Biome · the cold never lets go
Arctic / tundra
The harshest biome in this guide. Hypothermia here is not an episode but a constant background: the body loses heat continuously, and everything you do either slows that loss or speeds it up. There is no plant food at all, no wood, and almost everything has to be taken from an animal you have killed.
Если вы оказались в тундре или Арктике
- Уйдите из ветра и не вспотейте. Закройте голову, шею, лицо и кисти; тяжёлую работу выполняйте медленно, снимая лишний слой заранее.
- Отделите тело от снега. Рюкзак, коврик, верёвка, одежда, сухие ветви — всё под себя. Не стойте и не сидите без движения на голом снегу.
- Стройте простое укрытие. Траншея или защищённая от ветра яма реалистичнее иглу для новичка. Вход ниже спального места, подстилка толстая, внутри лопата или палка.
- Сделайте два отверстия для воздуха. Держите их открытыми. Никакого пламени, углей, горелки, свечи или жировой лампы внутри снежного укрытия.
- Топите снег только снаружи. Жёсткая платформа, не менее 5 м от входа, подветренная сторона и постоянный присмотр. В ёмкость сначала добавьте немного жидкой воды.
- Невнятная речь, шаткость, спутанность, сонливость или прекращение дрожи при продолжающемся холоде — тяжёлое переохлаждение. Утепляйте центр тела, вызывайте помощь, не растирайте обморожения.
Hour 1 — shelter, immediately
⏱ There is no scouting phase here. It is counted in minutes, not hoursThe order of Part 1 collapses into one item: stop losing heat. Look not for water and not for food but for shelter from the wind: a sastruga, a drift behind a rock, a slope, any hollow. Wind takes heat away several times faster than still air at the same temperature.
Immediately: cover your face and neck, put the hood up, hands into your sleeves or armpits, put everything you have underneath you, such as your pack, rope or branches. Direct contact with snow takes heat faster than anything else.
Day 1 — a snow shelter
⏱ trench 30–60 min · quinzhee 2–4 hours with a compulsory pauseSnow is not the enemy but building material and insulation: inside a snow shelter it stays around zero even when it is minus thirty outside. That is the difference between life and death, and it is achieved without a single log.
The quick option is a snow trench: dig a trench your own length in firm snow, roof it over with blocks, skis, branches and snow. Half an hour of work.
The thorough option is a quinzhee: pile up a heap of snow about two metres high, let it stand for 1–2 hours — in that time the snow sinters and the dome becomes strong. You must not dig sooner: the dome will collapse. Then hollow it out from inside, leaving walls 30–45 cm thick.
1. The snow trench is the thing you actually need to be able to build
Forget the igloo. A real block-built dome house is built by someone who has done it dozens of times, and in the frost it takes half a day. A trench is the same warmth in half an hour, and it is the trench you build when time matters more than beauty.
- Find firm, settled snow. The test: step on it — if your foot does not sink in and leaves a clear print with a sharp edge, the snow will do. In loose snow the walls crumble; there you need a different method.
- Dig a trench your own length and a little wider than your shoulders, a little above waist deep. Dig with a shovel, a board, a pot lid, a snowshoe — anything flat.
- One end of the trench goes half a step deeper — that will be the entrance and the "cold pit". The sleeping place stays higher: the cold air runs down, and the warm air stays under you.
- Roof the trench over: skis, poles, boards, or, if the snow cuts, slabs of snow leaned together against each other. Cover the top with a hand's depth of loose snow.
- On the floor — everything you have: branches, spruce boughs, your pack, rope, cardboard. Direct contact with snow is the fastest heat loss there is.
- Punch a hole in the roof a finger thick and keep a stick beside you to clear it: your own breath frosts it closed.
Work slowly and with your clothing open. Sweating while building a shelter is the commonest fatal mistake in the Arctic: wet clothing stops keeping you warm at exactly the moment you lie down to rest. Better to dig ten minutes longer and stay dry.
Keep a shovel or a stick to hand inside. The entrance drifts over during the night, and you have to dig out from the inside.
1. The vent hole is compulsory, and it has to be checked regularly — it frosts closed. Carbon monoxide from any fire, and even a build-up of carbon dioxide from breathing, have no smell.
2. The entrance below the sleeping place. Cold air is heavier and runs down into the pit by the entrance, and the warm air stays with you.
