Royal Army College

Lesson Overview

Most of what the Army does in winter involves moving and working in the cold: walking a welfare round through a long night, searching difficult ground for a missing person, carrying and lifting and building. All of it is harder and more dangerous than in summer, and it carries a trap that catches the unwary again and again: the effort of working hard makes a member sweat, and the sweat then chills them badly the moment they stop. This lesson teaches how to work in the cold without falling into that trap, how to keep your footing and choose safe routes on ice, snow, and wet ground, how to balance overexertion against the opposite danger of standing still and going cold, and how to watch constantly for the cold winning, in yourself and in those around you.

Snow is not just cold ground to cross but a heavy, exhausting medium that must be broken through, and the lesson teaches how a team shares that labour so no one is wrung out. It covers the dangers of frozen water and avalanche-prone slopes, and the conditions that rob you of sight and bearings, with one firm rule: the gravest of these hazards are judged by experts, not guessed at by the rest of us. The cold is beaten not by heroics but by routine and discipline, applied steadily by members who have learned the methods and use them every time.

By the end you will be able to explain the trap of sweating during exertion and the discipline that defeats it, describe the energy cost of moving through deep snow and the trail-breaking method that shares it, describe the dangers of footing and movement on winter ground including frozen water and avalanche-prone slopes, recognise the vision hazards of whiteout and snow blindness and the drills against them, navigate with the cautions that winter demands, work effectively with cold hands, and describe how a member watches over themselves and their team for the signs of the cold winning.

This is the knowledge layer. The practical skills of moving over winter ground, the use of snowshoes and skis, the drills of working and resting in the cold, and any travel near ice or steep snow, are taught and certified in person under qualified supervision; this lesson teaches the understanding they rest on. It pairs closely with the Navigation and Fieldcraft course, which teaches route-finding and movement in detail, and with the Combat First Aid course, which teaches the treatment of the cold injuries this lesson teaches you to prevent and recognise.

Key Terms

Overexertion: working so hard that a member sweats heavily and exhausts themselves, soaking the clothing and spending reserves the cold will later demand.
Ventilation: the deliberate opening or shedding of clothing before and during hard work to let heat and moisture escape and keep a member from sweating.
Trail-breaking: the heavy work of forcing the first path through deep, unbroken snow, shared out among a group by rotating the lead so no one is exhausted.
Overflow: water that has welled up on top of ice, often hidden under snow, which soaks anyone who steps in it and can chill them severely even though the ice itself held.
Whiteout: a loss of all visual reference when falling or blowing snow merges with a pale sky, so that the ground, the horizon, and your own sense of direction disappear.
Snow blindness: a painful sunburn of the surface of the eyes, caused by the glare of sunlight off snow, which can blind a member for a day or more and is wholly preventable with eye protection.
Manual dexterity: the fineness and speed of work the hands can do, which the cold steals as the fingers chill and stiffen.
The umbles: the early warning signs of hypothermia from Lesson 01, when a person stumbles, mumbles, fumbles, and grumbles.
Buddy system: the practice of pairing members so that each watches the other for the signs of cold injury that a person cannot reliably see in themselves.

The trap of sweating in the cold

The central danger of working in winter feels, at the time, like the opposite of a danger. Hard effort makes the body hot, and a member at work soon feels warm, even comfortable, in clothing that was right for standing still. But that warmth comes at a price. The body sheds its surplus heat by sweating, and in heavy winter clothing the sweat has nowhere to go. It soaks into the layers, and insulation that was keeping a member warm turns into a cold, wet drain against the skin. Then the work stops, the body cools, and the soaked member chills hard and fast, far colder than if they had never overheated. Many cold casualties are made not by the cold alone but by this cycle of sweating hot and then chilling wet.

The discipline that defeats it follows directly from Lesson 02: stay ahead of the body rather than react to it. Before hard work, ventilate and shed a layer, so you begin the task a little cool rather than warm, knowing the effort will soon heat you. The aim is to pace the work so as not to sweat, working steadily rather than in furious bursts, and to keep adjusting the clothing as the effort rises and falls. The moment the work stops, or even slows, put the layers back on at once, before the chill takes hold, because cooling begins immediately and a wet, resting member has little margin. Work cool, rest warm, and never soak through.

