8 Critical Winter Survival Skills to Practice

Once again, winter is fast approaching, and just as season follows season that means the arrival of cold and oftentimes treacherous weather.

You might like winter or you might resent it, but one thing you must do is respect it if for no other reason than it is statistically one of the most dangerous seasons, and it likely has always been that way.

The cold, bleak and often dim days of winter have long been associated with death, or near death. Most crops and vegetables will not grow, animals hibernate in their burrows, and much of what we associate with human activity and enterprise slows down or even halts entirely.

In many places throughout the world, winter serves to bring things to a standstill, a sort of silence over the land.

While the temperatures alone are enough to put your life in danger should you be exposed without adequate protection, accumulating snow and ice can also serve to disorient you, to make travel treacherous, and too greatly complicate activities and tasks that are trivial in warmer weather.

There is no reason to panic, no matter where you are going or where you live, but you must be prepared to survive winter’s chill.

In this article we will share with you eight critical winter survival skills that you should practice now to get ready for the challenges of winter weather ahead.

10 Winter Survival Tips Everyone Must Know

The Cold Embrace of Winter

One of the challenges of winter survival is it affects absolutely everything that you do. Travel, staying home, work, school, and especially dealing with additional emergencies and disasters. Sustained winter conditions will make all of that harder.

Operating motor vehicles become significantly more difficult or downright treacherous thanks to hazardous road conditions. If you have to work outside, or worse, should get stuck outside exposure will quickly become your number one threat, as prolonged exposure to cold weather and subsequent hypothermia will rapidly incapacitate you, and then kill you.

Each year in North America and Europe, alone tens of thousands die from cold weather exposure.

Your standard issue survival plans, especially pertaining to bugging out, will likely not go down quite the same way in the winter as they would the spring, summer or fall.

The previously mentioned road conditions will obviously be quite a wrench in the works, but even on-foot transit will be affected; certain routes will be made difficult to locate or follow, or simply impossible.

Obtaining water from natural sources will be far more challenging and laborious; it is hard to drink water that is frozen! You’ll need to thaw it first.

Even your daily readiness procedures will be impacted. Just ask anyone who carries a pistol for self-defense how challenging it gets keeping the gun accessible under bulky, heavy layers of suitable winter clothing.

The survival skills you will read below reflect this; some are skills that are simply endemic to winter survival, or survival in any perpetually cold region of the world. Others are a drastic enough modification of your usual day-to-day procedures that they belong on any list of winter-centric survival skills.

So without further ado grab your parka, lace up your boots and don’t forget your hand warmers. Let’s get into it!

7 Critical Winter Survival Skills

1. Create or Improve a Shelter

As mentioned above, the single biggest incidental killer in nature around the world is not a dangerous animal, is not a slip, trip or fall and it is not death via ingesting poisonous fungi or plants. It is exposure!

Specifically exposure which leads to hypothermia and eventual death. When your body’s core temperature starts to fall, you don’t have too long to warm up again before things start to get truly dire.

Caught in a SNOWSTORM - WINTER SURVIVAL BUSHCRAFT SHELTER in Heavy Snow, Bushcraft Trip

Hypothermia is sometimes a funny thing, and too many people fall victim to it in conditions that they would never dream it would be a real threat.

Say you’re out on a cool but pleasant spring day, let us say around 50° Fahrenheit, enjoying a brisk hike up a local mountain, when suddenly you and your partner get popped with a surprise but passing shower.

With soaking clothes and a light breeze your insulation will count for nothing and you’ll soon be shedding body heat at an alarming rate in those conditions, and shivering mightily in no time. Maybe hustling will keep you warm enough to stay alive, but maybe not. If you have to stop, however…

You can imagine how much worse such circumstances would be in improper cold weather, with temperatures getting close to or even below zero.

Now, add in wet skin or clothing and stiff winds, and you could wind up, quite literally, frozen in a very short span of time. It is hard to overstate how crucial it is to always have access to proper shelter in the winter.

If you find yourself trapped in a situation where the risk of exposure is a constant, it is imperative you know how to construct an emergency shelter using either natural or man-made materials.

Something as simple as a snow shelter, snow cave, or a reflective lean-to might mean the difference between life and death. Even if you can take advantage of a structure, even your very own home, knowing how to improve your shelter to maximize warmth is essential.

