Goose's toboggan was a masterpiece of packing. It included everything from his clothing to the canvas tent, from a wood stove to a can of whipped cream - not to mention the kitchen sink.
When we weren't madly running around with cameras, we tried to snowshoe ahead of Goose to break a nice trail for the toboggan.
We weren't planning to go in very far so none of us bothered to pack light. It ended up being a 2 km snowshoe.
Looks like Storm even packed in a Christmas tree!
The wintry landscape was beautiful and silent except when the odd train went by.
We headed down from this ridge to a more sheltered area to camp.
After selecting the prime location for the canvas tent, we stomped down the snow and levelled it, following Goose's instructions.
Then came the adventure of setting up the canvas tent.
The sides of the tent have guy lines that can tie to a tree or a log. There's no point sticking pegs into snow. We shovelled piles of snow onto the logs we used to secure the guy lines, and that froze them in place.
This was the view from our campsite.
Once the canvas tent was set up, we set up our individual sleeping tents. We would all hang out in the big tent but there wasn't room for six people to sleep there.
This is one of the last photos of our tent before it started to self destruct. Actually, that's not true since one of the poles had already broken by this point. Both windows tore away from the rest of the fly, and the fly ripped too. I had to use my emergency blanket under the fly since our tent was only mesh underneath the big rip. Apparently, ours is not one of those summer tents that can be used in all four seasons. It has been around the block a few times so maybe the fabric has been weakened by UV. It sure was a great time for our tent to start shredding all around us!
This was our little community, once we were all set up.
Goose's tent has a wood stove so we collected, chopped and sawed a big pile of firewood.