The single most useful change of habit is to slow down. A member new to the cold drives at their summer pace, heats up, sweats, and pays for it within the hour. The experienced hand moves deliberately, at a pace that can be held all night without breaking sweat, and adjusts by feel: if you are starting to sweat, you are going too fast or wearing too much, so slow, open up, or shed a layer at once, before the dampness spreads. A steady member who arrives dry is fit to keep working; a fast one who arrives soaked is halfway to being a casualty.

   THE GOLDEN RULE OF WINTER MOVEMENT: DO NOT SWEAT

   TOO FAST / TOO MUCH    JUST RIGHT            TOO SLOW / TOO LITTLE
   sweating, soaked       warm, dry, steady     shivering, chilling
        |                      |                       |
   slow down,            HOLD THIS:              speed up a little,
   open up, or           pace you can keep       add a layer,
   shed a layer          all night, no sweat     keep gently moving

   Before hard work : ventilate and shed a layer (start a little cold).
   During the work   : pace so you never break sweat; adjust as you go.
   The moment it stops: put the layers back on AT ONCE, before the chill.

Moving through deep snow, and trail-breaking

Snow is not merely cold; it is heavy, and forcing a path through it is some of the hardest physical work a member will ever do. A few centimetres slow the going a little; deep, soft, unbroken snow is another matter, each step sinking, each stride lifting the leg high and driving it down, so breaking that first path can cost several times the effort of walking the same distance on firm ground. The member breaking trail works far harder than everyone behind, who follow in the broken track at a fraction of the cost. Left unmanaged, this lands the whole burden on the one or two strongest, who sweat, exhaust themselves, and become the first to fail, exactly the people the group can least afford to lose.

The method that defeats this is used by every force that works in snow: rotate the lead. The member breaking trail does so only for a short spell, a set number of paces or a few minutes, then steps aside, lets the file pass, and falls in at the rear to recover in the easy track. The next member takes the lead for the same short spell, and so the heavy work passes steadily down the line and round again, no one carrying it long enough to be wrung out. The pace is set so even the lead does not break sweat, which usually means slow, and the spells are kept short in the deepest snow and lengthen where the going is easier. Tackled this way, a group can cross ground in a night that would destroy a single trail-breaker, and arrive still fit to do the work they came for.

   TRAIL-BREAKING IN ROTATION (share the heavy work, no one exhausted)

   Direction of travel  ----------------------------->

      [A]   [B]   [C]   [D]   [E]        A breaks trail (hard work)
       ^                                  B..E follow in the track (easy)
       |
   after a short spell, A steps aside, lets B..E pass, joins the rear:

      [B]   [C]   [D]   [E]   [A]        B now breaks trail
       ^                                  A recovers at the back
       |
   ...and so the lead passes down the line and round again.

   Keep the pace slow enough that even the LEAD does not sweat.
   Short spells in deep soft snow; longer where the going is easier.

The tools that make snow travel possible at all are snowshoes and skis, understood here in principle and learned in person. Both spread the body's weight over a much larger area, so the member rides on top of the snow rather than sinking in at every step, turning exhausting trail-breaking into something close to ordinary walking. Snowshoes are the simpler and more forgiving, strapped under the boot and worn at a normal gait, suiting broken or wooded ground and needing little training. Skis carry a member faster and with less effort over open ground and gentle slopes, gliding rather than lifting each foot, but demand real skill to use safely and to control on a descent. Either way the principle is the one that keeps a member from breaking through thin ice: spread the load. Where snow is deep enough to matter the proper aids transform the task, and the rotation of the lead still applies, because even on snowshoes the one packing a fresh trail works harder than those who follow.

Footing and movement on winter ground

Winter ground is treacherous underfoot, and the plainest danger of moving in the cold is also the most common: the slip, the fall, and the injury that follows. Ice, packed snow, frozen mud, and wet stone all offer poor grip, and a member moving in the dark, tired, and loaded is easily caught out. A fall on hard winter ground can break a bone or wrench a joint, and an injured member is in double danger, from the injury and from the heat lost lying still while help is found. Movement in winter is therefore deliberate: choose footing carefully, keep the weight balanced, shorten the stride on slippery ground, and accept that winter travel is simply slower than summer. Where a slope is genuinely icy, test each foothold before committing weight, keep the hands free to catch a fall rather than buried in pockets, and be ready to come down to all fours on the worst of it rather than fall your own height onto frozen ground.

