How I learnt through adversity - A new technique I developed for keeping warm at night high in Spanish Mountains . Written 8th March 2019

A new technique of keeping warm .

This is the true story of an uncomfortable night in the Spanish Pine forest which gradually became a pleasant night as I developed the right technique  . Basically, I was sitting one evening in the village bar up in the mountains North of Malaga.

I've been quite a regular in this bar the last few years during my times in Spain . however the local Spanish men around my age  in this village are quite clicky  when i'm there  and usually stay in their own group leaving me to sit alone in the corner. Maybe partly because their English isn't too good and my Spanish isn't brilliant which means effort.  It is for this reason that i prefer now to go across the road to the hotel which has very pretty Spanish girls working there who are much more friendly .

Anyway I was on the phone to Ron who started to get me paranoid saying "I bet they're going to follow you back to your camp."

Basically due to the fear-mongering Ron was doing I started feeling very nervous and a bit paranoid that the group of village men would follow me back to my sleeping place ( I was sleeping in the shower block on the abandoned camp site .  It was getting late and I snuck out of the bar and quietly headed along the mountain track towards my shower-block .

I walked along the track through the dark night ( it only takes about ten minutes through the pine woods to the abandoned campsite ).  After about 5 minutes a cars headlights  appeared behind me , driving up the track towards me . Thinking this might be the village men following me i made a run for it into the woods before they could catch me in their headlights ( the car was still some way off) . I ran at first then walked very quickly into the woods  down hill till i was several hundred yards downhill of the track and found a clump of low growing Spanish Palms ( Chamaerops humilis ) to hide behind in the dark shadows.  I was nervous and excited at the same time , like i was in an adventure that i had instigated ( i instigated sleeping rough in the first place in the forest near a village).

I looked up hill through the trees and saw the car pull up in a parking lay-by 150 yards above where I hid. After half a minute  i saw a torch swinging side to side way off to my right and uphill a bit, it looked as if someone had come out of the car and was searching for something maybe me !! Of course I will never know the actual truth of who was driving the car and who was walking through the woods with a torch .  There was no way i was taking any chances of sleeping in the shower block that night . If the village men were looking for me and already knew i had been sleeping in the shower block i would be a sitting duck  as there was only one way in and out of the shower block , i would have no escape !

I had no bedding with me in my backpack 

I had planned to use an old blanket I knew about , that I had hidden near a fence.  After about half an hour when the car had driven off up the track and the torch was no longer seen I went and got the blanket . I was a bit dismayed to find the blanket was quite damp .. there must have been some rain since I was last there . The temperature by now was starting to go down , don't forget it was January and up in the mountains. I made a little pile of collected Alleppo-Pine needles (Pinus halapensis ) as a mattress which I piled up against an old retaining wall made of railway sleepers (this part of the forest was inside the boundaries of the abandoned campsite).  I covered myself with the blanket and then with my tarp . The tarp was anchored with three rocks on the top of the retaining wall so it came down into a half tent shape above my bed . I got under the damp blanket but i started to get very cold as the temperature went down . I would say by now the time was ten or eleven pm .

Anyway as I lay down and started to feel decidedly cold i thought of how i can make myself warmer . Had the blanket been dry i think my problems would have been much less and I would have been at a comfortable temperature .

My first plan of action was to cut out as much wind as possible , there was a cold breeze blowing through . I closed both ends of the tarp so i was in a sealed environment though still a small draft entered through gaps. This didn't make much difference. After an uncomfortable 30 minutes especially with the cold feet , I decided to try lighting five or six of my tea lights i had brought with me ,  inside the tent . I did not want to go to sleep with naked flames near me so i set about gathering some smallish , flat rocks (averaging about 8 inches) that were lying around near the tent . I created a miniature cave under the tarp next to where i was sleeping . The cavity inside the mini cave was big enough to fit the tea lights which stayed alight. I closed up the tent again leaving a bit of a gap for ventilation and noticed a slight difference in the warmth inside the tent. i went back to try and sleep but still found my feet were pretty cold. By now probably 3 hours had gone by. I then reduced the inside area of the tent by making it smaller and weighing down the excess tarp with rocks . The temperature crept up more and parts of me were warm from the candles , but overall still not warm enough.

The real breakthrough came when i actually put the damp blanket over the rock cave  with myself also snuggled up   under the blanket . the heat from the candles and from the rocks , which were also nicely heating up , spread right under the entire blanket and all around my body . It was like being under an electric blanket . My cold feet warmed up as my core temperature rose and , with tawny owls and eagle owls hooting around me,  i drifted off to sleep . It was  about three in the morning and the outside temperature was probably around 3 to 5 degrees which is not exactly arctic but cold enough when u only have a damp blanket ! I must emphasize that these flat rocks  were sufficiently large enough to not allow the candle flames to come anywhere near the blanket material or tarpaulin, the heat from them simply rose up through the gaps  and also heated up the rocks too . The rocks were storing the heat, making them a heat sync .