Winter is the season which slows us down – which asks us to live deliberately – and, in so doing, reveals a whole new world. One of frozen lakes, silent forests, and animal tracks left in fresh snow, as if we were meant to follow them over the hill and beyond the pines.
In the enveloping embrace of a canvas tent, with the wood stove burning and the warm company of fellow travellers, we discover a winter with stories to tell.
In partnership with
Headwaters Wilderness Program and Lure of the North Outfitters have partnered to provide purposeful, fun, and exciting traditional winter hot tent camping experiences to individuals, families, outdoors clubs, outdoor education organizations, universities, and school throughout Ontario.
Combining Lure of the North Outfitters' expertise as a winter camping outfitter with Headwaters' professional educator-guides and reputation for unique program development and delivery, our winter camping programs are genuine and one-of-a-kind.
Winter camping is a unique way to immerse oneself in the winter landscape while learning how to live with it, not against it.
Our trips are beginner friendly, no prior experience in winter camping necessary. With our focus on living comfortably with the wilderness, we provide an opportunity to discover the wonders of winter in a safe and welcoming environment.
With Lure of the North Outfitters providing all the gear and logistical support, and Headwaters providing professional educator-guides as well as custom curriculum development, this program provides people of all ages an authentic, safe, warm, and truly unique winter camping experience.
Authentic Experiences
Educationally Exceptional
Winter Camping for School Groups, Aligned with Your Curriculum
By infusing every trip with local histories and ecological connections, students learn with rather than on the land, and in rather than about community.
The outfitted hot tent camping program provides groups that want to get out of the classroom in the winter season with the opportunity to conduct their program in a warm and comfortable wilderness-living environment, within the natural beauty and solitude of Ontario’s winter wilderness landscape. A variety of camp locations are possible across central and southern Ontario, and logistical support and educator training can be customized to meet each program's specific needs.
Every day that passes further removes awareness of the traditional voyage and the natural world. It is thus, to an exactly equal degree, that each passing day makes the voyage more necessary. To connect with the natural world is to know our place within it – to know our humanity stripped of its insulating artefacts. We are drawn to engage, both by necessity and by choice, no longer interested nor able to find ourselves idly swept along, unconscious to the world. It is to live raw, and to live richly indeed. A truth never more so felt than in winter.
Discover what's beyond the textbook
Drawing lessons from the landscape
If we want to deliver the types of educational experiences our students and our planet need, we have to think outside the box. The Ontario Secondary School curriculum is always our starting point, but it cannot be our end goal. To create the world they want to live in, students need to get out into it. They need to discover for themselves how their academic learning – ever-important – is not only connected to the "real world", but is drawn from it. That is the experience of a Headwaters Immersive Credit Course, which can be conducted as a winter hot tent camping experience at the high school or university/college level.
We start with the premise of re-imagining the classroom: not only taking students outside, but integrating academic lessons into the world around us: taking the place we are in and intentionally building a course that will draw the curriculum components out of the natural and cultural landscape.
This is learning emerging from place: going beyond giving lessons while on the landscape and moving toward drawing learning from the landscape.
Beyond the textbook and the classroom walls, and deeper than simply learning outdoors, our courses are a profound integration of academic learning, personal growth, community-mindedness, and the natural world. Merging the form of a wilderness journey with the learning of the classroom, this is education beyond the ordinary: credit courses which do more than teach, they immerse, providing for students a complex, multifaceted, authentic understanding of an interwoven world with no simple answers.
Winter Hot Tent Camping
Rentals, Guiding, & School Groups
In partnership with:
Cost
Full gear outfitting rental only: Average cost $60-$100 per person/day
Guided trips & school programs: Average cost $100 per person/day + outfitting
Details
Dates: January - March 2026
Ratio: 1:10 leaders to participants, or better
Winter camping experience necessary: None. Guided trips are slow paced and suitable for all experience levels
The Headwaters Team
As a boutique organization with an intentionally small team, everything we do is thoughtful, purposeful, and highly personalized to the needs of our partners. Schools get to know us, and we get to know them.
With combined decades of experience in outdoor education curriculum development, academic research, and wilderness trip guiding, logistics, and risk management, the Headwaters team brings a unique combination of expertise that sets us apart. Our team has led and overseen wilderness trips in the Northwest Territories; guided Indigenous cultural canoe trips for Québec CEGEPs; worked and conducted academic research at outdoor schools from Ontario to the Yukon; regularly present at conferences, publish papers, and sit on Boards and advisory councils for outdoor educators; hold Master's degrees, teaching certifications, and industry leading wilderness guide qualifications.
Rather than separate the academic researcher, the curriculum designer, the teacher, and the wilderness guide, we bring together these skill sets toward a common cause – developing and delivering extraordinary educational experiences. By putting all of these skills together, in one team, we create a strength of united purpose that is reflected in the quality and uniqueness of our Immersive Credit Courses.
As professionals in outdoor education, we’re aware of the widely varying degrees of exposure, comfort levels, and expected outcomes held by schools, staff, parents, and students alike. Given this dynamic, we strive to have our programs be as customizable as possible, to meet schools where they're at, viewing our relationship with schools less as a third party provider and more as a collaborator in crafting exceptional education opportunities.
"It is easy to understand that all life is physically connected through our chemical composition… However, it is on the [kinship] level that it is much more difficult, and indeed absurd to some, to contemplate that we share a connection to all life, but we do. This has to be felt and experienced – it cannot be rationalized.
~ Dr. Soren Bondrup-Nielsen