The gravest hazard of all is thin ice over water, and a member must understand both why ice cannot be trusted and how a group crosses it when it truly must. Ice that looks solid can be dangerously weak, especially near the banks of a stream or pond, near inlets and outlets and any place the water moves, over running water that never fully freezes, and anywhere a current or spring keeps the underside warmer than the air. Snow lying on top hides both ice and water, and worse, insulates the ice so it grows more slowly and stays thinner than bare ice. Two further traps deserve their own names. Overflow is water welled up through cracks and lying on top of the ice, often hidden under a skin of snow no different in look from firm ground; step into it and you soak your feet and legs in freezing water even though the ice held, and that soaking alone can disable you. Slush is snow saturated with that water, a draining mush that gives no support and soaks whatever touches it. The plain truth is that judging whether ice will bear weight is a job for the expert, not a guess for the rest of us: thickness, type, the water beneath, the recent weather, all bear on it in ways that take real knowledge to read.

The sound rule, then, is caution and avoidance. Frozen waterways offer easy, level, inviting routes, but their ice must never be trusted by its look alone, and wherever a route can keep off frozen water it should. Where a group genuinely must cross, and only under qualified judgement that the ice will bear, the principles are these. Spread the load: cross one member at a time, never in a bunch, well apart, so the weight on the ice is never more than one person. Rope the crossing: the member on the ice is on a line held by others on firm ground, so a break-through can be hauled out at once. Loosen for the worst: rucksack waist-belt undone and a hand free, so that if the ice gives way the pack can be shed and does not drag the member under. And govern the whole by the principle of self-rescue and casualty rescue without becoming a second casualty. A member who breaks through helps themselves first, turning back toward the ice that just held, spreading their weight wide, and working their body up onto the surface rather than fighting straight up out of the water. The rescuers do not rush onto the ice that just failed, which only doubles the casualties; they reach the person from firm ground with the rope, or anything long enough to extend their reach, and haul. A break-through is a race against the cold, which disables in minutes, so a rescued member is got out of the wet, warmed, and watched, and what follows belongs to the Combat First Aid course.

Route choice in winter must also reckon with the light. Winter daylight is short, and much of the Army's cold-weather work falls in darkness, which hides the ground, conceals slips and weak ice, and makes navigation far harder and slower. A route that is straightforward by day can be hazardous by night, so a member plans for the dark, chooses the easiest ground available, allows extra time, and treats the failing light as one more reason to move with care.

Avalanche: terrain to recognise and avoid

One winter hazard a small, lightly equipped force should treat almost entirely as something to recognise and steer clear of is the avalanche, the sudden release and downhill rush of a mass of snow. A member does not need to become a snow scientist, and must not pretend to be one. What a member needs is to recognise the ground where avalanches happen, so as to avoid it, and to know the firm rule that governs travel in such country.

The ground to recognise is, in plain terms, steep, open, snow-loaded slopes: a moderately to steeply pitched open hillside holding a deep blanket of snow with nothing, no trees or boulders, to anchor it. The danger rises after fresh heavy snowfall, where wind has loaded snow thickly onto one side of a slope, during or after a thaw, and on any slope below which a member would be swept into a gully or over a drop. The signs of instability, recent avalanche debris, cracks shooting across the snow, a hollow drum-like sound underfoot, are warnings to treat with the utmost seriousness.

The rule that matters most is unbending. Avalanche terrain is judged by real expertise and local knowledge, and by no one else. Whether a snow slope is safe to cross on a given day is specialist work, drawing on training, snow assessment, and knowledge of the local hills and recent weather that a passing soldier does not have. So the standing instruction for the RKA is to avoid steep, loaded, snow-covered slopes wherever a route allows, and where a task might take a group into such ground, to defer to qualified mountain or avalanche expertise and follow their judgement rather than form one's own. This lesson teaches you to recognise the danger so you avoid it and know when to stop and ask; it gives no one a licence to gamble on a snow slope.