3. Take a shovel or a stick inside, so you can dig out if the entrance gets buried.
🌙 Night 1 — the polar night may not end
In winter, above the Arctic Circle, the sun does not rise for weeks. "Night" stops being a stretch of time and becomes a permanent condition, and with it the natural daily order disappears. Set up an artificial rhythm — сон, работа, еда и проверки укрытия по часам или по счёту: недосып и потеря режима ухудшают внимание и решения.
In practice: insulation from the snow matters more than anything else. Boots and wet things go into the sleeping bag or under you, otherwise by morning they will be ice. Do not sleep without ventilation. Do not fall asleep before you have warmed up: shivering at bedtime means you will not wake up warm.
Days 2–3 — the critical window
⏱ Only one thing is decided here: whether you are holding on to your heatThe shelter gets finished off: the walls are smoothed from inside (a smooth dome does not drip), a sleeping shelf is made above the entrance, the bedding is built up. Water — melt snow, never eat it: warming snow in your mouth costs the body heat it does not have. Ice is better than snow — the same volume gives you several times more water.
🌙 Nights 2–3
A routine appears. Before sleep: check the vent, dry or thaw your boots and insoles, put everything damp under you, get snow ready for the morning's water. Check your feet every day — frostbite starts without pain, and the first sign is not pain but loss of sensation.
Week 1 — fat and protein
⏱ The rest of the weekCordage — in practice only sinew from an animal you have killed: there is no plant fibre here. Ice fishing (a hole, a line, a bone hook), snares for hare and ptarmigan along snow trails — in winter the trails are trodden in and predictable.
Fats matter more than calories as such. On lean meat alone a person weakens and falls ill even when eating their fill — that is a well-known misfortune of polar expeditions. The diet of the northern peoples is built precisely on fat. Do not throw away fat and bone marrow: that is the most valuable part of the kill.
🌙 Night, week 1
Ночь остаётся вопросом дисциплины: два свободных вентиляционных пути, сухая подстилка, утеплённая ёмкость с водой и проверка обуви. Никакого пламени, горелки, углей или жировой лампы внутри снежного укрытия. Отсутствие заметного дыма не означает отсутствие угарного газа.
Как греться и топить снег без огня внутри
Укрытие сохраняет тепло тела, а не производит его. Все операции с пламенем выполняются снаружи, на жёсткой платформе и под присмотром. Внутрь возвращаются уже с тёплой водой и сухими вещами.
- Площадка: утрамбованный снег и два слоя толстых сырых жердей крест-накрест; при наличии — металлический лист или штатная подставка горелки.
- Место: не менее 5 м от входа, подветреннее укрытия, без снежного карниза и нависающих ветвей.
- Вода: сначала налейте в ёмкость немного жидкой воды, затем понемногу добавляйте снег. Полная кастрюля сухого снега легко пригорает и даёт мало воды.
- Запас: нагрейте воду до безопасно тёплой, плотно закройте и заверните ёмкость в сухую ткань. Не кладите кипяток прямо к коже.
- Сушка: мокрые носки и стельки сушите на расстоянии от пламени и только под наблюдением; синтетика плавится раньше, чем выглядит горячей.
Если топлива нет: делайте укрытие меньше, утолщайте подстилку, защищайте шею и голову, ешьте доступную высококалорийную пищу и оставайтесь сухим. Самодельная лампа внутри не является безопасной заменой костру.
Weeks 2–4 and beyond — brain tanning
⏱ No hurryThere are no plant tannins here at all, so hide is worked with the animal's own brain: boil it, mash it to a paste, rub it into the cleaned hide, dry it, work it soft with your hands, smoke it over coals for durability. Nature arranged it conveniently: most animals have exactly enough brain for their own hide. Clothing made of hide with the fur inward is the only thermal protection that really works in this biome.
Animals
This is a fundamentally different animal, and here the rules for the brown bear are lethally dangerous. A polar bear sees a human as prey, not as a threat, and can stalk you deliberately.
You must not: drop face down and play dead (with a brown bear that saves you, here it is an invitation), or run (it will catch you easily).
You must: make noise and look bigger as it approaches, back away without turning your back, and if it attacks — fight with any object you have, aiming for the muzzle and nose. Camp: leave no smell of food, rig a trip line with cans on it. What to do: Do not drop face down — fight, hit the nose and eyes with anything you have. Do not keep food or a kill near your dwelling; run a cord with something rattling on it around the shelter.
