Murphy’s Law Applied to Winter Camping

The need to urinate at night increases in direct relation to the hour past midnight, layers of clothing worn, occupants in your tent, and inches of new snowfall. Curiously, it increases in ‘inverse’ relation to the decreasing outside temperature.
Sticks emerge through the snow at a rate proportional with the time.
The weight of your backpack increases in direct relationship with the length of your hike and the depth of the snow.
Your warmest item of clothing will be the one that is torn, wet or forgotten.
Tent stakes come only in the quantity ‘N-1′ where N is the number of stakes necessary to stake down a tent. The quantity of N-1 tent stakes will all be of length L-1″ where L is the length needed to reach solid snowpack.
All food assumes a common taste and color when freeze-dried.
Divide the number of servings by two when reading the directions for reconstituting anything freeze-dried.
The person hiking in front of you will randomly dislodge snow from all tree branches above your head. If you remain a safe distance behind the person in front of you, then the person behind you will randomly tap those same branches with their trekking pole, dislodging the snow before they reach the branch.
The actual comfortable sleep rating for your sleeping bag is 15 degrees more than what was advertised.
When sharing gear with a group three will bring stoves and no one will bring a cooking kit.
Your backpack’s weight will not be affected by the amount of food eaten out of it.
The loudness of your tent mate’s snoring during night grows in direct correlation to your need for sleep.
The sun sets 47% faster than normal when setting up camp. It sets another 28% faster if freezing rain is eminent.
Of a 25% chance of freezing rain, 100% will fall in your campsite.
When snowshoeing you take half as many downhill steps as uphill.
30% of a backpack’s contents could have been left at home.
The number of times the trip is described in a story is directly proportional to the misery experienced during the trip.

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February 22nd, 2015 | Category: Winter Camping