Most people think that willingly pitching a tent in the snow is about as sensible as pounding nails into your feet. They see themselves shivering under a tiny plastic tarp and over a stove the size of a beer can, where the only way to warm your toes is to go outside and hike some more, and the only way to dry your socks is to go home.
This is because most people have never been winter camping with Garrett and Alexandra Conover. I was among a group lucky enough to snowshoe with the pair up Maine's Allagash River in frigid January, the waters and surrounding strip of forest silent, cold and white. At night, we lounged around in our shirtsleeves in a tent so big you could square dance, while a portable sheet-metal wood stove pumped out such glorious warmth that we had to periodically throw open the tent flap to cool off.

Alexandra and Garrett run a Maine-based guide business called North Woods Ways. After graduating from college, about two decades ago, they had the good fortune to apprentice with a legendary Maine guide named Mick Fahey, who had learned his wilderness skills from Penobscot Indians.

Among other things, Fahey taught them that Native Americans didn't just dash in and out of the winter forests; they lived comfortably in them, refining their cold-weather "technology," as Garrett aptly calls it, over thousands of years. By utilizing the methods of this ancient woods culture, the Conovers have honed a winter camping technique so hospitable that they can stay out in the subarctic climes for as long as their food holds out.

For our Allagash trip, the couple outfitted the eight of us (themselves and six guests) with two "heavy" ten-by-twelve-foot cotton wall tents and two sheet-metal wood stoves, each about one foot square by two feet long. These stoves serve as furnaces, ovens, cookstoves and clothes dryers. They'll even turn a tent into a sauna when you want to bathe.

Among the more hellish aspects of "high-tech" winter camping is waking up to icy air, your bag damp with exhalation and your clothes frozen into crusty lumps. Since you have no real heat source, the only way to warm your frigid boots is to put the ice cubes on and run around in them. Happily, the Conover trip was different.

Whoever woke up first would reach a hand out of his or her bag, start the stove (with materials stacked the night before) and go back to sleep. About four hours later, when I deigned to rise, it might be 20 below outside but the tent would be 60 degrees, and my clothes, hung in the peak of the tent the night before, would be as dry as stale bread.

Now, a tent and a stove packed together weigh about forty pounds. But we didn't carry them on our backs; we used long, skinny Cree Indian-style toboggans. They slid along the frozen river almost effortlessly, allowing us to bring, besides tents and stoves, such luxuries as Champagne, a cheesecake-producing reflector oven and caribou stew.

One morning, we could hear the wind whistling down the river valley. Because of the clothing we'd been ordered to bring, though, we weren't worried. Over our felt boot liners and felt insoles, we wore mukluks. With soles of thin, breathable, almost-suede-like leather and loose uppers of canvas, they are, unlike boots, warm, roomy and featherlight.

In extreme cold, one of the greatest imperatives is that you engage in transpiration, which is to say, you pass your sweat in gaseous form clear out of your clothes. Whereas the felt liners and mukluks breathe wonderfully, conventional boots can retain your perspiration, forcing your already beleaguered toes to warm the consequent wetness and perhaps resulting in some surgeon somewhere saying "These black things will have to go."

For clothing, the Conovers advocate layers of wool insulation under breathable cotton wind gear; they dislike man-made fibers for many reasons, including their shortcomings around campfires. Alexandra once saw a candle flame dissolve the arm of a polypropylene sweater. "If you melt your clothes," advises Garrett, "you might be kind of cold."

Over the wool layers, the guides prefer to wear low-tech, lightweight, long-fibered Egyptian-cotton wind pants and anoraks.

Some crusty cynics, with hellish memories of glacial Boy Scout campouts still giving their inner child frostbite, might wonder if there's a payoff for all this wintry equipping and effort. Only peace, quiet and Nirvana. In summer, a place like the Allagash can be a nightmare of 10,000 neon-draped lunatics banging their plastic canoes into the rocks. But in winter, the only sign of humanity (if you ignore the ghastly clear-cuts 500 feet from either shore) might be a trapper's snowmobile tracks.

Snug and secure, we were able to relax and bask in the hushed beauty all around us: a coyote baying like a loon just fifty yards from our campsite, owls on our tent pole, a deafeningly bright canopy of stars, a violet sunrise lighting a riverbank of birches and balsam firs dusted with hoarfrost.

As Alexandra says, feeling safe and protected in the woods allows you to "find the peace in nature and then the peace in yourself."

I warmly agree.

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