Ever had a thermos, Nalgene, or your favorite canteen swell to its breaking point in winter’s cold temps? Whatever activity you were doing outdoors in sub-freezing temperatures, it’s likely that you didn’t need that extra hassle.

Staying warm can be a full time job, and keeping an ample supply of water in liquid form can also be a constant chore. So how do you keep your bottles from busting and your water filters from breaking? And what’s the best way to consume snow?

Cold weather can wreak havoc on your trapping activities, freezing triggers shut and imprisoning footholds in frozen dirt beds. But there are a few ways that the cold can help us, whether you are trapping as a pastime or trapping for food during a wilderness emergency.

Frozen Baits
Successfully baiting traps is an important part of the overall art of trapping. Unless you have a creative and effective motion-activated trap, the bait is the only reliable reason for an animal to visit your trap. In weather above freezing, your quarry and plenty of other critters can steal your bait. But a frozen block of bait will take some work for your target animal to chew up, and it will be a lot harder for little bait thieves (like mice and birds) to eat the bait out of the trigger or run off with it.

One good thing about snowy survival scenarios is that ground-to-air rescue signals are easy to spot on the white background. One terrible thing about that same scenario is that a little more snow can hide your signal completely.

Any rescue signal needs to be huge if it is to catch the attention of aircraft, regardless of the situation. This will be true on a desert island or deep in the snow-covered backcountry. While the snow does create a blank canvas for you to build a high-contrast signal for aircraft to spot, the snow also has its share of problems.

A wintertime wilderness emergency can leave you with a lot to worry about. Fortunately, making a bed to get you up off the frozen ground is one of the easiest problems to fix—if you know how to make a bough bed.

I am sure that beds and mattresses like this go back to antiquity, but they became common in the later days of the fur trade era in the northern U.S. and Canada. To make a bough bed you don’t need much in the way of tools—just a pair of gloves should do it.