My night in the bivvy

Last night I thought I'd try out sleeping on the snow in a bivouac bag. The weather was calm when I went out just after 11pm with my survival pack to find a cosy spot to bed down for the night. In it there's a polar bed roll, which is a windproof bivvy bag with a thin foam camping mattress rolled up inside, a sleeping bag, and other stuff like water, food bars, signal mirror, whistle etc.

I found a fluffy patch of snow sheltered by a rock wall, and rolled out the bivvy bag, put the sleeping bag inside, climbed in and took off my boots, then pulled the pack inside to make an internal wall next to my head to keep the bag up off my face. The sky was the most fantastic pink and mauve as I lay there on the snow. The bag has a draw string at one end, and once I was settled I pulled it tight leaving only a little breathing hole and I quickly drifted off to sleep.

It was surprisingly warm inside with just a little condensation, and the snow easily molded to my body shape under the mat. I woke up a couple of times during the night to turn over, and peeked out at the long shadows on the distant ice cliffs of Commonwealth Bay, before drifting again into a deep sleep. I woke up about 7:30 am, still cozy and warm in the sleeping bag but the bivvy bag was flapping quite a lot and it seemed very noisy outside. The condensation inside the bivvy had turned to frost and with each flap of the bag little snow flakes fell on my face.

Peeking out I could see drifting snow and the waves being whipped up by the katabatic winds off the polar plateau. I retreated into the bag for a while, then by 8am I figured no one was going to bring me a nice hot cuppa, so it was time to head back to Sorensen's Hut for breakfast. Packing up was fun, the bag is just big enough to sit inside, so I got dressed i.e. put on my boots, which were the only items that I removed last night. I stuffed the sleeping bag back into the pack, and crawled out of the bivvy. It was then the wind hit me! I had to pin the bivvy bag down, quickly brush off the show drift and get it into the pack in the 'lee' of the rock, then do some blizzard walking to get back to the hut.

Everyone is still asleep here, so I've put on the kettle and hung out the bags to dry. Looking at the weather station, the wind picked up to 20 knots about an hour after I went to bed, and blew at 30 to 40 knots all night, and is now 40-50 knots. Good to know that you can hunker down in that gear and be safe and warm even in a blizzard.

Tony