Whiteout and snow blindness: the vision hazards

Winter attacks the sight in two opposite ways, and both can stop a member or a team dead. The first takes vision away by taking away all contrast; the second damages the eyes through too much glare.

Whiteout is the loss of all visual reference. When snow is falling or blowing thickly and the sky is a flat pale grey, the snow underfoot and the sky above merge into a single featureless white, and a member loses the horizon, the shape of the ground, the difference between up-slope and down, even the sense of which way they are moving. It is profoundly disorienting: members have walked in circles, stepped off edges they could not see, and become separated within metres of one another. A whiteout can come on fast and does not lift to order. The drill against it is set out as a clean sequence so a cold, frightened member can follow it. Stop: do not press on into ground you cannot see, which is how members walk off edges. Stay together: close the group up at once, hands or eyes on one another, no one drifting out of contact, because a member lost in a whiteout can be lost for good. Shelter and wait if you safely can, for a whiteout may pass. And if you must move, navigate by compass and pacing, falling back on the dead-reckoning method of the Navigation and Fieldcraft course, the magnetic bearing on the compass and the careful counting of paces, because in a true whiteout there is nothing to navigate by but the instrument and the count. The compass still tells the truth when the eyes can tell you nothing.

   THE WHITEOUT DRILL (when snow and sky merge into one white blank)

   1. STOP            do not press on into ground you cannot see
   2. STAY TOGETHER   close up, hands/eyes on each other, no one drifts off
   3. SHELTER & WAIT  if you safely can; a whiteout may lift
   4. IF YOU MUST MOVE, navigate by COMPASS BEARING and PACE COUNT
                      (dead reckoning: see Navigation and Fieldcraft)

   The eyes give you nothing. The compass still tells the truth.

Snow blindness is the opposite hazard. Snow is a brilliant reflector, and on a bright day, even a bright overcast one, it throws sunlight, including the burning ultraviolet, up into the eyes from below as well as down from above. That glare sunburns the surface of the eyes, and the result, coming on hours later, is eyes that feel full of grit, that water and burn and cannot bear light, and that may be effectively blind for a day or more while they heal. A blinded member is a casualty and a burden, and the injury is entirely preventable. The prevention is to protect the eyes from the glare: proper dark eye protection that cuts ultraviolet, worn whenever snow is bright, in cloud as well as sun, because the glare burns through thin overcast. Where it is wanting, a member improvises slit goggles, a strip of any material, bark, card, leather, cloth, worn across the eyes with a narrow horizontal slit cut for each eye, which lets a member see out while shutting out almost all the glare. It is an old method and a good one, and a member who knows it need never be caught defenceless against the snow's glare.

Winter navigation: the cautions

Navigation in winter is the navigation of the Navigation and Fieldcraft course done under conditions that quietly work against it, and a member carries a few cautions into the snow. The first is that familiar features are buried or changed. A blanket of snow smooths the ground, fills in ditches and small streams and the very hollows and bumps the contours describe, drifts into shapes that were not there yesterday, and turns a distinctive path or wall into an unbroken white surface. A feature relied on for a fix may simply be gone, so a member trusts the larger, surer features that snow cannot hide, the shape of a ridge, a river valley, a lake's outline, and reads the ground expecting it to look different from the map.

The second caution is that distance is harder to judge. Across a uniform white surface, with no trees or buildings of known size to scale against, the eye loses its measure, and members consistently misjudge how far they have come. The answer is the navigation course's: trust the pace count over the eye, while remembering that deep snow shortens the stride and changes the count, so the count itself must be allowed for. The third caution is the steadying one: the compass is still true. Snow changes the look of the ground, the feel of the distance, and the confidence of the eye, but it does not touch the magnetic bearing. A member who navigates by map, compass, and pace count carries on through conditions that would defeat navigation by eye and landmark alone.

Working with cold hands

A great deal of the Army's winter work is done with the hands, handling tools and ropes and equipment, fastening and building and tending, and the cold steals the hands' usefulness first. As the hands chill, they lose their dexterity, and every task grows slower and clumsier. Cold fingers fumble at fastenings, drop tools, and cannot manage fine work that would be nothing in the warmth, so a member who lets their hands go cold finds even simple jobs taking far longer and going badly. This is reason enough to keep the hands warm and dry, in loose mitts or gloves, and to work the fingers from time to time to keep the blood in them; but it is also a warning sign in itself, because clumsy, fumbling hands are one of the umbles of Lesson 01, an early sign that the cold is reaching not just the fingers but the whole person.

