When I was in my late teens I talked two friends into driving up past Kamloops with me in a 1978 Pontiac station wagon, the kind with the wood panelling down the side. My family had a cabin up there at around 5,000 feet, and it was just after the New Year. That car was unreliable enough that if I did not let it warm up for a solid ten minutes it would stall as I pulled onto the highway. In my heart of hearts I figured it would make it up the mountain. I did not really think it would start again to bring us back down.

None of us had ever used snowshoes. The fellow at Mountain Magic stayed late on Christmas Eve so I could borrow a pair. A friend had given me black and white photocopies of satellite photos he had pulled from a logging company and I thought that was about the most sophisticated thing going. I had used a map and compass plenty of times. I had no idea how to read a satellite photo.

The hike in was around 21 kilometres, most of it on an old logging road that had not been plowed, then some bushwhacking. Our packs were heavy. I had fresh food in mine, a chicken or two, because I wanted to cook properly once we got there. Our sleeping bags and every bit of our survival gear stayed behind in the station wagon, in case we needed it back at the vehicle.

Read that last sentence again. The gear that would have kept us warm spent the whole trip sitting in a car, 21 kilometres away.

The sun was out and it felt manageable. With heavy packs and steady movement you stay warm, and I hiked most of it in a t-shirt.

I have quoted a temperature for that day a few times over the years and I want to be straight with you: I never had a thermometer on me. Whatever numbers I have given came from reports I read afterwards, and those readings were taken a long way below where we were standing. What I can tell you honestly is that it dropped steadily through the day, and that a clear sky at 5,000 feet after the sun goes down is a different animal entirely from the same place at noon. That is the part that matters. The cold does not arrive. It accumulates while you are busy feeling fine.

An unplowed logging road under fresh snow looks exactly like every other side road, which is how we got lost.

So I decided to take a shortcut, and I was actually right about the direction. What a satellite photo will not show you is terrain. I went down a steep embankment full of deadfall and kept punching through the snow between the logs, and by the time I climbed back up to the other two I was soaked and covered in snow, still in that t-shirt, and the sun was going down.

Except it was getting darker than it should have been.

That is the detail I want you to sit with, because I could not work out why. It was getting darker than the sunset could account for and something was not clicking. I had stopped shivering a long time before that and I had not noticed.

I told the other two that if I passed out, the keys were in the top of my pack, the cabin was that way past the lake, and they should drop the packs and drag me in.

Then I got some layers on and got moving, and inside a few minutes the doom and gloom started to lift. A bit of warmth completely changes your mindset. Once I could think again I asked them the question I have been asking ever since.

On a scale of one to ten, where are you right now? Ten is top of the world. One is the brink.

I said six. One of them said four. The other said one.

We slogged in on sheer determination and stupidity. The frozen lake we had to cross took us 45 minutes, and in summer it would have taken you five. My hands would not work well enough to get the lock open and we ended up forcing the door. Then you find out the thing nobody warns you about, which is that the inside of an unheated cabin is exactly the same temperature as the outside. Your mind knows that. Your body still hopes for warmth when you open the door.

My fingers felt like solid blocks of ice. I was clumsy in a way I had never been before, using two hands to pick up a single piece of kindling, like a Muppet, fumbling matches one after another while my head drifted toward what happens if I cannot get this fire going. We got it lit. It is remarkable how quickly spirits lift once a fire is burning. One of us came away with frostbite. All three of us were hypothermic.

Hypothermia whispers

Most people picture danger in the backcountry as a bear coming through camp or a cougar slipping through the shadows. That is the movie version. The real threats are quieter, and they sneak in unnoticed until they are right on top of you.

Hypothermia does not announce itself with claws or teeth. It whispers. A shiver you ignore, numb fingers fumbling with a zipper, thoughts that slow down just enough that you do not realise what is happening until it is nearly too late.

I have broken through ice before, and here is the strange part. Sometimes the water feels warmer than the air. For a moment you think, this is not so bad. That is the trap. As soon as you climb out, the wind hits your wet clothes and the heat pours out of you, and hypothermia stops being a possibility and becomes a countdown.

