RVing is most fun as a warm weather activity, but for those of us who live in these rolling boxes full-time, cold weather is sometimes an integral part of the RV lifestyle too.
“Hey Sweetie, was there SNOW in the forecast??!
We’ve been caught out in the cold many times, and we’ve been surprised to find ourselves camping in unexpected snowstorms a few times too. We love these snowy opportunities to take photos of winter wonderlands, and my photo of our rig in a Colorado Rocky Mountains snowstorm appeared on the cover of the November/December 2017 Escapees RV Club Magazine.
Escapees Magazine Cover, Nov/Dec 2017
Photo by: Emily Fagan
Brrr…! Looking at that photo I remember just how chilled we were when Mark made that snowman. We shivered for a few days at 10,000′, surrounded by snow and ice. But the beautiful fall foliage that Jack Frost had covered in lace made up for it!
We have published several blog posts that offer tips for RVers who plan to camp in cold places for a while:
While we shoveled snow off our solar panels and struggled with overnight temps in the teens during that Colorado snow storm (indoor temps that weren’t much better!), we learned a few more things about how to boondock in a snow storm when overnight temps drop into the teens, and we wrote them up in another wintry blog post:
We ended up in a snow storm again this past spring when we were camped in Los Alamos National Forest in New Mexico and the white stuff began to fall.
In New Mexico we looked out our back window and saw snow quickly piling up on our bikes!
It’s snowing!
This gave us a few more insights into camping in snowy weather, and we put together an article for Escapees Magazine with various tips we’ve found useful for camping in the cold. It was published in the January/February 2018 issue of Escapees Magazine.
“Camping in the Cold” in Escapees Magazine Jan/Feb, 2018
Text by: Emily Fagan. Photos by: Mark and Emily Fagan
Although it sounds silly, perhaps the biggest tip is simply to avoid places where temperatures might drop below freezing and where it might snow. In the wintertime this means heading south (Florida, California and Arizona are good and generally snow-free choices), and in the shoulder seasons it means staying away from far northern latitudes and high mountains.
Well, we won’t be wearing shorts today!
As I write this in January, 2018, we’ve had several weeks of temps in the mid to high 70s in the Arizona deserts, hardly winter weather at all! Yet much of the rest of the country has been bitterly cold.
Of course, it’s impossible to know ahead of time whether the southwest or Florida will be warmer. It seems that almost every winter one or the other is blissfully summery while the other is steeped in frigid misery, so it’s not that easy to choose an itinerary that guarantees winter warmth. When you find yourself in a blizzard, you just have to enjoy it. For us, as soon as it starts snowing, we run outside to play and take photos!
The snow was coming down hard in New Mexico last spring!
We had to wipe down our cameras every minute or so!
Another good idea is to take advantage of the snow and chill your beer while you play. Whenever we are in New Mexico we hunt down Alien Ale wherever we can find it, and during our stay in snowy Los Alamos National Forest we cooled down a few beers in the snow in the bed of our truck!
Our Alien Ales got nicely chilled in the snow.
Once inside the RV, all that wet, snowy and sometimes muddy clothing has to go somewhere to dry. We hang ours in the shower on a spring loaded curtain rod where it can drip freely.
Wet, wet, wet!
But aside from romping in the snow, drinking ice cold beer, and warming up next to our vent-free propane heater when we come inside, it is dealing with cold nights that is the biggest challenge. For RVers that get hookups, there are many options for heating an RV with unlimited electrical power. But for those who boondock all the time and live on solar power like we do, electrical power must be conserved, especially if the daytime skies are overcast.
Our vent-free propane heater is a blessing during the day because it throws off incredible warmth without using any electricity. However, we don’t run it overnight, and our factory installed RV furnace is so loud it tends to wake us up every time it turns on, which can be every half hour when temps dip into the teens.
Lots of blankets and a good quality heavy down blanket solves the problem under the sheets, and in the morning a combination of our vent-free propane heater and RV furnace bring the indoor temp up 20 degrees higher within a half an hour.
Here are pics of our clock thermometer during our worst case ever of early morning cold temps in our buggy. This happened earlier this year at Sand Hollow State Park in Utah in October:
When we first opened our eyes one morning at Utah’s Sand Hollow State Park, the temp was 30.6 degrees in the rig (lower right)!
