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Tomek · Posted: Sat 18:17, 29 Jan 2011 Post subject: COLDER! (eng.)

"More than anything else, your clothing protects you from the elements. In extreme conditions, the right clothing can be the difference between life and death. Even in more temperate climates, the clothes you wear can speel success or failure for your expedition. The kind of clothes you need to wear outdoors ebvioysly depends on what sort of weather conditions you are expecting. But no matter what you wear, you need to take care of it. That's why military units, including the US Air Force, teach their soldiers the COLDER principle. It's just as useful for civilians as it os for them:

C Keep clothing CLEAN. In the summer, this is important for hygiene and comfort. In the winter, clean clothes will keep you warmer. If they are covered in dirty and grease, they lose some if their insulating qualities.

O Avoid OVERHEATING.
When you get too hot, you sweat - it's your body's netural mechanism for cooling down. The trouble with sweating to much in the field is that the sweat gets absorbed by your clothing, which decreases its insulating qualities. Also, as the sweat evaporates, it cools your body down. Both these facts mean that overheating by wearing clothes that you can easily loosen or unzip to stop you sweathing.

L Wear your clothes LOOSE and in LAYERS. The best form of insulation is air pockets. If you weae several loose T-shirts, you will create seceral insulating layers of the pros cal 'dead-air'. These will keep you warmer than one thick jumper, which has no dead-air layers. If you wear a number of layers, it also means you can easily remove something if you start to overheat. And keep the layers loose, because tight clothes restrict the circulation of blood, which will make you cold and numb.

D Keep your clothes DRY. Wet clothes can sap your body's warmth, so when you make camp at night, one of your priorities should be drying
out any clothes that have become we, either from the outside (because of rain, snow of frost) or from the inside (because of sweat). Out in the field, it is often difficult to avoid getting wet. Choose a water-repellent outer layer if this is at all likely to happen.

E EXAMINE your clothes for problems. Your clothing is going to get some pretty heavy use, so it's important you should keep a keen eye on what sort of state it's in and, if necessary...

R REPAIR your clothes. Clothing should be properly maintained and holes fixed as soon as they appear. It's amazing how quickly small holes can become big ones. Once that happens, your clothes will stop doing the job for which you've chosen them, and you lose a key adventage against the elements.

Once you have understood the COLDER principle, you can start thinking about exactly what kind of clothes you need to wear for your trip.

Bear Grylls from the book: Bear Grylls Living wild / The Ultimate Guide to Scouting and Fieldcraft.

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