It does not take a lake and it does not take deep cold. Hypothermia is your core temperature dropping about two degrees below normal, under 35 Celsius, which is a low bar. Steady rain, high humidity, a day sitting somewhere between plus two and plus ten, and nothing dries out. Your sweat stays in your layers, the rain keeps soaking in, and wet clothing pulls heat out of you faster than cold air ever will. That is a normal November day on the coast, and it is most of the weather we actually hunt in.

I have stood in the chill of a fall evening with layers too thin, realising my pride had left me unprepared. I have snowshoed 20 kilometres with sweat soaking through my clothes and then fallen into deep snow as the sun went down, heat draining out of me as fast as my strength.

Stop. Administrate yourself.

Years back, a friend of mine who had come out of the British Army asked if I wanted to come and hike some hills with him. He had been to SAS selection twice and come close without ever getting badged, and he had worked alongside special forces in his capacity as a sniper. Of course I said yes. Then I picked completely inappropriate boots for the job and had hot spots on my feet almost immediately. I said nothing. I was not about to be the one complaining in front of him.

The third fellow with us piped up that his feet were bothering him, and I remember thinking, I sure as hell would not be saying that out loud. My buddy turned around and said: stop, administrate yourself.

Sit down. Take the boots off. Fix your socks. Brew up some tea. Put a jacket on if you are cold. Then we go.

I had been raised the other way, which is to be tough, do not complain, power through, and there will be a finish line somewhere where you can nurse your wounds afterwards. He was not setting a fast pace and he was not screaming through. But the moment there was a problem, he stopped and dealt with it.

I only put my jacket on because somebody else put their hand up first. And the dark place my head had been in going up that hill lifted. My feet still hurt, I was still in pain, but I was not sliding into hypothermia any more.

I spent the next two and a half weeks in flip flops because the scabs on the backs of my feet were too big to get a shoe over. That was the price of keeping my mouth shut.

So here is most of what I have to teach you on this subject. Stop the second you start getting cold, rather than once it has already gone bad, and put something on before it gets away from you, because there is nobody out there who is going to come along and fix it for you.

Watch your partners, because you cannot watch yourself

A cold brain is bad at judging its own condition, and it gets worse at the job exactly as the situation gets more dangerous. On that mountain I had stopped shivering and I did not notice. My friends' numbers were data my own head could no longer give me.

We do not all have the same metabolic rate or the same energy level, so keep an eye on the people you are with. And understand that the one most at risk is very often the one insisting he is fine. That night, that was me.

The line I want stuck in your head is this one: when hard shivering slows or stops and you are still cold, things just got serious. That is your body running out of ways to warm itself.

The one to ten check

Ask it out loud. On a scale of one to ten, where are you right now? Say your number, and make your partners say theirs. Saying a number out loud is much harder to fake than saying you are fine, and saying you are fine costs nothing.

A rough guide to what the numbers mean:

• 9 to 10. Warm, fed, dry, thinking clearly. Keep checking anyway, because conditions turn faster than numbers do.
• 7 to 8. Cold but performing. Shivering when you stop, warm on the move. Layer up, eat and drink now, while the fix is still cheap.
• 5 to 6. Persistent shivering, fingers getting clumsy, decisions taking longer than they should. Stop. Shelter, dry insulation, calories, warm sweet fluids. Do not try to walk yourself warm.
• 3 to 4. Stumbling, slurring, fumbling, confused or irritable. This person will not self-rescue reliably. Stabilise him and call for help early rather than late.
• 1 to 2. Shivering may have stopped. Drowsy, apathetic, may want to lie down, and in bad cases may start pulling clothing off. Handle gently, no rubbing limbs. Insulate him from the ground, wrap head and neck, share heat, and get search and rescue moving.

When anybody in the party says five or lower, the trip changes and getting everyone warm becomes the only objective. Mild hypothermia reverses fast. Get dry, insulate, get out of the wind, add warm sweet fluids and calories, move gently, and a healthy person is usually back inside an hour. It gets harder and slower with every stage down, which is why the further it goes, the more the answer becomes professional help rather than field improvisation.

