Cotton

I just spent 4 days and 3 nights at a survival camp to learn about Awareness. This was my first experience with winter camping, as I took the option to tent camp all 3 nights. Temperatures ranged form a low of the high teens at night with 20-25 miles per hour wind gusts to the upper 30's during the day. The first lesson I learned was cotton kills. Although I layer up pretty good at night I had too much cotton on and almost froze. If the pole shift occurs and you are not equiped with the right type of fabric in your clothes you will greatly diminish your chances of survival. The gentleman who ran the camp wanted to teach me a lesson the first night and provided me with an article and some proper type clothes the 2nd and 3rd nights. The article is called Fiber and Fabric Construction - Death by Exposure - Hypothermia by William. W. Forgey. So I got all my cotton long underware and threw them out. The first paragraph of the article is as follows:

Cotton has been a mainstay of fabric construction since ancient times. Its use in outdoor clothing cannot be condemned too highly. Designer and traditional brands of jeans have no place in the outdoors. Cotton allows heat to be conducted through it, even when dry, at a rate 3 times faster than wool, nylon, polyester and acrylic fiber cloth. The latter fibers are about equal in their dry insulation ability. Olefin (Polypropylene) has about twice the dry insulation ability ot those fibers and 6 times that of cotton. All manufacturers of outdoor clothing generally avoid pure cotton due to its poor insulation ability. Other major problems with cotton are its low evaporative ability and its very poor insulation when wet. Wet cotton allows thermal conductance to increase by a factor of 9 times, thus making it a danger to its wearer.

I do not live in a real cold part of the US and do not do a lot of outdoor activities in the winter, so I learned somethings the hard way as far as clothing. The second and third nights I was not overly cold except when I had to get up to go to the bathroom.

Offered by David.