36 minutes later the rig had warmed up to 52 degrees…NOW we could get out of bed!
(or maybe we slept in another 20 minutes while the rig warmed up some more!)
Escapees RV Club’s magazine offers loads of wonderful tips and insights every other month, and we’ve been publishing articles in its pages for ten years now. One of the best things about this unique RV magazine is that most of the articles are written by club members who are sharing tips that they have learned in their own RV travels.
From beginning RVers learning the ropes to seasoned RVers sharing things they’ve learned over decades of involvement in the lifestyle, real life experiences are at the heart of each article.
For RVers that have a dream of becoming a published writer, joining Escapees and then submitting a tip or two to the magazine is a wonderful way to see your work in print. Escapees Magazine also features a member photo section in each issue with a theme, and we’ve had a ball prowling through our old photos to find fun images that fit the theme of the month.
Solar panels don’t work too well when they’re buried under snow!
Escapees RV Club is much more than just a magazine, however, and we have been astonished over our years of membership to see how doggedly the club leadership stays on top of the changing times, evolving the Club’s offerings to ensure an ever increasing value for all its members.
There are several different kinds of RV parks under the Escapees umbrella offering short and long term rentals as well as ownership. Many other affiliate parks discount their fees as much as 50% to SKPs (Escapees members). Escapees members can also join the Days End Directory which has the biggest database of boondocking locations out there.
Since the concept of boondocking is highly valued by Escapees RV Club, it is possible to dry camp at any of the Escapees parks very inexpensively. When we visited Escapees headquarters at Rainbow’s End in Livingston, Texas (near Houston) a few years back, we stayed in Dry Camp A for just $5 a night.
Classic Texas deluge rainstorms turned Dry Camp A into Wet Camp A very quickly, but we just ducked inside to tour the phenomenal mail sorting facility for Escapees’ mail forwarding clients. This facility is so large it employs 20 people full-time and a semi-tractor trailer full of mail pulls up everyday. It even has its own zip code!
That’s better, clear of snow, but prolonged cloudy skies will make the solar panels relatively ineffective.
We have many pages of articles about solar power here.
Escapees co-founders Kay and Joe Peterson were a very unusual couple who jumped into the full-time RV lifestyle when they were in their early 40s. Working as a licensed traveling “tramp” electrician, Joe found work all over America. They and their younger kids lived in both Airstream and Avion travel trailers, and at one point they even put the kids in their own suite in a truck camper in the bed of their truck! (Read more about Kay Peterson’s remarkable life here).
Neither Kay nor Joe is with us any longer, but in recent years Escapees has reached out to younger RVers with their Xscapers program, and they have expanded their offerings for all RVers in many ways. Not only are there multi-day RV Bootcamp programs where new RVers can attend seminars and learn from seasoned pros, but they now have a Webinar series and an RVers Online University full of fabulous courses on every imagineable RVing topic.
We sure didn’t expect snow, but what fun it was!
Escapees doesn’t stop at just RVing. They also offer many intriguing organized outings. Escapade is a big rally that brings together Escapees friends, both old and new. Another type of organized travel adventure, SKP Hops, takes members by RV, cruise ship and/or plane to destinations in all corners of the world.
Escapees is also very active in advocacy work for all RVers, whether they are members or not, making sure that our concerns and needs are supported at both the state and federal level.
Escapees also addresses issues facing RVers that no other organization tackles. From offering an assisted living facility at Rainbow’s End so RVers can remain in their rigs after they hang up their keys, to offering information about choosing a domicile state and acquiring health insurance, to doing a very thorough weighing of your RV (wheel by wheel) in a program called Smartweigh, the folks at Escapees are extremely creative in providing information and support for RVers of all shapes and sizes, ages and interests.
What to do with the snow on the roof? Mark built a snowman…
We have been Escapees members since 2008, and we highly recommend it to everyone who owns (or dreams of owning) an RV. You can join by calling 888-757-2582 or clicking the link below. If you mention our blog, Roads Less Traveled, when you sign up, the good folks at Escapees will put a little something in our tip jar, a win-win-win for you, Escapees and us!
The cost is $39.95 per year and includes the magazine subscription, but if you think you’re going to be enjoying the RV lifestyle for a while, you might consider a Lifetime membership which will pay for itself in less than 6 years.
