headlamp on and you're in good shape. The other is when you're out and for the day, you need to have something to protect your eyes. If you look out on the lake today we've got brilliant sun and then that's all you're seeing. You can actually get a whiteout and your eyes can hurt from having that. So I wear a very dark pair of sunglasses that also has blinders on the side which keeps the sun from coming in and creating a reflection on the backside of the glasses. It makes looking into a very, very bright situation a lot more tolerable. I tend to carry my extra batteries by the way, for my headlamp with one of those warming packs inside of here which is inside my pack, which always keeps them warm because you don't need those until the end of the day. So you want to make sure that those batteries are working. These are just your battery packs. The other key ingredient for me, when you're dog sledding you're holding onto the handlebars and your feet are on the runners, right? And so you're concentrating on this. You've got your hands on the sled. You're having to maneuver around most of the time on the trail. So this particular camera bag, this low bag. One of the things that's kind of nice about the low bag is that the backside of it for comfort, it's padded. There's a tremendous amount of padding on the back of this. And that's nice for when you're hiking in the summertime but it's also nice that when you're traveling and she's down, it's absorbing a lot of that motion, that's going like this. But then it's also if you're in the sled and you're on the handle bars, you've got to reach way down like this which oftentimes the handlebars of the sled don't allow you to get down that far. So I try to serve two purposes here. I bring a duffel bag, very lightweight duffel bag, like this. I have it lined with cold cell foam, which just kind of gives me a little bit of absorption protection here. And this is where I put my extra jackets, the lightweight stuff, extra jackets, extra gloves. And this serves as a great platform that when I'm in the sled and the reason I like to do this, everybody kind of has their own way, but now you can imagine I've got the sled, handlebars are up here. I can take my camera bag now. And I set my camera bag right on top of my very, very soft bag of extra clothing and now I will keep the camera bag open like this. Now the sled, you have to realize, inside the sled there's a basket and it's material and you can zip it all the way up. So if you roll over, if it snows, it doesn't fill with snow. So this is in there. So now whenever I want to take a shot it's elevated from the bottom of the sled. It's absorbing all of the bumps of the trees, and the rocks and so on that we're hitting when we're in the trail. And I can simply just reach down, I see something, I can pull up my camera and I can get a shot while I'm on the sled. While I'm moving. Some situations are too much movement. You can't do it. You need to keep it inside. But for the most part, that's my basic setup for going out and keeping my camera gear safe. Keeping my camera gear warm and allowing me to shoot on the fly.