There is a real conflict here, because some tasks cannot be done in thick mitts, and bared hands chill fast and can frost-nip in hard cold. The method that resolves it is to prepare for bare-handed work before you bare the hands. Think the fiddly task through while your hands are still warm and gloved: lay out the parts, loosen what can be loosened in advance, position everything to hand, and rehearse the fine movements, so that when the gloves come off the work is as short and certain as it can be made. Then work fast, and rewarm at once: bare the hands only for the part that truly needs bare fingers, do it quickly, and get the hands back into warmth, gloves or armpits or a warm pocket, the moment it is done, before the cold bites. And let the buddy watch: a member absorbed in delicate cold-handed work loses track of their own hands, so their partner keeps half an eye on them, watches for white or waxy fingers or growing clumsiness, and calls a stop to rewarm before a slow job becomes a cold injury. Worked this way, prepared, fast, rewarmed, and watched, even fiddly tasks get done in the cold without the hands paying for it.

Watching for the cold winning

Through all of this work and movement, a member keeps a constant watch, on themselves and on others, for the cold beginning to win. The signs are those of Lesson 01: shivering, then the umbles, the stumbling and mumbling and fumbling and grumbling, and the more dangerous later signs of confusion, drowsiness, and shivering that stops. A member cannot reliably see these in themselves, because the cold dulls the very judgement that would notice them, which is why the buddy system matters: members watch each other, check each other at halts, and speak up when a comrade grows slow, clumsy, or withdrawn. No one is allowed to fall behind unnoticed, for a member left alone and failing becomes a casualty quickly and quietly, and in deep snow, whiteout, or broken ground a straggler is lost from sight in moments.

So the work is broken by regular chances to warm and dry, and the team holds together as one body, counting heads and closing up, never strung out so far that the front cannot see the back. The cold is patient and relentless, but it is beaten by members who beat it with routine and discipline rather than trying to outlast it with effort. The treatment of a member the cold has caught is taught in the Combat First Aid course; keeping the team fit enough that no one needs that treatment is the whole work of this lesson.

The balance between overexertion and standing still

Working in the cold sets two opposite dangers against each other, and a member must hold the middle ground. On one side lies overexertion: sweating, soaking the clothing, and burning through the reserves of energy and fluid the cold will later demand, so an exhausted member chills more easily. On the other lies standing still and growing cold, because a person who stops moving makes very little heat, and a member who halts too long, or sits down to rest and does not get up, chills as surely as one who never moved. Both extremes end in the same place.

The answer is to keep moving gently rather than either driving hard or stopping dead. On a task that demands long stillness, a watch or a wait, keep the blood moving with small steady activity, stamping the feet, swinging the arms, working the fingers, rather than letting the body settle. Halts on the move are frequent but short, long enough to rest and adjust clothing but not to chill, and at a halt a member never sits on snow or cold ground but uses a pack or other insulation between themselves and the cold and reaches for a warm drink. This is where the trail-breaking rotation earns its keep, for the spell at the rear of the file is a rest taken on the move, recovering in the easy track without ever stopping and going cold. Pace the effort, keep gently in motion, and rest warm and briefly: that is how a member holds the balance through a long cold task.

In Practice: A Long Night's Search Across the Flats

You are out on a search through a hard winter night, looking for an elderly man who has wandered from his home across a broad stretch of low, snow-covered ground, and everything in this lesson is at work in how you carry yourself. You shed a layer before the long slope, because climbing will soon warm you and arriving soaked would leave you chilled the moment you stopped. Where the snow lies deep across the flats, the team breaks trail in turns, each taking the lead for a short spell and then dropping to the rear to recover, so no one is wrung out and the pace stays slow enough that no one breaks sweat.

You pick your footing in the dark with care, going the longer way round rather than trust ice you cannot see near the frozen stream, mindful that overflow could soak you to the knee even where the ice held, and that a break-through here would make two casualties out of one. The slope rising to your left is steep, bare, and heavy with wind-blown snow, and you keep well off it, because steep loaded snow is avalanche ground and not yours to judge. When a squall blows up and snow and sky merge into a white blank, you do not press on: you stop, close the team up so no one drifts off, and when you must move you go by compass bearing and pace count as the Navigation and Fieldcraft course taught, trusting the instrument because the eye now tells you nothing.