Winter RV Wonderland.
To read our Escapees Magazine article about cold weather camping, visit the following link:
Stay Cozy and Warm while Camping in the Cold – Our article in the Jan/Feb 2018 issue of Escapees
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Snow, Hail and Ice in our Travels – Where Jack Frost Has Come to Visit Us!
- Valles Caldera National Preserve & a Spring Blizzard in New Mexico!
- Brilliant Fall Foliage + Snow in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado
- Bryce Canyon Gone Wild – Tempests, Rainbows & Wildlife
- Newspaper Rock Utah – Petroglyphs and Rock Art from the Ancients
- Snow in the Arizona Desert – A Beautiful Fairy Dusting!
- Slip Sliding Away – An Ice Storm in Texas
- San Juan Mountains Colorado – And then it Snowed!
- Crater Lake National Park in Oregon – Bluer than blue!
- From Salt to Snow in Nevada – Bonneville to Lamoille Canyon
More info about Escapees RV Club:
- RVers Online University – Top notch RV education
- Escapees Online Webinars – Learn from the pros!
- Bootcamp Events – Hands-on learning for newer RVers
- Xscapers – Escapees Resources for younger RVers
- Upcoming Xscaper Convergences – Meet other younger RVers!
- Upcoming Escapees HOPs – Worldwide Travel Adventures, some by RV some by cruise ship!
- Smartweigh – Find out if your RV is overweight and/or unbalanced
- Escapees Discussion Forum – Get answers to your questions or help out other RVers with answers of your own
- Submit an Article to Escapees – See your work in print!
- Become a Member – Join the Club!
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LOVE, LOVE those snow pics…especially Mark’s perky snowman ! Nodding my head as New England has just had snow to rival the notorious blizzard of ’78 ! Memories of snow-shoers and cross-country skiers on the Charles River…
And what a blizzard that was!! How amazing to experience snow like that a second time… We’ve had mostly mid to high 70s in Phoenix for a few weeks, which makes it particularly hard to imagine the deep freeze that’s been going on in the northeast!!
Hi, Love reading all your posts that come in our email. Great articles all the time. We just arrived east of Bisbee, AZ yesterday, coming from park hosting at Davis Mountains State Park, TX, in December. Boy, we have a tale to tell of a snowfall last Dec. 7, when 7″ fell on the park creating an incredible winter wonderland. How do I send you a picture of our snowy rig?
Thank you, Darin! Davis Mountains is a neat State Park. We saw it when it was bitterly cold, but no snow. 7″ must have turned it into a beautiful winter wonderland!! Our contact info is in the “About & Contact” item in the menu (here).
Enjoyed reading your “Stay Cozy” article. Your ideas are “spot on”…and have used them may times ourselves. We sometimes hunt in the fall when temps drop in the teens and have survived comfortably with your techniques and have never had frozen pipes. Although I have never needed to try this, a sage old RV dealer in Butte, Mt told me about putting rock salt in his grey and black water tanks to keep them from freezing so dumping them when needed, the contents remained a slurry to be easily dumped.
Hunters have to deal with some cold temps, that’s for sure, Dick. We were camping with a group of hunters when we had several mid-30 degree mornings in our rig in Utah (high-20s outside)! Love the idea with the rock salt — makes a lot of sense. If the RV furnace ducting goes through the basement compartment where the plumbing is (a “heated” basement), and you run the furnace quite a bit, that helps keep the pipes from freezing too. Just don’t hook the fresh water hose up to a spigot outside — stick to using the DC water pump inside the RV! Thanks for reading and happy travels!!
The rock salt is a great tip. How much salt do you put in each tank? We are relatively new rv’ers and are doing it full time. Currently in Arkansas at Maumelle Park and “enjoying” below freezing temps now about 95% of our time since mid-December. So far, no broken pipes!
Another set of great photos and comments! My favorite winter RV tip is not to do it! Oh,wait, that wasn’t included. Sorry! But we did enjoy the photos, as we always do!
Very funny, Pete!! I wouldn’t trade this lifestyle for anything, but there are definitely times I’d love to curl up in front of a wood fireplace or simply live with effortless climate control indoors. Hopefully New England is out of its Deep Freeze by now…!!