Sparkle & Ice is Girlguiding’s big winter survival camp event. This was its third year and also my third year there.
Sparkle & Ice happens at three training & activity centres simultaneously – Waddow in Lancashire, Blackland Farm in Sussex and Foxlease in Hampshire. I took my Rangers to Foxlease and the adventure started with getting the train at just after 8am on Saturday, followed by a bus from the nearest station, all weighed down with warm clothes for the weekend and camping equipment. Yes, you’ve seen the word camp twice already. It’s February. It snowed twice here last week. I got anxious messages from parents about camping in temperatures of down to minus six.
We knew February was going to be cold when we booked it back in the autumn but you don’t really realise it until the camp is almost on top of you. I’d been stressing warm clothes and good sleeping bags and hot water bottles for months and Girlguiding added indoor space at the last minute. This was my third Sparkle & Ice – we’d had wind, rain and mud at the first one and then although it had been cold at the second, I’d been a volunteer and sleeping indoors. Now we were looking at real sparkle and real ice.
We got on the train with all our luggage – each person had a bag of stuff plus a bedding roll (except me; my bedding was all inside the giant 100l duffel bag on my poor back) and we also had group equipment of two tents plus a bag of spare sleeping bags. It’s not too much to carry, as long as you’re not going too far on foot. We took over two tables and even so, I had to sit in the seat behind them with the spares bag. My oldest Ranger spent the time on the train filling in her health form – the 14/15-year-olds had remembered to bring theirs with them but the oldest, who is also a Guide leader, had forgotten to pick hers up. Fortunately she’s well into the age when she’s allowed to fill in her own.
At Brockenhurst we dragged everything across the tracks and to the bus stop. I’d been expecting a shuttle bus up until about a week before camp and suddenly there were only two units coming by train and we had to make our own way from the station. Fortunately, the local buses were reasonably cooperative and the drivers, as always, were brilliant. I knew where the Foxlease bus stop was but must have pressed the button a bit too early as the driver yelled “Do you want here or Foxlease?” which meant I was trying to stop us at the wrong place. Well done, driver.
We pitched our tents on a field still well-coated in crispy ice. I have no problem with my little two-man tent and the younger girls got on reasonably well with the big five-man Ranger tent until two acquaintances of mine came by to chat and to offer unsolicited concrit on the tent-pitching. Once that was done, it was off to the opening ceremony which was not terribly sparkly. The traditional marching band couldn’t come so some of the staff and volunteers paraded around the courtyard with recorders they couldn’t play and the traditional lighting of the bonfire with copious lighter fluid wasn’t positioned where most of us could actually see it. Never mind. I sent the Rangers off to try out activities and to get to know the place before lunch while Pixie – oldest Ranger/Guide leader – and I went to find out what hoverball archery was.
I realised it must be something odd when we arrived to find it right in front of the horses. You don’t usually put sharp flying missiles near things that can be injured by them and it turned out to be inflatable archery where you use a foam arrow to hit a ball held up by a column of air. Ridiculous but fun. I wish I’d discovered it years ago.
Lunch was uninspiring. Guided by previous events, we’d expected a takeaway lunch of sandwiches, crisps & fruit and instead we had soup and bread. The picky-eater Ranger I’d been concerned about finished her soup in record time and then hoovered up everyone else’s leftovers, so that was good. The picky-eater leader made do with just the bread.
The rest of the day passed in a haze of activities. We mostly stuck together, the Rangers broadly leading the way while the adults followed. We did real archery, we toasted marshmallows, we went to the shop for sweets and badges and we did our ticketed activities – a planetarium, an owl experience and an assault course. The planetarium was fine, exactly what you’d expect. We sat inside an inflatable dome and watched a series of short films about space and astronauts and tried not to fall asleep in a warmish place after an early start. The owl experience… was a bit more mixed. The owl people had expected to have gone home an hour before we arrived & hadn’t had a break, although I found the people were more irritable than the owls who were surprisingly content to perch on people’s hands and have their feathers gently stroked. These owls were Meg the Little Owl, Nigel the Spectacled Owl and Hazel the European Eagle Owl who is a vast and intimidating beastie, albeit one who actually only weighs six pounds – about as much as a big kitten. The assault course was inflatable and much beloved by Guides and Rangers alike, although the adults found it all much harder work than the teenagers.
