Extreme winter camping with my 5 year old and 8 year old sons using a hot tent in Alaska. It got down to -26C or -16F. Not only did we enjoy winter camping, but ice fishing, muskrat trapping, snowmobiling (snow machining) and camp fire cooking.
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00:00Luke, Tom and Nate here with the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel and we're here with Jake and
00:21his boys from How To Alaska and we're here in the Arctic wilderness of Alaska and we're
00:27gonna be doing some awesome camping. We're gonna go ice fishing, we're gonna camp in a hot tent,
00:33we're gonna hunt muskrats, we're gonna blow up tons of fireworks. Are you guys ready?
00:38Oh we're in it now. Check it out how beautiful this is. We got the Matanuska River right over
00:51there but somewhere over there is a lake that we're gonna go camp on and we're gonna take the
00:58snow machines across the ice. Should be plenty thick but you can see where there's overflow.
01:03Because there's moving water under the ice it pops up in weird places and causes overflow so
01:09we're gonna try to keep our snow machines on the dry side. Hey Nathan you enjoy the snow machines?
01:21Come on Nate let's go!
01:51I just saw a hare. Yeah right here. You want to shoot a rabbit? All right.
02:05There's tracks all over the place. This is his tracks right here. These are all snowshoe hare
02:14tracks. That's real fresh. There's rabbit poop. All right guys let's go back to the snow machines.
02:26Well that was a fun little distraction but I think we're gonna keep going.
02:29Jake was very kind and volunteered to go and check to make sure the ice was safe.
02:50Oh this is gorgeous.
03:00This looks like a gorgeous spot. I think we should go camping. Hey check it out there's a little otter
03:08slide. See you can see where the otter's been sliding down on his belly into the water. Yeah
03:12there's a little bit of fish and poo. There's a spring comes in right here so that's where there's
03:16open water so that's how they get in under the ice and they fish they pull themselves up.
03:21I never wanted to say anything. Oh yeah.
03:39All right if you're focused on one you'll do it.
03:42Oh
03:46You guys starting to fire over here? Let me let me give you a little help here.
03:50Cotton balls with Vaseline. That's what you want man. Put that thing right under there.
03:58Oh you're good. Wait that was yeah yeah it's it's good and it'll burn for a while because
04:04of the Vaseline. You better get some more wood on top of that.
04:12Okay okay no poor Nathan. We get out here he starts complaining about his feet being cold.
04:19I'm like why you have a pair of negative 60 boots. I look over and he's not wearing his
04:25boots he's wearing his rain boots and it's about 10 degrees outside so we have got to get him warm.
04:32Okay so I've got some hand warmers here.
04:37Okay I'm gonna put his camping booties on and I'm gonna get him in a sleeping bag with some hand
04:44warmers. Slide down inside down okay. Would you like to watch a show while you warm up? Get down
04:54on the thing and take your boots off. Get in as deep as you can. I can zip you up okay. You just
05:00stay there and get warm for a second. I need to put the stove together then you'll be a lot warmer.
05:18All right we got a roaring fire in here and it feels amazing. My hands were getting so cold
05:34trying to roll that that titanium. There we go. Stick your boots here by the fire. Oh it is still
05:44warming up in here. Oh you caught one. Look at that pretty little trout right there.
05:52Well while I'm inside fussing with the stove, Jake brought firewood
05:57and Cody caught a little trout. Look at that little dinner there.
06:01Are you cooking up those little salmon? Yep. Look at that little guy.
06:15Oh my glass is fogged up. Come on in.
06:21You can feel the heat already. Nathan you awake? Yeah. He's like I got the phone though.
06:26Hanging out in here is nice. I think Nathan has been pouring liquid nitrogen into his boots. These
06:32are the coldest boots in the world. So we are going to sit him sit them here by the stove
06:38in the hopes that they may warm up here. Who's next?
06:47And then you come out but the stove has melted enough to fill up the lake
06:51Isn't that just entertaining?
06:57I absolutely love these lights. This is a bicycle light that comes with a GoPro mount
07:03and these battery packs that you strap to your bicycle frame and instead I just hook them up to
07:09my tripods or my other GoPro mounts. It will run about 12 to 16 hours on the low setting or at a
07:16thousand lumens it'll last about four to six hours. These are awesome for portable work lights.
07:21There you go. Catch and release. Oh I could see them down there. Yeah they're going nuts. I think
07:29they like that light. There you go. Let's get this fire up and going and I'm gonna get some dinner
07:35cooking here.
