Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Surviving a -36° Night - No Tent u0026 No Sleeping Bag" video.

  1. At least at -36, he's not fighting the wet like you were. I consider wet conditions more dangerous at higher (above-freezing) temperatures than the deep cold. My closest encounter with hypothermia was at 35 degrees (about 3 Celsius) in wet snow. Everything was wet. There was no escape from the cold until I got dry, and I was hours from getting dry. Glad I wasn't stuck on an overnighter that time.
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  2. At those temperatures, it's pretty hard to start a fire by accident. Imagine even a good-sized spark landing on the shelter. It takes a lot of energy to warm up that bark to combustion, and it's just a random spark. Kind of turn the question around and ask yourself if you could build a life-saving fire by sending intermittent sparks into a pile of wood. What a foolish way to start a fire!
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  3. In the end, what kills you in a situation like that is despair. You'd be amazed at what a human can endure if they just don't give up.
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  4. That's a pretty miserable night, waking up with one side cold every half-hour or so. But it beats having both sides cold with no fire. Making the video was difficult, but it also took your mind off how freaking cold you were. You weren't just spending a night outdoors. You were recording it for posterity. I don't think I'd venture out without a lightweight tarp (or two). I thought you were cutting it close on the firewood, when you did the "feed long ends into the fire" strategy. Very smoky and harder to ration your fuel supply for a full night. But you're pretty adept at gathering max firewood for minimum effort, so even if you ran out, you could always get more. I must say you were very efficient at whatever you set out to do. The only thing I'd've done different was waste a lot of energy processing the wood into approximate stove lengths, and made a tidier fire. I'm not sure my way'd be better for delivering more heat to my shelter. There's a lot to be said for the long fires, and since you're spending the night down low, you're not really troubled by the smoke. Still, you demonstrate one true fact about the deep cold. If you've got fire, you can survive. Doesn't matter how cold it is.
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