Is a hot tent the key for winter camping?

Winter camping requires a sick sense of optimism. It requires forgetting the cold, uncomfortable hours of semi-sleep, and gasping at the snow’s glitter. 

If, like me, you have this sick optimism, you leave each winter camping trip glad to be returning to the land of central heating, but also absolutely convinced that—like old infomercials—“there’s got to be a better way.” Just one more layer. A hot water bottle. Maybe a better camping spot.

Enter the hot tent: a groundless tent and collapsible titanium stove (which rolls up smaller than you’d think possible.) I didn’t purchase a high-end model, but the whole package still weighed only 9 pounds.

This, I thought, was the ticket to pleasant winter camping.

It does help. The stove easily heats the tent and can fully flush the cold out of your system. Though be warned the fire will need a lot of tending through the night. You want to set up the tent once, well away from the road, and spend multiple days exploring the surrounding area. Otherwise, day trips make more sense. This allows the tent to take on the feeling of a cabin, a place of warmth and comfort to return to. Setting up (and breaking down) camp can be too time-consuming to support easy winter backpacking. 

However, camping with a hot tent is not all positives, and can be a more difficult calculus than expected.The weight of supplies is not limited to the tent and stove. An axe and saw are also needed, and you must choose a campsite where you can legally and efficiently process wood into sizes suitable for the stove. Setting up the tent, unrolling the stove metal, and chopping wood also takes more time than you’d think.

Comfort is not the word that comes to mind when instead of lying down after a long day, you  find yourself trekking through the forest, chopping and carrying downed wood back to camp to make a fire. But waking up and popping another stick in the stove is preferable to suffering in a sleeping bag that never feels thick enough.

Over multiple trips, each time leaving the backcountry with that same repeated line of “there’s got to be a better way,” I have come up with a recipe to hot-tent travel that works for me.

Do I recommend a hot tent? Yes—but know it has many caveats that can turn it from a panacea into an oddly specialized piece of equipment.

— Jack Pearson