Winter Camping Tips on RV Podcast 378

With these winter camping tips, you'll be warm and cozy, hiking and snowshoeing with confidence, and loving all the good times around a roaring campfire deep in the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

We recorded this episode of the RV Podcast entirely on location at the beautiful Tahquamenon Falls State Park in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. We've done a campout up here for 10 years now every January and it's become a highlight of the year for us and the many camping friends who join us in the woods.

You can click the video below to see the YouTube version of the podcast.

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Winter Camping Tips Show and Tell!

We had so much fun doing this podcast. We had a bunch of newcomers join us, as well as many returning winter campers. They came from all over the Midwest and as far away as Nebraska.

The weather was cold but beautiful. The snow gauge at the park measured 16 inches on the level ground.

On Sunday, as we broke camp and headed back home, we were being chased with a massive Upper Peninsula lake effect snow blizzard with 40 miles per hour winds off Lake Superior and a predicted dump of 15 inches of snow. Wind chills were predicted to drop to 20 below zero Fahrenheit.

Chris Grever Schuhle took this photo of the snowy drive back home

But except for a bit of white-knuckled windy and snow-blown driving when most of us crossed the five-mile-long Mackinaw Bridge that separates Michigan's Upper from the Lower Peninsulas, we all safely made in over and became trolls once again (trolls are what Yoopers call people who live below the bridge).

Tahquamenon Falls State Park is a great place for winter camping

Probably the best of our winter camping tips is to go to Tahquamenon Falls State Park!

Tahquamenon Falls State Park is one of Michigan's biggest, encompassing some 50,000 acres and stretching over 13 miles of Upper Peninsula wilderness.

The centerpiece of the park, and the very reason for its existence, is the Tahquamenon River with its waterfalls.

The Upper Falls (shown above in a photo I took during this year's campout) is one the largest waterfalls east of the Mississippi. It has a drop of nearly 50 feet and is more than 200 feet across. The falls always, well, fall. They don't freeze, though the river does up and downstream.

That's because of the swift current. A maximum flow of more than 50,000 gallons of water per second has been recorded cascading over these falls. And if you're wondering about the dark brown/copper-colored water, it's not pollution. The color comes from the tannins of the tree roots and vegetation that grow along the riverbanks.

Tahquamenon Falls is actually divided into two sections - the Upper and Lower Falls.

The Lower Falls

Four miles downstream from the Upper Falls is a series of five smaller falls cascading around a river island known as the Lower Falls.

Although not as dramatic as the Upper Falls, they are equally magnificent and on our campout, we always snowshoe from the campground to the lower falls. Some years, the most hearty among us then snowshoe the river trail that runs between the lower and upper fal...