We put bedtime off for as long as possible. My Rangers are not disco, DJ, dance competition or surf competition types so we lurked in the craft room playing board games until the closing ceremony at 10pm. I struggled a little with my Articulate partner and then we all struggled with the genuine 80s Blockbusters. Quite apart from some questions being phrased as if they were written in the Victorian era, giving us difficulty in even understanding what it wanted, some of the questions were in themselves very out of date. My Rangers had no idea what J was the son of Lennon and I had no idea of the capital of Yugoslavia, a country that ceased to exist when I was about – oh, seven. As late as that?
The closing ceremony was a laser show, presumably because of complaints from locals after the traditional fireworks show. But the laser show was very good – two sets of lasers shone across the tarmac at the front of the house, making crazy patterns on the trees and also forming shapes and colours in the air above our heads, all to music. Naturally, it ended with Let It Go. What other music could you possibly close a winter survival camp on an actual snowy day with?
And then it was bedtime. I gathered my Rangers. We had an offer of indoor space and if they intended to take it up, it would be better to go to bed inside than to drag their bedding across a freezing cold campsite in the dark an hour later when the tent got too cold. But after a short debate, they decided they’d rather try sleeping in the tent. They had good sleeping bags and warm clothes and hot water bottles. So I sent them off to bed and then trudged back across the site with Pixie to fill all the bottles and we all settled in for a night that would reach minus four degrees celsius.
Actually, it wasn’t too bad. Well, I had a four season sleeping bag inside a two season sleeping pod – that’s like a big loose sleeping bag wide enough to starfish in, plus a hot water bottle plus my camp blanket on top. I’m not entirely certain what my Rangers had. I didn’t go inside their tent and inspect their bedding but they said they had plenty of extra blankets and they had three spare sleeping bags between them in the spares bag.
I mean, I didn’t sleep. I rarely do in a tent and this was 100 yards from a main road on the other side of the trees, plus I had a tentmate in the form of Pixie, who was not equipped with good bedding and who breathed like a steam train all night. But other than a brief shiver half an hour after getting into bed, I was warm enough. I even had to take my socks off. I hadn’t realised until this weekend that I’m a big fan of removing socks. To keep my feet warm in my sleeping bag they need skin-to-skin contact, not damp sweaty fabric separating them. To keep the Rangers’ feet warm in wellies I frequently recommended removing a pair of socks to stop their toes getting crushed and therefore cold.
We woke up – or decided it was time to start thinking about getting up, anyway – to ice on the inside and outside of the tent. I’d put my phone inside a mountain mitten next to my bed and the cold had drained the battery, although putting it inside my clothes inside my sleeping bags restored it to 38% battery for an hour or so and I’d left a drink in the porch, which had turned to solid ice. All the same, I’m quite good at mornings in the tent and I was up, back into extra layers and had my sleeping bags packed up before Pixie or the Rangers even moved.
Then I made the big mistake. I went outside and found the tent dusted fairly thickly with frost. I casually brushed it off. Actually, it was thick enough that it took a little effort and apparently that “little effort” was too much for the plastic windows. They smashed. Plastic film windows! Those things are made of plastic film instead of glass precisely because it doesn’t smash. Turns out if they’re cold enough and you apply a little force, they’ll just smash. Good thing it was a one-night only thing and the first thing we were doing after breakfast was striking camp.
The Rangers had done ok with the cold. We all agreed that it would have been nice to have the hot water bottles refilled at about 4am but other than that, we hadn’t been as cold as we’d expected in a tent in February at minus four. When I asked if anyone would come back next year I got a yes and a couple of non-committal maybe grunts. That’s not an outright no and I’ll take that as a triumph.
On Friday it had sounded like madness, camping in this weather, when the week had been marked by snow but on the whole, I think it went very well & I’ll definitely be offering it again next year.