They practically never attack a human, but they wreck your stores. The arctic fox is also often rabid — do not let it near and do not touch it, especially if the animal is oddly bold. What to do: Fire and noise at night, stores kept out of the dwelling. The arctic fox is not dangerous, but it will drag off everything not tied down.
Ice and weather
Going through into the water at these temperatures gives you a few minutes of being able to act. Test the ice with a stick ahead of you, walk in someone else's tracks, go round river mouths, open leads and the stretches under snow near the bank. If you go through — do not thrash about, crawl out onto the ice on the side you came from, and change into dry clothes at once. What to do: Test with a stick ahead of you, go one at a time, pack on one shoulder. If you go through — turn to the edge you came from and crawl out rather than stand up.
In a whiteout the horizon, the shadows and any sense of distance disappear — a person loses their direction ten steps from the shelter. In a blizzard, do not go out at all, and if you must, only along a rope run from the shelter. What to do: Do not travel. Build a shelter at once, while you still have the strength; run a hand line to water and stores.
Water: ice is preferable to snow (the same volume gives several times more water). Fresh sea ice is multi-year ice: it is dark, rounded and almost unsalted, unlike young ice. Meltwater from under the snow by a stream. Boil it if you have the means.
Food is the weakest point of the biome. There is practically no plant food at all, and in summer there is not much more of it. The basis: ice fishing, snares for hare and ptarmigan along snow trails, sea mammals and birds on the coast.
Fat is the priority. Eat fat and bone marrow, not just meat: without fats the body does not take in enough energy, and a person weakens on a full stomach.
Plants of the tundra
In summer berries appear in the tundra, and they are the only plant food we include — they have no dangerous look-alikes among the tundra species:
Red berries on a low shrub with tough glossy evergreen leaves. Sour, keeps extremely well.
Dark blue berries with a waxy bloom, on a low shrub. The juice stains your hands and tongue — a simple check.
An orange-yellow berry made up of separate beads, like a raspberry. Grows on the boggy parts of the tundra.
getting out of the wind · insulation from the snow · face and hands covered
snow trench · quinzhee with ventilation · sinew cordage
топка снега снаружи · подлёдная лунка · костяной крючок · силки на снежных тропах
brain tanning · одежда мехом внутрь · утеплённые ёмкости для воды
permanent snow or turf housing · a store of fat for the winter
↳ Taiga — the same tanning method, but there is firewood↳ How the levels work in general
Where to put it
- Where the snow is firm and deep. The test: step on it — your foot does not sink in and leaves an even, clear print. Snow like that is in drifts behind obstacles, not out in an open windswept spot.
- Not under a slope and not under a cornice: an avalanche or a snow drift buries the shelter and you with it.
- Not on the ice of a lake or river, unless you are sure of the thickness, and not over a crack.
- On the lee side of an obstacle — a sastruga, a ridge, a boulder. The wind then drifts snow onto you instead of blowing your shelter away.
- Leave a marker. Stick in a pole with a rag on it: a shelter drifted over with snow looks no different from a snowdrift, and people have lost their own house after walking two hundred paces away.
- 1 Blocks in a spiral. The snow bricks are laid not in rings but in a helix: each one a little higher and a little further in. The spiral is the only way to close a dome without formwork, and the whole secret is in it. Wall thickness 30–45 cm.
- 2 The vent. A hole in the dome a finger thick, always. Check it and clear it with a stick: frost from your breath closes it over during the night.
- 3 The sleeping shelf. Above the level of the entrance. Warm air gathers at the top; the difference between the shelf and the floor is up to ten degrees.
- 4 The cold pit and an entrance from below. The entrance below the shelf, with a bend in the crawlway. Cold air is heavier, it runs down into the pit and stays there. This works without any door at all.
- 5 Зона без огня. Внутри только подстилка, сухая одежда, закрытая тёплая вода и свет от батареи. Топить снег и сушить вещи над пламенем — снаружи.
- ! Пламя внутри запрещено. Отдушина не превращает снежный дом в безопасную топочную. Угарный газ не пахнет, а подтаявший свод теряет прочность. Держите внутри лопату: вход может замести.
