How Native Americans Slept Warm In A Tent At 40 Below

Two shelters on the same river bottom, on the same night. Same poles, same cover, same little fire burning in the middle of each one, and the same forty below zero outside. In one of them a family sleeps the whole night through with their coats off. In the other, a freezing draft runs across the floor all night and the blankets are soaked through by morning. Same poles, same cover, same fire. The difference is one piece of material, and where it hangs. In this one I lay out how those shelters actually worked, and it isn't what most folks think. A tent in deep cold is not a box that holds heat. It's a machine for moving air. I go through where they set it, why the cone shape beats every flat wall ever built, what those two smoke flaps at the top are really for, why the fire stays small, how they slept up off the cold floor, and why the old ones never slept in the clothes they worked in. Then at the end I show you the piece almost nobody knows about, the liner, and the four separate jobs that one sheet is doing at the same time. The fire never heated that shelter on its own. The liner is what let the fire work. I also cover the carbon monoxide danger plain and early, because any fire in any shelter makes it, you can't see it or smell it, and it kills people every winter in tents and ice shacks and campers. Those old shelters were open top and bottom on purpose. Don't copy the fire into a sealed modern tent or a vehicle. My name is Tommy Whitehorse, I'm sixty-six years old, and I camp the same hills my grandfather camped. These things aren't secrets. They're just forgotten. Thank you for sitting with me, and walk easy.