If your home loses power or cannot generate heat during periods of extreme cold, you should know how to create a microclimate using a tent, tarps, blankets, and so forth in order to heat the air volume of a smaller space with greater efficiency, potentially keeping you and your family alive.

Employing microclimate/micro shelter techniques and a small heat source like a candle, handwarmers or even just your own body heat will keep you surprisingly warm! You can use similar techniques inside a vehicle should you find yourself stranded and out of fuel, facing a similar risk of exposure.

2. Build and Tend a Fire

Sometimes, no matter how much body heat you are able to conserve, no matter how much warm air you are able to hang on to, the chill of the atmosphere is overwhelming.

You will need to generate a net surplus of heat, and do it quickly if you want to survive such brutal conditions, and the best way to do that reliably, no matter what sort of situation you are in, is by building a fire.

The ability to build a fire and take advantage of its life-sustaining warmth is of prime importance in your winter survival skill repertoire.

Many preppers know how to build a fire, how to maintain it and how to extinguish it but building a fire in wintry conditions presents added difficulty. First and foremost, cold temperatures do not make building a fire any easier, and with winter weather often times comes considerable precipitation in the form of snow or rain.

Both create substandard conditions for building your fire, and that will definitely increase the pressure on you when you are shivering and struggling with numb fingertips and crushing fatigue.

Consider that any fuel you might gather, especially tinder and kindling, is likely to be wet and useless, and this doesn’t even take into account how difficult it will be to find beneath the white-out layer of snowfall.

Assuming you have everything you need to get the fire going, you will likely need to elevate the fire as building it directly on snow or ice covered ground is a great way to have it extinguish itself as the snow or ice melts. With wet fuel, your burgeoning flame with disappear in a puff of steam.

Beyond these material concerns you will also have equipment challenges to deal with as a result of the cold; lighters might not work as well, and even traditional prepper standbys like ferro rods or firesteels will be more difficult to utilize thanks for the loss of dexterity from the cold or the necessity of wearing gloves.

Any spark you do generate will cool even quicker, reducing the chances that it will catch on your tinder. For this reason particularly hot burning fire starters like storm matches, butane torches and magnesium fire starters are liable to have an advantage.

Though you will need a survival fire more than ever in wintry conditions, those same conditions will make building and tending it even more challenging. Make sure you are up to the task before the cold settles in!

3. Cold Weather First-Aid

First aid skills are essential for survival, and anybody who has been serious about personal preparedness knows there are approximately a million ways to get her.

Winter will provide many more ways to get hurt, some of them unique to the cold temperatures, and you must be prepared for dealing with these eventualities whenever and wherever sustained cold conditions exist.

By now you are probably seeing a pattern when it comes to exposure-related hazards thanks to winter weather; you are definitely on the right track!

When the body can no longer maintain its internal temperature, or suffers thermoregulation failure, and that temperature starts to dip below approximately 95° Fahrenheit you will become hypothermic.

Symptoms of hypothermia include confusion, dulled senses and reflexes, and difficulty in coordinating body movements.

As hypothermia progresses, heart and respiratory rate will both plummet along with blood pressure. This is a critical juncture that many will not survive. Eventually, total delirium takes hold, followed by unconsciousness and death.

If flesh is exposed to sustained freezing temperatures frostbite can occur, resulting in the destruction and subsequent loss of tissue as ice crystals form in the body, along with compartment syndrome, gangrene and other maladies.

Many times, the full toll of frostbite will not be known until a month or more after the incident, assuming the victim survives. You should know how to treat both of these occurrences…

Hypothermia is easier to treat, or at least simpler, and involves only warming up the victim by getting them moving, wrapping them in blankets, providing them with hot water bottles or other warming apparatuses and in extreme cases giving them an IV of warm fluids.

Frostbite is far more challenging, and warming the victim up can only halt the worst of the damage; medication and surgery are often required.

Beyond these cold-weather related conditions, you will find that slips, trips and falls are all more common during cold weather thanks for the preponderance of ice and snow slick surfaces, both around human habitation and out in nature.

Anytime someone takes a tumble, especially one as uncontrolled and surprising as a fall on slippery ice, the possibility exists for significant sprains, fractures and concussions. These can be showstoppers if they happen in a remote location where you’ll be unable to get help.