How to build a snow hut
- Find the right snow. A firm drift that cuts with a knife, a board or a pot lid. Loose snow will not do — from that you make a different structure with a dome (see below).
- Cut blocks about the size of a large book and a hand's breadth thick. Take them from inside the future house — that way you are digging out the floor and making the wall at the same time.
- The first ring in a circle 2–2.5 m across per person. Then cut it away at an angle from one block to the end of the circle — that gives you the start of the spiral.
- Lay in a helix, each block tilted inward, trimming the lower and side faces with a knife so that the block rests on two neighbours. The block has to stand on its own, with nothing holding it.
- Close the dome with a last wedge block at the top, fitted from inside and trimmed to place.
- Fill the gaps with loose snow from the outside, rubbing it in with your palm.
- Cut a crawlway on the lee side, below floor level, with a turn in it. Raise the shelf inside above the crawlway.
- Punch a vent in the dome and put a stick beside it for clearing. Bring a shovel inside.
- Point the dome up from inside with a knife and smooth it: a smooth dome runs the drips down the wall, an uneven one drips onto your sleeping bag.
If the snow is loose. Rake up a heap about two metres high, let it stand for 1–2 hours (the snow sinters and the dome becomes strong) and only then hollow it out from inside, leaving walls 30–45 cm. Digging sooner is not allowed — it will collapse. The method takes 2–4 hours, but it needs no skill at cutting blocks.
In the Arctic summer you build from turf, the bones of large animals and hides — on a frame of driftwood or ribs. It is the same semi-dugout dwelling as in the steppe, only the insulation is hide with the fur inward.
Rules, every one of which saves a life
Smoke, air and the door
Door
Wind with snow cuts visibility to nothing, and a whiteout — diffuse light with no shadows — takes away even the horizon: you cannot see where the snow ends and the sky begins, and you cannot make out a drop under your feet.
What to do: do not travel. Build a shelter immediately, while you still have the strength — a trench in the snow in half an hour. From the shelter to your stores and to water, run a guide rope: in a blizzard that is the only way back. Go out along it and nowhere else.
What to do if you go through: do not thrash about, turn round to the edge you came from (the ice held there), elbows onto the ice, push yourself out horizontally and crawl out rather than stand up, rolling to the side. Once out — do not run to camp; undress at once and wring out your clothes: wet cloth in a frost freezes within minutes.
Prevention: test the ice with a stick ahead of you, go one at a time with a gap between you, take your pack off one shoulder so you can shed it.
Shore ice is torn away by the wind and carries people out to sea. Signs: cracks along the shore, noise and cracking, an offshore wind, water in the cracks.
What to do: do not sleep on the fast ice, do not go out onto the ice in an offshore wind. If you are carried off — do not try to jump from floe to floe; stay on the largest one, put up a shelter and signal.
Minus twenty and minus fifty are different worlds: at fifty, equipment fails, metal breaks, and unprotected skin freezes within minutes.
What to do: inside, and do not go out. Bring in everything you need for a day beforehand. Face completely covered, nothing metal touched with a bare hand.
Relevant in mountain tundra and on coasts with cliffs. Do not put a shelter under a slope or under a cornice — a cornice collapses on its own, with nothing to set it off. What to do: Do not put a shelter under an open slope or under a snow cornice.
It looks like a gift and is in fact the worst thing that happens: the snow house sags, clothing gets wet, the ice becomes unreliable, and when the frost comes back it turns everything wet into ice.
What to do: watch the dome, dry anything that got wet immediately, stay off the ice.
In summer the permafrost thaws and subsides; in winter ice and snow bridges hide the cracks. Both open up without warning.
Signs: sagging ground and saucer-shaped lakes, mounds with a crack along the top, thawed-out banks by streams; in winter, strips of smoother and paler snow across a slope. What to do: walk probing the crust with a stick, one at a time, with a gap between you. In summer do not camp on tilted ground or on mounds with cracks in them. Do not go near the edge of a thawed-out bank: it is held up by ice that is melting right now.
- Time — leave straight away, not after packing.
- Distance — every step away from the source cuts the dose.
- Shielding — any mass between you and the source: earth, stone, water, a wall.
Nuclear
A snow shelter gives you protection in itself: snow is water, and water blocks radiation well. A metre of firm snow works about as well as half a metre of earth, and heaping it up is faster than digging frozen ground.
- Bank the shelter up with snow and increase the thickness of the dome if you have anything to do it with.
