That's a nice bull Dark2Dark, Thanks for the encouragement. I like how you say mostly prepared lol. A guy should definitely be able to have a small fire to stay warm in those conditions.. Did you camp out of Snow or Shovel?
Yeah, they were pretty adamant about no fires when I asked them. Including no backpacking wood stoves.
Honestly, there is such little burnable wood in there, it wouldn’t have been easy, even if there wasn’t six inches of snow covering everything.
We had the clothes, tent, bags, etc to stay warm. My buddy was wishing he had a better sleeping mat for the conditions, it was difficult with the water filter freezing, the ramrod of my muzzleloader freezing, gaiters freezing, etc!
Probably the thing we messed up on the most was not having sunglasses for the snowy conditions once the high elevation sun came back out!
We camped at Shovel. Snow would have been better, for sure, as we hunted closer to there. The hike up out of Shovel every morning, and even down into it in the evening sorta sucked! Snow would be the same if you were hunting back towards Shovel.