Your cold-weather first aid kit should account for these eventualities: include splints, Vaseline, heater packets, and other essentials.

4. Dressing for Survival

So we know that winter weather provides many opportunities for hypothermia and frostbite to strike and so your first line of defense, assuming you cannot stay tucked into your home by a roaring fireplace, is to dress appropriately for the weather, and that means layers.

No matter how good the garment or how high-tech the fabric a single layer of clothing, or your inner layer plus a heavy outer layer, is just not going to be adequate to the task of keeping you warm for all of your outdoor activities.

Sure, you can probably get away with it for a quick trip to the corner store or the grocery, but you definitely don’t want to chance it anytime you are traveling, bugging out, or embarked on some other outdoor adventure, or one that could potentially see you stranded outdoors.

To appropriately equip yourself for cold weather survival you will need to dress in layers, and beyond that, those layers need to serve a specific purpose.

Your innermost layer, or base layer, should be lightweight and made of a moisture wicking fabric. Remember what I said about being all wet and exposed to cold air? That is a great way to go screaming into hypothermia in a very short time.

Your inner layer should pull moisture away from your body so that can evaporate, helping to keep you warmer. Wool, silk and synthetics are good choices but avoid cotton like the plague as it holds way, way too much moisture and takes too long to dry.

Your mid layers, which could number one or two, will be the primary mechanism by which you stay warm, as these fibers will help the trap body heat and create a cushion of warm air between you and the frigid atmosphere.

Wools, fleeces and even silks can be good options here. Lastly your outermost layer, or shell, should help keep the wind and water off of your mid layers and off of you.

This is a jacket or parka, though a specialized windbreaker maybe fine when it isn’t too awfully cold out.

This is the layer that will repel the elements, but it always comes at a price: Any material that will keep both wind and rain off your back will trap moisture, so you’ll need to use this selectively depending on your activity and conditions.

This layering exercise is not just important when you are outside in wet winter weather; anytime you’re exerting yourself you will start to perspire, and heavy perspiration that soaks your clothing with sweat, and wind up being just as lethal as a plunge into an icy lake.

Make sure you dress appropriately in the winter time, and that means dressing in layers with sharp attention paid to the function of each layer, adding and removing layers as appropriate to your level of activity.

5. Adaptation

Sustained cold weather is going to change the way you do everything, and refusal to change will court disaster. For instance, the onset of winter will make travel of all kinds more hazardous.

Are you changing the way you conduct your itinerary accordingly? Are you checking the weather and ensuring roads are clear before setting out?

If you live in a place that does not have the roads cleared by legions of salt trucks and snow plows, are you equipped in your vehicle to handle the conditions? Are using chains or some other device to provide more traction?

Do you have a cold weather-specific survival kit equipped in your vehicle?

Most preppers will carry needed items for survival and emergency remediation in their vehicles, but winter weather will necessitate the addition of other things, like blankets and hand warmers, and potentially the removal of others, like bottled water. It won’t do you much good if it freezes and bursts in your truck!

On a similar note, if you carry a firearm for self-defense you will have to take the good and the bad when it comes to winter weather.

Typical cold weather clothing will allow you to carry a much larger gun than usual in your preferred position with very little risk of it becoming exposed or getting made, but having to claw it out from beneath one or two layers of clothing, including a large and bulky outer layer, before hauling the gun into action is not a recipe for winning a fight.

Many savvy pistoleros choose to carry a much smaller gun in an exterior pocket on their outer layer so that they can always have it close at hand, just in case they need it.

Even your overarching survival plans will have to change in the winter time. Certain bug-out locations might no longer be good options in the middle of winter, or the routes to them might become closed-door hazardous, leading you to reprioritize them for a different one.

If heavy snowfall or a lengthy blizzard cease you totally shut indoors, will your supplies hold? What will you do if they don’t?

Every item on your survival plan and checklist must be scrutinized for suitability in winter weather, and altered, replaced or discarded if it cannot pass muster.

6. Navigation

Good navigation skills are always important, in every kind of survival situation, but there are specially important in cold weather. as mentioned above, your number one risk associated with any cold weather survival scenario, and really when dealing with cold weather at any time, is exposure.