Fire is won hours before you strike the spark

Once you are properly cold, fire is the only thing that matters, and it is also the thing you will be worst at. My fingers would not hold a match.

A fire is rarely won at the moment you strike a spark. It is won hours earlier, when you decide to pick up that first piece of birch bark and put it in your pocket. I collect tinder as I walk: birch bark, old man's beard, dry twigs. If a stick is wet on the outside I will split it, because the inside is usually perfectly dry. Sometimes I will tuck small pieces in a pocket and let my body heat dry them out.

A few habits that stack the odds in your favour:

• If there is snow or wet ground, lay a small platform of sticks so the fire is not sitting directly on it. Otherwise the ground steals the heat before the fire ever gets established.
• Start small and work up. Match size, pencil size, finger size, wrist size. An overfed fire is a dead fire, and people smother them all the time.
• Carry more than one way to light it. I like a cigar lighter with a piezo ignition, because it throws a strong flame and dries out if it gets soaked, plus a ferro rod, which will keep working long after lighters and matches have quit.
• Cold rarely kills a fire. Wind does. A small windbreak of rocks or logs makes the difference.
• Practise it when the stakes are low. A calm evening in your own backyard, one match, all your tinder gathered before you strike. Not the first time your hands stop working.

Before you leave the vehicle

Gear left in the truck cannot help you. I paid for that lesson with a chicken in my pack and my sleeping bag 21 kilometres behind me. Run this at the tailgate, out loud, every time.

• Is my dry insulation in my pack, in a dry bag, rather than in the truck? A synthetic puffy you never wear on the move is your reset button, and synthetic keeps insulating when it is damp, which is why it beats down in this country.
• Do I have two ways to make fire on my body, not buried at the bottom of the pack?
• Is my communicator charged, and does somebody know my plan and my out-time? A satellite communicator or PLB is what actually reaches help where there is no cell signal, which is most of where we hunt. Learn how yours triggers an SOS before you need it, in the dark, with cold hands.
• No cotton anywhere in the system, socks to toque, because cotton holds water against your skin and keeps pulling heat out of you.
• Baseline check, out loud: what is everyone's number right now?

Get the - FREE - Wet Cold Survival Guide

I have put all of it into a free field guide: the stage-by-stage self-check, the full one to ten scale, what to do in the first five minutes if somebody is going down, the tailgate check, and a printable pack checklist you can lay your gear out against item by item.

Download The Wet Cold Survival Guide

Right now, every download is also an entry to win a copy of John Barklow's new book, Knowledge from Storms. Silvercore Club members are entered automatically, and can earn a second entry by downloading the guide. Giveaway details can be found on Silvercore Outdoors Social Media during the giveaway period.

Go deeper: Silvercore Podcast 190 with John Barklow

John Barklow spent 26 years in the U.S. Navy, most of it teaching Naval Special Warfare how to survive the coldest mountains on earth. After 9/11 the military needed mountain warfare expertise and almost none of it was left, so they took a diver from Cleveland, Ohio, and his work went on to reshape cold weather training for a generation of special operators.

He came on the podcast to talk about what actually keeps you alive when it goes wrong: the mindset, the drills, a horseback hunt here in British Columbia that nearly ended under 1,400 pounds of falling horse in the dark, and a pile of lessons he learned the hard way so that you do not have to.

Listen to Silvercore Podcast 190 with John Barklow

Take your number

Some people are clever and they learn from the mistakes of others. I have never really been that way. I have always pushed boundaries to see what they feel like for myself, and I have paid for it in cold nights and close calls and scars that could have been avoided. The benefit is that those mistakes gave me lessons I will never forget. You are welcome to have them for free.

Try the one to ten check on your next day out. Out loud, with whoever is with you. It will feel awkward the first time and it will feel normal by the third, and one day it will matter.

The Silvercore Club is built for people who take that seriously. It keeps you sharp and it has your back: training, discounts on the gear that actually matters, liability insurance, and a community of people who go out prepared. It is $59 a year.

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Travis Bader, Silvercore Outdoors