I have never camped in the winter. I have never wanted to camp in the winter. It just doesn’t sound like my kind of fun. My boys and husband have been camping in the winter. My husband isn’t necessarily a huge fan of it, but my boys enjoy it. My boys have learned to dig snow caves and have slept in them over night. I find that crazy.

At Church I am currently in charge of the Young Women group. During our planning meeting several months ago some of the young women asked if we could go camping some time during the winter. Because we are trying to teach them how to plan and execute activities, and we want the program to be their program, we told them if they planned it we would make sure it happened.

This past weekend we had the campout. We did not dig snow caves, nor did we sleep outside (they didn’t want to do that kind of camping thankfully!). We went to our local Church camp, camp LaDaSa, and slept in the cabins.

They are not heated, you have to light a fire in the woodstove. There are no bathrooms in the cabins, just a shower house a little way through the woods. There is electricity, so we did have a little bit of light.

We had 4 cabins to sleep in, and once we got the fires started, the cabins warmed up quickly. Each cabin is just one room with 3 sets of bunkbeds, the young women split up into 2 groups, 5 and 4. The young women leaders (2 of us) took the third cabin, and the priesthood leader and his wife took the 4th.

We spent most of the evening in the leaders cabin where we cooked soup on the woodstove, ate lots of snacks, had a planning meeting for the next 6 months, had a great devotional with one of the young women leading, and spent a lot of time just visiting and catching up on what everyone was doing.

Everyone went to their cabins again about 11:00 where we instructed the young women on how to keep the fire going through the night so they didn’t get cold. We then all went to bed, or at least we all stayed in our respective cabins. Winter camping is nice because everyone does stay in their cabin since it’s cold outside! It wasn’t super cold, the weather was very cooperative, especially for January in Alaska as it stayed between 15 and 25 degrees Fahrenheit the whole time we were there.

We were up the next morning by 7:30 so we could get cleaned up, eat breakfast, and checked out of our cabins. We had a second activity that afternoon in Anchorage, in conjunction with our young men group, to watch a UAA/UAF charity basketball game.

I have slept in these cabins in the summer many times and found them to be comfortable enough. I was worried during the winter as to whether they would stay warm enough. It wasn’t -40, so we had that in our favor. We had to keep the small stove stoked, but we were able to stay plenty warm without cooking ourselves out.

I still am not a winter camping kind of person, I don’t like being cold. I’m not really a camping type person to begin with. But it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. If the young women wanted to do it again next winter, I would do it again. I don’t really want to sleep out outside, the cabins definitely made it comfortable and doable for my first winter camp. It was a great experience and I’m glad the young women suggested it, planned it, and that we could help them execute their idea.