If your tour lasts longer than the day

From halfway through the night, my sleep becomes more relaxed, the temperature in my sleeping bag is now almost tropical and when I finally wake up at around 7 a.m., I actually feel halfway rested. One person after another crawls on all fours with all their equipment out of the snow cave where we have just spent the night. Outside, we are greeted by daylight and a crisp -17 degrees Celsius.

Luckily, we were very well prepared for this challenge. We didn't have to spend the night in a snow cave, but had planned to bivouac.

"When your tour lasts longer than the day" - this was the motto of an event organized by the Alpine Club, or more precisely the Forum Alpin, a section of the Vienna Mountain Club, which I attended in February.

A few days before the bivouac experience, there was an evening lecture on the topic. It was specifically about bivouacs in winter. The evening was led by Harry Grün, an experienced member of the Mountaineering Group of the Alpine Club. We were given information about the dangers to be considered in terms of equipment, physical condition and external conditions, which items of equipment should definitely be in your backpack and what you should also take with you if you are planning a bivouac in winter.

We then split into groups depending on the accommodation we wanted for the night of practice: snow cave, igloo, tent, snow trench... there were no limits to the participants' imagination, everyone was allowed to try out what they wanted to test. My husband and I, along with a few others, opted for the snow cave because we thought it was more likely that we would need this bivouac form in an emergency. We agreed a meeting point for Saturday morning and drove home with lots of new ideas in our heads.

Over the next two days, our apartment was literally transformed into a mountain sports store. We pulled a huge amount of equipment from our shelves and put together what we would need. Or what we thought we would need. We did our best to stow all the equipment sensibly in and on our backpacks and arrived excitedly at the meeting point on Saturday.

By the time we had finished, 5 hours had passed and night had fallen. We had a bit of trouble getting ready for bed one after the other and crawling into our sleeping bags, as space was quite limited, but eventually we all made it.

We had actually brought food with us to cook a meal, but we were too exhausted to do the work. So we ate our fill of snacks such as muesli bars, nuts and chocolate, because the body needs enough fuel to maintain its body temperature in cold temperatures.

At around 9:30 pm, we looked at the clock and thought to ourselves "we can't possibly go to sleep this early", only to fall asleep exhausted shortly afterwards. Soon the first snoring noises could be heard and we would wake up a few hours later after our first winter bivouac, with the memory of a great, educational experience and a feeling of audacity.

Our conclusion

If we were faced with an emergency situation that required us to spend the night in the snow, we would rather build a simplified form of snow cave. The long construction time keeps you warm, but you don't want to be too exhausted in an emergency situation, or perhaps you don't have the strength for it.
It was made clear to us again how important it is to always have a bivouac sack with you on mountain tours, because without the wind- and water-repellent protective layer, a cold night would be much more uncomfortable and potentially life-threatening.

A big thank you to the mountain club and especially the mountaineering group, who made this experience possible for us!