The temperature this morning dipped to 3 below zero. The cold snap, coming after a wintry snowstorm the day before, reminded me of a similar day in December 1983 when the temperature dropped to 9 below while I was camping out. I consider myself fortunate to have survived that night with all my fingers and toes intact, and to have learned from the experience.

Back then two close friends, Johnny and Gordo, persuaded me to go camping with them. I didn’t relish camping in winter, but the thought of buddy time away from my newspaper job appealed a lot. We intended to stay a couple of nights in a patch of woods where Johnny, a true woodsman, sometimes hunted deer.

We left for this hastily planned trip equipped with a tarp, a cooler of food and beer, sleeping blankets, firewood and some straw, all of which we loaded into my red VW microbus.

The drive to our camping spot 15 miles out of town was chilly, but we had on warm coats, gloves and winter boots. I don’t recall the weather forecast coming up for discussion. This was decades before cell phones, weather apps and social media could have warned us what we were in for. Still, we had newspaper, ,radio and TV forecasts. I don’t recall if we ignored them or if the polar air took all by surprise.

We reached the patch of woods as daylight faded. We started a fire and strung a rope between two trees. We hung the tarp over the rope and staked down the corners to make a lean-to to protect us from the wind and reflect some heat from the fire.

As the evening progressed we noticed the plunge in temperature, but without a thermometer or cell phones we had no idea just how cold it was. We kept throwing wood on the fire, straying from it just long enough to answer nature’s call.

Finally, I spread out my sleeping bag on some straw under the lean-to. My bag was an Army surplus model that had a decent layer of down and was narrow at the feet like a mummy’s sarcophagus. I thought it would keep me sufficiently warm, but after an hour or so I awoke to find my feet pretty well numb. I got up to stomp some feeling back into my toes and found my friends still warming themselves at the fire. Finally we all retired, and I got a few hours of sleep.

The cold woke me up about the time the sky was starting to show a little color before dawn. I stayed in my cocoon for a while until I realized it wasn’t getting any warmer, so I got up, put on my boots and edged closer to the fire.

As we rubbed our hands over the crackling flames we sized up our situation. The eggs in the cooler, to our amazement, were frozen solid. How cold did it get? The firewood was running low, but we had some comforts.

By melting ice we were able to brew a pot of coffee. That steaming cup, enjoyed amid the brutal cold, remains the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had. And the rising sun cast a brilliant, bluish light through the frost-covered limbs of our tree canopy, an unforgettable scene.

We decided to pack it up and head back to town but soon discovered the van was going nowhere. The engine would barely turn over due to the cold, a condition we tried to alleviate by shoving some coals under the rear-mounted engine. The heat made almost no difference, and the attempts to start the engine ran down the battery.

We began to walk down a snow-covered gravel road to the nearest farmhouse. By now the sun was high enough to give an illusion of warmth, and the exercise warmed our bodies and lifted our spirits.

We knocked on the door of the first house we came to, and to our relief the owner answered. He was surprised, not so much by a visit from unexpected strangers but by our being outdoors at all. It was he who broke the news that the overnight temperature reached 9 below.

After giving us a ride to camp and jump-starting the van, he went home. I don’t recall his name, and both my good friends have since passed so I may never learn who helped us, but I was sure glad he was there when we needed help.

The experience of that outdoors adventure made a vivid impression, and we repeated the winter campout the next year and for many years afterward. The number of participants steadily grew until the charm of “roughing it” it was all but lost, and so it ended.

Looking back I’d say we were foolhardy to set out with so few supplies and so little regard for the expected weather conditions. Had we known, we might have changed our minds and missed out on a truly unforgettable and mostly positive experience.

Likewise, had I known how difficult it would be to open a bakery 10 years ago, I might not have attempted it. But as with any endeavor, you deal with the challenges as they come and hope they don’t occur all at once. You learn from mistakes. And you look for and lean on people who can help you along the way, friends as well as strangers.

I would add that you don’t have to be a little crazy and overly optimistic to run a small bakery, or any business for that matter, but it helps. And without that leap of faith, that venture into the unknown, you can miss out on a lot. Like the best cup of coffee ever, and the self-knowledge that comes from taking on a challenge.