07:44All right let's get some dinner going. I have a bunch of short pork ribs here soaking in bubogi
07:50sauce and we've got a bunch of fajita vegetables and tortillas so we're going to be making a little
07:57Korean Tex-Mex fusion here with bubogi fajitas. So this is my ice fishing chisel. I forged it
08:06before we came up on this trip and it's got a chisel on one end and a scoop on the other
08:11but it works good for a lot of things.
08:27It's already frozen. A little bubogi sauce on everything. That's gonna be good. I've got an idea.
08:40There we go. Korean bubogi pork rib fajitas.
08:48Oh that's good. They're kind of sweet instead of spicy.
08:52You like that? Really really good. Best Korean fajitas you've ever had?
09:00Hey Nathan what do you think? You like your fajita? Yeah. Good. All right guys we've got
09:04some fajitas in our belly. I think it's time to shoot off some fireworks. What do you think?
09:13There we go. Got a little berm so if the fireworks fall backwards they won't shoot
09:16it back towards us. This is just fireworks.
09:36We're talking serious here. Holy mackerel. I feel like this can
09:40ward off invading armies. Yeah it's cold out here. This is awesome.
09:47Oh my gosh.
09:59Whoa that goes. Good luck.
10:17Oh
10:35that was awesome. Was that cool? Yeah.
10:38Ah are you okay there? Yeah I'm fine. We got a thousand firecrackers here.
10:58That was awesome. You guys want to all light up roman candles? Here everyone grab one.
11:08Oh
11:15We're gonna run around the lake real quick and set a bunch of muskrat traps tonight.
11:19See if we can't maybe catch and eat a muskrat later on. There we go. You've said a few of
11:25these huh? It's on my fingers too. This right here is a conibear trap. Muskrat goes through
11:30boink and it gets them. Yeah I had a double spring conibear 110 and I
11:35caught it my fingers in at once. Got a bucket full of conibear traps. We're gonna go get some muskrat.
11:47So right here we have a muskrat feed hut.
11:55Yeah look at that. It's just like a big pile of grass that they've stuck in the ice.
12:01So if you're ever in a survival situation you could always ice fish through these.
12:06Oh look at that. They get up in this tube and then they kind of get on this shelf and then
12:14they eat their food outside of the water where they can have a breathing hole.
12:18Oh that's a good sign. You see that? Bubbling. Bubbly.
12:24I don't think it's going to snow tonight.
12:26All right Aiden hop on bud.
12:37You can't remember how it goes. Oh you see that? Yeah it seems like it will fall through.
12:44They're coming in this way and then they're sitting on their little ledge over there.
12:47Yeah.
12:57Let's do this. It'll be a tough catch here but.
13:08You guys had a good time didn't you? Yeah I just had a bomb. We just got back from setting the
13:13muskrat traps and the temperature has dropped to negative eight or about negative 22 celsius.
13:21It's nippy guys and it's getting colder.
13:26Frozen marshmallows. Luke put your boots down. Look at that sucker. Did you even cook that?
13:34Not even brown on the outside. I think you just ate a frozen marshmallow. You know I
13:39gave you a perfectly good stick. I'm gonna get my boys out here. That's yours. More trustable.
13:52See you tomorrow.
13:57Well Jake and his boys just left to go home and sleep in their warm beds.
14:02So it's just us out here tonight. Why don't you sit here by the fire and stay warm
14:08and I'm gonna go in and get your bags all ready okay?
14:13It's real easy.
14:22I got the door of the stove facing towards my bag and I've got a pile of wood
14:26within arm's reach but I don't know how much I'm actually going to use the stove in the
14:32middle of the night. I just don't know if I want to be stoking it all night.
14:36We can see here inside the tent on the floor it's about 22 degrees fahrenheit maybe 25.
14:41And if you look at on the walls you can see there's frost on the inside of the walls below
14:45about here. So from about here below is 32 degrees and the higher up you go in the tent
14:51the warmer it gets until it feels like 70 degrees up here. Okay okay all right Tom sit down on the
14:59buffalo hide. I'm putting on these down booties to try to keep my feet warm in my sleeping bag.
15:10All right guys it's pretty late I'm going to bed I'll see you in the morning we'll see how this goes.
15:21Well guys we survived the night and look who's up.
15:25Hey Tom you're nice and warm. How about you Nicole? Yeah. Look at all the snow on your mat.
15:35See from the from the frost on the tent. It was a little bit of a rough night last night
15:39around midnight Tommy sits bolt upright in his sleeping bag and starts screaming his head off.
