As it happens I'm leaving for a camping trip in the snow tomorrow morning. It's the sierras (relatively warm) and I'm leading a bunch of inexperienced scouts (so not a particularly grueling trip) but still with opportunities for danger. I was surprised how many of these SV kids signed up and were then pulled by their parents -- 50%! Only a few years ago these trips were immediately oversubscribed, with nobody getting pulled even when it turned out to be blizzard conditions. The kids, at least, are enthusiastic.
Winter conditions in the continental US are, by comparison with the Icelandic conditions in this article, rather clement. The worst I've been in here has been -15 F (-26 C) though that was before the wind...oh the wind! But I have friends who camp out and work in northern Canada, Alaska, and Antarctica. They have to deal with real cold! Me, I go out for a week with my dog and a friend and then presto I'm back in toasty civilization. Not really rugged at all. But it is why I drive a dinosaur-burner.
That's tragic--but let's keep it in context. It happened before WWII. Some of these young boys were wearing shorts and sandals (without hats) in a blizzard, climbing up a mountain slope with a 70% gradient (black diamond ski slopes start at 40%), without any sort of topological or detailed map, no lights, no ability to communicate with the outside world and one adult to supervise 27 students. I can't imagine any of those things are true for Gumby's trip.
Lack of preparation and lack of looking ahead causes most problems. Of the three times I have come close to dying in the backcountry (all of them due to stupidity on my part!) two of them were due to failure to look ahead. Both times I was saved by my dog.
Thinking you know what to do is a recipe for disaster. Its the same thing that causes you not to check the return value from a system call "hey, this can't fail".
I teach adults how to be out there safely and how to train and look after kids who of course don't yet have appropriate judgement.
FWIW, did a winter camping trip with kid's SV troop a few weeks back. no one got pulled, and had a few last minute joins. with that said, it was unreasonably warm that weekend (it barely got down to -1 C at night), which was a bummer.
Only one parent did give that explanation (I don't care about the explanation -- why put people on the spot?) though frankly being outside away from other people is likely the safest place you could be in that regard!
I was recently in Northern-ish Ontario, and I had to pump some gas, so I was in the shade of the roof overhead the pumps. It was about -40 degrees.
I was standing there in relatively dense clothing, since it was cold, and I was out there for maybe 1-2 minutes.
It was the first time I really felt and could believe that standing out there in that temperature would cause me to simply die in not very long. I could feel the bite through my thick coat, through my boots, through my hat. I could feel the heat leaching out. Cold like that is no joke.
Winter conditions in the continental US are, by comparison with the Icelandic conditions in this article, rather clement. The worst I've been in here has been -15 F (-26 C) though that was before the wind...oh the wind! But I have friends who camp out and work in northern Canada, Alaska, and Antarctica. They have to deal with real cold! Me, I go out for a week with my dog and a friend and then presto I'm back in toasty civilization. Not really rugged at all. But it is why I drive a dinosaur-burner.