When the team halts to listen, you keep your feet moving and your fingers working, and you do not sit on the snow. You watch the others as they watch you: when your partner answers slowly and fumbles with their torch, you know the umbles when you see them, and you get them moving, warmed, and checked. What you do for the man when you find him, and for a comrade the cold has caught, belongs to the welfare and Combat First Aid lessons; that you shared the labour, judged the ground, kept your bearings when the world went white, and kept yourself and your team fit to search through the whole long night belongs to this one.

Check Your Understanding

Explain the trap of sweating during hard work in the cold and the discipline of ventilating, pacing, and re-layering that defeats it, and describe why trail-breaking is shared out in rotation when a group moves through deep snow.
Describe the dangers of footing and movement on winter ground, explain why thin ice over water (including overflow) is the gravest hazard and the principles by which a group crosses ice only when it must, and state the firm rule that governs travel in avalanche-prone terrain.
Describe the two vision hazards of winter, whiteout and snow blindness, and the drill or prevention against each, and explain how a member works effectively with cold hands while watching, with their buddy, for the signs that the cold is winning.

Reflection (write a short paragraph): This lesson argues that working and moving in the cold is a balance held by judgement and discipline, not by effort alone, and that the worst dangers, sweating into a chill, trusting bad ice, walking on into a whiteout, going still in the cold, do not feel dangerous at the time. It also argues that the gravest hazards, weak ice and avalanche-prone slopes, are not yours to judge but the expert's, and that your task is to recognise them and defer. Think about a long cold task you may be set, such as a search or a welfare round through the night. Which of these dangers do you think would be hardest to keep watch against once you were tired, cold, and busy, and why might the buddy system, and the discipline of sharing the heavy work, catch what you would miss in yourself?

Summary

The central trap of working in the cold is that hard effort makes a member sweat, the sweat soaks the clothing, and the soaked member then chills badly when they stop; the discipline, following from Lesson 02, is to ventilate and shed layers before exertion, pace the work so as not to sweat, slow down rather than overheat, and add the layers again at once at a halt.
Deep snow is exhausting to move through, so the heavy work of breaking trail is shared by rotating the lead, no one carrying it long enough to be wrung out; snowshoes and skis make snow travel possible by spreading the load so a member rides on top rather than sinking in, and are learned in person.
Winter ground is treacherous underfoot, and slips and falls cause injuries the cold makes doubly dangerous; the gravest hazard is thin ice over water, with overflow and slush as hidden traps, and because judging ice is expert work a member keeps off frozen water where possible, while any necessary crossing spreads the load, ropes the member, and follows the principle of self-rescue and rescue without making a second casualty.
Avalanche-prone terrain, steep, open, snow-loaded slopes, is to be recognised and avoided; whether such a slope is safe is judged only by real expertise and local knowledge, and a member defers to that judgement and never gambles.
Winter robs the sight two ways: whiteout merges snow and sky and steals all bearings, met by the drill of stop, stay together, shelter or wait, and if you must move navigate by compass and pacing (Navigation and Fieldcraft); and snow blindness sunburns the eyes from glare, prevented by proper eye protection or improvised slit goggles.
Winter navigation is that of the Navigation and Fieldcraft course under harder conditions: familiar features are buried or changed and distance is harder to judge, but the compass is still true, so a member trusts the larger features, the pace count, and the bearing.
The cold steals the dexterity of the hands and makes every task slower, and clumsy fumbling hands are also one of the umbles; fiddly work is prepared before the hands are bared, done fast, and the hands rewarmed at once, with the buddy watching.
A member balances overexertion against standing still by pacing the effort and keeping gently in motion, keeps a constant watch for the cold winning using the signs of Lesson 01 and the buddy system, allows no one to fall behind unnoticed, and breaks the work with regular chances to warm and dry; this routine and discipline lets the Army search and carry out welfare work through a long cold night. The treatment of cold injury is taught in the Combat First Aid course.

Moving and Working in Winter