Summit County, Colorado U.S.A.
		I remember one time when Noah and I went on one of our first overnight survival trips in Colorado. It was a cold weather snow caving expedition, In waist high snow we treked up the mountain in our snowshoes and loaded down packs, but with one wrong move you'll find your self like a turtle on it's back in the deep snow, AND WE DID, more times then I want to recall. Well we found what we thought was a good place to start our first real snow cave and we were going to stay in this one all night. I would dig out the snow onto a survival blanket and then Noah would pull out the snow and give it a toss out to the outer wall. So there I was digging in the snow deep into the side of the hill when, well the way Noah tells the story is...
	"I was digging out a storage bunk for our cave while Phoenix was working on the sleeping quarters. He would put his space blanket down and pile snow on it. When it was full he would pull it out and dump it outside. He kept doing this and using a candle lantern for light inside. He was getting pretty deep into the ground when all of the sudden I heard a mumbling sound coming for behind me, when I looked to see what was going on all I could see was two feet wiggling in a wall of snow. The roof of snow had just collapsed on top of Phoenix! Well I pulled on his dangling feet and gave them a tug and then another, then just a quick as you please he came sliding out on top of the survival blanket with snow in every pocket." Well at this time the sun was really working on going down over the Colorado mountains and we were getting wet, cold and tired. Quitting was not even a option and it was too late and too far to go back, so we started looking for a new place to start our new cave. We decided on a different approach to the cave, we went for the cave under the fallen tree approach. We found a nice big fallen tree and with cold, wet hands we started making our new home for the night. It turned out really well except for one thing and we only find this out after we started trying to sleep that night, the cave was made on the side of the hill and when we got in the sleeping bags to sleep we would end up in a frozen shambles at the bottom side of the cave within minutes. There wasn't a lot we could do about that, so I made sure that Noah was on the bottom side and we lived with it. I have had a problem with tight places but I forgot about it until that night, so we ended up using our small candle lantern with a 9 hour burning candle. It was down to a nub when we woke up the next morning and yes in a frozen shamble. We now that you should always put your boots and clothes in your sleeping bag with you at night, but they were all wet and we were to tired to bother with it, "well you live and you learn"  the next morning our clothes were as hard as boards, it felt like I was trying to put my barefoot into a brick, and my foot was bare because my smartwool socks were, you guessed it, frozen solid. And of coarse if you have done any camping at all you know that the first thing you have to do in the morning is PEEE. Well, try it when its really cold and you can't put your frozen clothes on, what ends up happening is you just run out there and do what needs to be done! We pulled on what we could and literally pulled and drug our sleeping bags behind us as we walked crawled and drug ourselves through the deep snow back to the truck. When we made it back to the truck and had some warm coffee and turned up the heater. We know that we learned a lot that night, we learned that we have a lot to learn...