I know you’ll find this rather shocking, but all those white things in the new picture of me aren’t really snowflakes – they’re feathers from an old pillow, which we thought would be a clever way to illustrate a blog about the great outdoors – and coincidentally, as it turns out, they reminded me about one of the coldest nights of my life.

Way back when I was a poor college student who couldn’t afford new camping equipment I went into an army and navy store and plopped down 25 bucks for a used mummy bag before heading off for a winter mountaineering expedition.

You can see where this story is going.

The bag probably had been last used at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, or maybe even earlier during the Siege of Leningrad, and the stitching had all the integrity of a stuffed panda you sewed for arts and crafts at camp.

A virtual blizzard of feathers flew free while I tramped up the snow-covered trail – of course I hadn’t thought to secure the bag properly – so by the time we arrived at the three-sided shelter (by the way, what was the point of the missing wall?) my sleeping accommodations basically consisted of a thin, cotton sack containing less down than a newly hatched duckling.

But guess what? That wasn’t the coldest night of my life.

True, the feathers did remind me about that frigid night in the old mummy bag, but that bitter memory in turn evoked a recollection of an even icier winter evening years later on Camel’s Hump in Vermont, when I seemed to go out of my way to induce hypothermia.

Here’s how you, too, can suffer all night.

1. Climb a 4,083-foot mountain wearing a heavy expedition parka and 50-pound pack, thereby guaranteeing you will be soaked in sweat by the time you reach the summit, even though the air temperature is 20 below zero and the wind is whipping at 50 mph.

2. Decide that the barren, unprotected peak would be an ideal place to change out of your perspiration-drenched inner layer, so you strip down to bare skin while digging around for a dry shirt in your disorganized backpack.

3. Somehow make it back to an unheated cabin that has so many broken windows the gale-force wind inside would prevent you from lighting a match even if there were a fireplace or wood stove.

4. Crawl into a sleeping bag you thought was rated at 20 below zero, but the measurement must have computed using some weird Kelvin-like scale.

All I remember about that long, long night was forcing myself to stay awake and shiver. When morning mercifully arrived I squirmed around to extract the water bottle I had stashed near my chest and discovered, to my horror, that it had frozen solid.

The first thing I did after stumbling down the mountain, driving home with the heater going full blast and using all the hot water in the tank for a 30-minute shower was order a 40-below sleeping bag, a bivvy sack, an inflatable sleeping pad, and a supply of chemical hand-warmers. A wiser man would have bought a ticket to Antigua, or at least Death Valley.

Anyway, I’ve since survived colder nights than that Camel’s Hump ordeal in considerably more comfort – comfort, of course, being a relative term.

I also don’t skimp on cold-weather gear.

I remember once deciding whether or not to buy a pair of insulated “super” gaiters at International Mountaineering Expeditions in North Conway, New Hampshire, when the proprietor, the legendary Everest climber Rick Wilcox, advised me, “You know, nobody ever turned back from the summit because his feet were too warm.”

As I write this, incidentally, the wood stove in our house is roaring away for the first time this season. My threshold for lighting it used to be below 50 degrees, but I’ve discovered numb fingers make more mistakes on the computer keyboard, so I now reach for the kindling if the temperature dips much below 60. Interior, of course. Outside, not too far north, there’s a frost warning.

I’m prepared for winter not just with a 40-below sleeping bag, super gaiters and other such equipment, but also with about eight cords of well-seasoned wood stacked in my sheds.

Later on I’ll bring you up to date on my continuous logging operations, but I’d better stop now and stoke the stove.