- Leave clothing and boots in the cold pit by the entrance. Dry dust in a frost shakes off almost completely.
- Water: take snow from deep down, from below the layer that fell before the event, and ice from under the surface. Fresh top snow is exactly what caught what fell.
- Food is the special feature of this biome. Reindeer lichen takes up fallout more than any other plant, the reindeer eats the lichen, the human eats the reindeer. After Chernobyl that short chain made Scandinavian reindeer meat unusable for years. Switch to sea fish and to whatever was under cover.
Chemical
Heavy gases run downward, and your shelter is precisely down there: a snow trench, a pit, a crawlway below the floor. Under a chemical threat all of that becomes a trap.
What to do: get up onto high ground, move across the wind, leave the shelter for the time being. In a frost the cloud lasts longer — cold air does not mix. Breathe through cloth, but watch that it does not ice up and cut off your breathing.
Biological
There are no people, so there is almost no risk. But there is one feature found nowhere else: thawing permafrost. It preserves pathogens from old animal and human burials; the anthrax outbreaks on Yamal began with exactly that — thawed-out carcasses.
- Do not touch carcasses and bones that have thawed out and do not camp near them.
- Do not butcher animals you have found dead, however hungry you are.
- Boil water, meltwater included: what was frozen into it comes out as it melts.
- Isolate anyone who falls ill; in the cold, illness is harder to bear.
Path A — with bare hands
You know everything humanity knows, but you have nothing except your hands and what grows around you.
The first year
- Снежное укрытие и изоляция от снега — первая задача.
- Топка снега и нагрев только снаружи — первые сутки.
- Ice fishing and snares for ptarmigan — the first weeks.
- Clothing of hides with the fur inward — долгосрочная защита; до неё решают сухие слои и малое укрытие.
Three years
- Brain tanning and sewing with sinew — the skill without which the North cannot be got through.
- A sledge, a kayak or a skin boat; putting food by in the permafrost — a ready-made eternal refrigerator.
- Summer housing of turf, bone and driftwood.
- Dogs, if you have them — here they are not a luxury but transport and a guard.
The ceiling, and an honest limit
- Achievable alone: sitting it out. A year or two on protein and fat, in a snow house, in fur clothing.
- Not achievable alone: staying stable. One injury, one lost mitten, one hunt missed — and there is no margin left.
- Honestly: in the Arctic the right strategy for a person alone is to head south, not to settle in. Every other biome forgives more.
The bottleneck of this biome
Fuel and fat. There is no firewood at all. All your warmth, light and water come from the fat of an animal you have killed — that is, from hunting, which may fail.
Path B — on what is left
The same place, but within a day's walk there is something people abandoned. That does not cancel self-reliance — it only speeds it up.
What to look for here specifically
- Polar stations, drilling rigs, shift settlements, airfields — fuel, stoves, huts on runners, tinned food, sleeping bags.
- Barrels of diesel — here that is months of warmth, which no amount of hunting will give you.
- Abandoned machinery: batteries, metal, tracks, glass.
- Fuel and food depots: the frost preserves everything, what you find here is still edible years later.
What that unlocks
- Diesel and a stove change the whole scenario: with them the Arctic turns from "holding on" into living.
- A sleeping bag and synthetic clothing save you months of work on hides.
- The frost stores your supplies for free — food you find does not spoil.
The trap on this path
Distances and weather. The trip to a station can take weeks, and a blizzard does not ask permission. And your whole life ends up tied to a finite stock of fuel: when the barrels run out you will have to go back to path A, having already lost the skills.
The ceiling by year
| Timescale | With bare hands | On salvage |
|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | A snow house, hides, protein and fat — if the hunting went well | A stove and diesel: wintering instead of fighting |
| Year 3 | A sledge, a kayak, food put by — only in a group | A hut on runners or a station as a base; supplies for years |
| Year 10 | Alone — unlikely. In a group — yes | As long as the fuel lasts. After that, path A or south |
Protecting yourself and your family
Children in the Arctic. Обморожение может начинаться без боли, поэтому регулярно проверяйте лицо и руки, а ребёнка держите рядом и постоянно в поле зрения. В полярную ночь сохраняйте понятный распорядок сна, еды и коротких безопасных задач: он уменьшает тревогу и помогает взрослому замечать изменения поведения.