15:46By the time I get him down Nathan's screaming and crying.
15:50It took me forever to wake him up. I had to pull him out of his sleeping bag and pat frost on his face to get him to wake up and stop screaming and then Tommy started screaming again.
16:03You know about about an hour and a half later we got everyone to stop screaming and stay asleep.
16:07I did not scream. Yeah you totally did twice. Well I wasn't planning to but I kept the stove going all
16:14night about every two hours it would start to get a little cold in here and I would kind of wake up
16:19and I'd reach over and grab a log from the log pile and throw it in there and then go back to
16:24sleep and about two hours later that would happen and but yeah we kept it kept it warm all night long.
16:31Now it's going pretty good it's pretty toasty right now. We're killing some time till the sun comes up
16:37we're just gonna watch some battle bots on our phone. All right we're almost 32 degrees so
16:44right hovering around freezing inside the tent so that feels warm. Look how covered in frost my
16:51overalls are. Oh these pants are cold.
16:58Look at this it is cold out. Not a cloud in the sky. When the temperature drops all the clouds fall
17:07Outside the tent it's negative 16 degrees fahrenheit
17:10that's negative 26 celsius. Oh it's cold today. Man we better get a fire started out here.
17:21Well welcome back. Yeah. All right Cody you want to go do some ice fishing?
17:26Let me get this open for you.
17:28This is the Alaskan fish finder right here. Stick your face in the hole and see the fish.
17:33It works. You can see them down there. Oh Cody what do you got there? Look at that beautiful
17:39Dolly Varden right there. Nice. One of the creepiest things about camping on frozen lakes
17:46is that the ice moves and it cracks. It's like plate tectonics on the ice and last night we
17:53had a couple really big cracks where we're sitting in our sleeping bag. It all said boom.
17:57You can hear that the ice move and growing underneath us. Wake up this morning and look
18:02at this crack right past the tent. I mean they're harmless. It's not like you're going to fall into
18:12the ice. It's 18 inches of ice but it wakes you up and freaks you out.
18:17All right Jake's running off to go grab another dead tree and
18:20I'm going to start chopping some wood get this fire going.
18:42I want to play snow machine tag.
18:47That's a lot of wood.
18:57We got a bag of scotch eggs and I've mostly cooked them up already so we just need to heat them.
19:08I've sold your chair.
19:16Caribou sausage right there folks. Can I have a caribou sausage? Here Tom why don't you try
19:21some caribou sausage. This is what the caribou Cody shot. I love it. That's it's good.
19:30There you go scotch eggs. You got a hard-boiled egg covered in pork sausage
19:34and deep fried with panko. Oh it's one of the most delicious things ever when it's warm.
19:42I did a video on how to make campfire scotch eggs as part of my 23 campfire recipes
19:47video and I'll put a link in the description to that video. Definitely check it out. These are
19:52delicious. So you know like there's a difference between the right you're like
20:05look out
20:09who wants to warm up.
20:16You like that Nate? Well both the boys are sitting on the snow machines making
20:20engine noises. I think it's a sign that they really want to go out on the snow machine.
20:25All right I think we're going to go check out those muskrat traps.
20:41No nothing there.
20:44Nope all right well we're going to cover it up so we don't kill them all.
20:53Oh a little weed in it. We definitely had muskrat action there. We got one more.
21:01First I hope we get one. No well we didn't get to eat any muskrats but that was still pretty cool.
21:08Well I think we're going to start heading back to camp.
21:11Well I think we're going to start heading back to camp and breaking down camp here in a little bit.
21:16Got a long way to go to get home.
21:20All right I'll tell you what this tent's been a good little tent for us. I'm actually really
21:24pleased with it. It's super light. It only weighs about four pounds for the tent and the stove.
21:29The stove's made out of titanium and it like weighs less than a book but uh it's a seek
21:34outside four-man teepee hot tent and I'll put a link in the description to it but I need to start
21:40packing it up and getting ready to go because uh we're going to run out of daylight here a little bit.
21:45Oh
22:08we've been hearing more of those big cracks in the ice and look at it
22:11one of them runs right through my stake in the center of my tent.
22:15Probably the heat from the tent expanded the ice and made it crack right in the spot.
22:36Well guys I hope you enjoyed this video as much as we enjoyed filming it.
22:40If you guys want to see more camping adventures from the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel don't
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22:57to check out Jake's YouTube channel How To Alaska. I'll put a link in the description to their stuff.
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