History and Heritage of Winter Camping in Canada

Long before winter camping became recreation, Indigenous Peoples across Canada had developed sophisticated ways of travelling, making shelter and living through winter. 

There was no single approach because there was no single Canadian winter. Shelter reflected the landscape, available materials and whether a camp needed to last a night, a season or something in between. On the Plains, portable tipis could be covered with sewn bison hides. In forested regions, poles, bark, boughs and hides were used in different forms of shelter. Across the Arctic, snow itself could become a remarkably effective building material. 

These were not rudimentary versions of what came later. They were highly adapted technologies developed through generations of knowledge and experience. That knowledge would become essential when Europeans began attempting to travel, trade and live through Canadian winters themselves. 

One of the most striking records of traditional winter shelter is held by the Canadian Museum of History: a series of 23 photographs taken in 1916 showing Inuinnait builders constructing a 12-foot snowhouse on the ice at M'Clure Strait. 

The sequence shows just how much knowledge was involved. Suitable snow had to be selected, cut into blocks and assembled into a stable structure capable of retaining warmth against Arctic conditions. Where a dependable supply of firewood was unavailable, the qulliq or kudlik, traditionally fuelled with animal oil, could provide light and heat. 

Travel south and the materials changed. In the forests, wood offered both building material and fuel. Temporary shelters could be positioned around an open fire or constructed to accommodate one while allowing smoke to escape. Boughs provided insulation from frozen ground. Bark and hides could provide protection overhead. 

On the Plains, portability was especially important. Tipis combined a framework of poles with hide coverings that could travel as communities moved through seasonal territories. Thousands of tipi rings remain visible across the Prairies; Grasslands National Park alone contains more than 20,000. 

What connected these very different shelters was not their appearance, but their responsiveness to place. People understood what could be carried, what could be gathered locally, how heat behaved inside a shelter and what was required to make camp in severe cold. 

These traditions did not simply disappear when manufactured materials became available. Natural hides, bark and other traditional materials remain part of living Indigenous cultural knowledge and practice, while newer materials have also been adopted where they are useful. Old and new can exist alongside one another. 

Europeans arriving in Canada brought manufactured goods, but they did not bring generations of experience living through Canadian winters. 

The consequences could be severe. In 1619, Danish explorer Jens Munk attempted to overwinter at Churchill while searching for the Northwest Passage. Of his crew of 64, only Munk and two others survived. 

As European exploration and the fur trade expanded, Indigenous knowledge became fundamental to travelling farther into the country. Indigenous Peoples provided much more than directions. Europeans learned about routes, seasons, food, clothing, transportation and ways of making camp. At Prince of Wales Fort on Hudson Bay, for example, Dene and Cree families supplied Hudson's Bay Company employees with food and essential cold-weather equipment while also working as guides, couriers and provisioners. 

The exchange also introduced new materials into Indigenous communities. Metal tools, kettles, woven cloth and eventually canvas could be incorporated where they offered an advantage. 

This is an important distinction in the history of winter camping in Canada. Europeans did not introduce the idea of portable shelter or heated winter camps to Canada. They entered landscapes where both were already well understood. What they did bring were new materials that gradually became part of that much older story. 

Canvas had one particularly useful quality: it travelled well. 

Like hide, it could be fashioned into a covering that moved with the camp. It could be folded, packed, erected again and repaired when necessary. As it became more readily available, canvas began appearing in Indigenous camps as well as those of traders, trappers, surveyors, prospectors and construction crews. 

Fire was changing too. Open fires continued to be practical, particularly for travellers moving quickly. Snow could be cleared, boughs laid down for insulation, canvas or another covering positioned for protection, and a large fire maintained in front. 

For a camp remaining in place, an enclosed wood stove offered another option. The fire could be contained, while stovepipe carried smoke outside the shelter. Less space was required around the fire and more of the shelter could become usable living space. 

An unexpectedly early Canadian example appears in the 1790s, when Elizabeth Simcoe lived for a time with her family in a canvas house at Newark, now Niagara-on-the-Lake. Grates initially used for heating proved inadequate and were replaced by stoves. 

