Frozen (hiking)

It sucks, when you wake up in the morning and your tent is covered with ice. But it really sucks, when your sleeping back is.

I woke up in the middle of the night, around 12pm and looked up on the sky. The stars had completely changed since we had gone to bed (around 6 or 7, when it gets to dark to hike and to cool to stay outside), but the milky way was still as beautiful as before. It was a moonless night, and I had never seen as many stars in the northern hemisphere than this night out in Zion.
I peeled myself halfway out of the sleeping bag and felt the small crust and christals of ice on top of it. I wondered if we should wake up completely and move over into the tent. But the sky was just too beautiful to look at, so I went on watching the stars and eventually fell back asleep.

The next morning, the sleeping bag was frozen completely. It was pretty dark: The opening of a four season sleeping bag is not even a few square inches big and just enough to put lets say a nose through it. But I did not feel paranoid because the little air reaching me was still so cold that there was no doubt it was there. I wore my ski trousers and every other clothes I had brought to the trip, but it was still freezing. In the morning, when your body got completely acustomized to not moving, there is no blood circulation left to keep you warm.

As always, getting up and starting to hike is the only way to get warm, but it is also the hardest part to do. It sucks when you try to get a frozen bag into its cover, to wrap up a tent using your teeth to tie it up, because your fingers are not useful that cold. And then finally walk walk walk untill the warmth crawls down to your arms and feet eventually.