Any mistake that increases your risk of exposure is one that you must avoid. Accordingly, getting where you are going and where you’ll be safe out of the cold is imperative. 

This could be nothing more than a drive through the country on a snowy day or knowing how to self rescue when you get lost out in the wilderness.

This can be harder than it sounds whenever you’re dealing with snowy weather, because it is so easy to get turned around when the ground is covered with snow, visibility is reduced and landmarks that you might normally rely on either have their shape, color and outline changed or are covered entirely.

For this reason it is important that you have multiple, redundant skill sets that you can depend on for navigation in cold weather. GPS, as always, makes sense when you are on foot or traveling by vehicle but you should also have a map and compass that can help you get where you need to go.

But this requires practice, both when it comes to using them together and also when getting a fix on your position because terrain identification will be anything but easy under the circumstances.

The longer you are lost and the more mistakes you make going from point A to point B the greater and greater the risk will be that you can fall victim to exposure. making sure your navigational skills are up to snuff, and they can withstand the test brought on by cold weather, is crucial.

7. Signaling

Signaling is always a crucial skill when disaster strikes because you need to be able to let people know where you are, especially when they cannot see you, when conditions are bad or if they are located a far distance from your location.

Good signaling skills and the equipment to make use of them are especially imperative in the winter because you are far more likely to need prompt rescue when caught outdoors, or anytime you have a risk of exposure due to cold weather.

You should have no less than three available signaling options at any given time, regardless of what you are doing.

For instance you might make use of a high-visibility marker panel that can be stretched out on the ground and easily seen from the air, or hung in such a way that it is visible from the ground over a long distance.

A high-powered flashlight or emergency strobe could be another option with multiple uses and, depending upon your situation, smoke signals, made all the more effective if you are able to generate black smoke which will contrasts sharply with a white background.

Lastly, an auditory signal is a good idea, taking the form of a survival whistle or even a firearm if you have an abundant supply of ammunition.

Signaling is not just for wilderness survival situations, as choosing to stay behind and combat rough winter weather when you perhaps should have evacuated when the going is good means you might not be able to effectively leave you’re lodging.

It may also be the case that potential rescuers will assume that an area is deserted, or has already been swept, so you must have a way to get their attention in a very short span of time.

Do take care with some signal methods like flares or mirrors as they might present secondary hazards or require considerable practice to make use of. You don’t want to be figuring these things out during a trial by fire, having never interacted with them before!

8. Cold-Weather Hydration

Dehydration is always a swift killer. Luckily, most preppers and outdoorsmen know already that water is reasonably easy to come by and in cold weather survival so long as you have snow and ice.

After all, you can collect it, put it in a pot and melt it, and you’ll have water. Water trickling off as temperatures rise in the form of snow melt is also viable assuming it isn’t already terribly dirty; it is usually pretty safe to drink as-is.

This will, naturally, necessitate a greater investment in either heating capability or fuel consumption so you can create a fire or run a heater or stove capable of following your water in a timely fashion. Simply packing snow or ice into a container and then it clutching it close to your body in order to thaw it will both rob heat from you and take a long time.

However, cold weather creates many other complications concerning the collection and carry of water. Water that you already have on or about your person, or stored in your vehicle, can of course freeze where it won’t be drinkable until it is thawed again. It might also burst the container it is stored in, ruining it.

This can make long-term preparation in cold environments or during cold seasons more challenging than usual because you’ll have to take constant care of your water if you want to prevent it from freezing.

If you are on foot, you’ll need to place your water in such a way that it is insulated from the cold or else closer to your body than usual so that your body heat can help keep it liquid. This might necessitate cutting some corners when it comes to loading your pack and arranging your gear.

When there is plenty of snow around there is at least water that you’ll be able to access, but the logistics of making it drinkable to say nothing of keeping it drinkable as another layer to the difficulty of cold weather hydration.

Conclusion

Winter is a season that will put your survival skills to the test, since so much of what you do will be made more difficult, more dangerous and more complicated by this coldest and bleakest of seasons.

Some of the challenges brought about by winter weather mean you will need to employ entirely new skills and adapt old ones if you want to remain ready for whatever comes. Stay safe this winter by practicing these six winter survival skills before the white stuff starts hitting the ground.