It was far removed from modern hot tenting, but the basic combination had appeared: canvas shelter, contained wood heat and smoke directed outside. 

Through the nineteenth century, canvas shelters became increasingly familiar wherever Canadians were working beyond permanent settlements. 

A Library and Archives Canada watercolour from 1873 shows canal builders camped at Sault Ste. Marie. Canvas tents stand among barrels, clothing, cookware and tools, with a canoe overturned nearby. 

The image captures something important about the development of the winter tent. It was not simply somewhere to sleep; it was living space.

That mattered to people surveying remote country, working traplines, prospecting, building railways and canals or spending a winter cutting timber. A camp might need to function for weeks or months, and the ability to heat it changed what was possible. 

Inside a stove-heated shelter, clothing could dry, water could be heated and meals prepared away from the wind. After a day working outside, people had somewhere warm to gather and rest. 

By the early twentieth century, heated canvas tents were established enough to be used as organized working accommodation. Parks Canada's research into Depression-era relief camps records standards calling for a wood stove in each tent. By then, the elements of a modern canvas hot tent would have been familiar: a portable fabric shelter, contained wood fire and stovepipe carrying smoke outside. 

For most of this history, camping was a means to something else. People were hunting, trading, trapping, surveying, prospecting, building or cutting timber. 

Recreational camping developed much later, particularly as more Canadians began heading outdoors for leisure during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They carried equipment and practices that had already proven themselves in working camps. This transition forms an important part of the history of hot tenting in Canada. 

Winter campers inherited the same choices. A simple camp with an open fire offered mobility and required less equipment. Carrying a canvas tent and stove meant more weight and more work, but the reward was a warm space where people could cook, dry their clothing and spend time comfortably out of the weather. 

Modern equipment has expanded those choices enormously. Lightweight synthetic tents, insulated sleeping pads and highly efficient sleeping bags allow people to travel through winter without relying on a heated shelter at all. Yet the canvas hot tent remains, not because winter camping equipment stopped evolving, but because it offers a different way of making camp. 

The history of winter equipment is sometimes presented as a steady progression in which new materials replace old ones. The reality is more interesting. Materials can continue to exist alongside one another because they offer different advantages. 

Traditional wooden snowshoes are a good example. Indigenous Peoples developed distinct snowshoe forms suited to different landscapes and snow conditions. Wood created a strong frame, while hide webbing distributed weight across the snow with flexibility and relatively little material. 

Those principles remain effective. Traditional wooden and hide-webbed snowshoes continue to be made and used today alongside modern alternatives. 

Canvas has endured for similar practical reasons. Synthetic shelters can be exceptionally light and compact, while cotton canvas offers different advantages for a heated winter camp. It is durable, repairable and well suited to the changing temperatures and moisture created when a wood stove is operating inside a shelter. 

Wood heat has endured because the fuel can often be found where the camp is made, then processed with simple tools. 

None of this means the materials share the same history. Indigenous traditions of working with wood and hide long predate European arrival, while woven canvas and manufactured metal stoves entered the Canadian winter story later. What they share is continued usefulness. 

Esker belongs to the modern end of this history. 

Our Canadian-made hot tents use cotton canvas. Our stoves use wood for heat. Our traditional snowshoes continue to use wood frames and hide webbing, materials whose effectiveness in Canadian winter travel was understood by Indigenous Peoples long before Europeans learned how to live and travel through these landscapes. 

We use these materials today not because winter equipment should remain unchanged, but because newer does not always mean better for every purpose. 

There are lighter ways to sleep outside in winter. There are modern snowshoes made from entirely different materials. There are ways to camp without processing a single piece of firewood. They offer different experiences and solve different problems. 

A canvas hot tent creates a warm living space in winter. A traditional wooden snowshoe provides flotation through deep snow using a remarkably simple structure. An axe, saw and wood stove turn a local source of fuel into heat. They are tools whose value becomes apparent through use. 

The history behind them is not one straight line from past to present. It is a much richer Canadian story of knowledge passed down, knowledge shared, new materials adopted and older materials retained because they continue to do their job well. 

That history continues every time we make camp in winter.