Winter Camping with Arden

My buddy Charlie and I are attempting to camp at least once a month this year. We tried a couple of years ago and even though we didn’t make it every month, we still got out about 8 times, which is kinda the whole point. We had planned on taking our kids last weekend but he and his family ended up really sick. Arden had already gotten his hopes up for the trip and it was the only weekend we could do it, so we decided to go for it!

We loaded up the Runner, I put my RTT on the rack, and we made our way into the mountains.

Murphy’s law, it has been the warmest winter in Colorado that I ever remember, and the one weekend we decided to go camping Colorado decided to be freezing cold and windy. We still had a great time setting up camp and Arden had a blast exploring and building the fire for us.

We had an early dinner and then crawled into the tent and watched Star Wars on my iPad.

Here is where things got interesting…the wind started to pick up around 10pm. I was fine with it, Arden was sleeping fine and we were still warm enough. At about 1:30am though, the wind got insane. It started blowing away my table and knocked over my stove, but the kicker was it was blowing around the annex on my tent so much that it kept knocking over and shutting off our little propane heater. I tried several different things to try to secure it from the wind but it was impossible. It was about 1 degree outside so without heat we would definitely be in a tricky spot. I decided to make the call that we should head home. I started the 4runner to heat it up, moved Arden into the car and broke down camp on one of the windiest and coldest nights I have ever felt. It was something. We then slowly wound our way down the mountain and eventually made it home around 4:30 in the morning. It’t not how I wanted the trip to go, but it was still fun and a great story to tell. I can’t wait to get back up there when it is warmer and more fun.

For the photographers: Nikon D3 + 24-70mm f2.8 G. Nikon D3s + 105mm f1.4 ED. VSCO Film 02 Re-release.