You need to be inspired. Here's an little trailer of an film by Werner Herzog. There was an full length version of it, but it was taken down, but you can order it on Netflix. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_wnpkOVIHQ

Rent the film and get inspired. These folks work hard in deep snow and -70F*. Theyre just ordinary folk.

not yet available on netflix, but I added it to my "wish list" anyway...

Jesse, honored to be included on your list of guys you want to hear from -- not sure how merited it is.

I agree with others that a woodstove heated shelter or fire in front of a lean to is a much quicker way to get warm than planning on a snow cave. Plus I find caves claustrophobic.

The first question is how big of a stove you are trying to run. There is a lot to be said for going with the smallest heated shelter you can get away with and a commensurately sized stove because the size of stove you are running and the size of shelter you are trying to heat determines the tool kit. Plus smaller shelters get more of a gain out of body warmth alone.

When I still had a Kifaru medium stove, it pretty much took a 24" bow saw and minimum 20" handled axe to keep it running in the winter. It's not a very efficient stove though. Larger stoves in 8 man or larger shelters, same thing. Right now the only back packable stove I have is my homemade "little pig" which gets the GoLite Utopia very warm and keeps the Seekoutside BCS warm enough. It can be run pretty well with the 6" Gerber slide out saw and little 4"x1/8" blade D2 utility knife I carry. There's an in-between setup that has me carrying an 8"x3/16" bowie OPC gave me and a japanese tree trimming saw. I have also carried the cold steel tomahawk a fair amount as the absolute lightest implement available that allows for a two handed overhand chop.

I must say that I'm in the camp of being biased towards batoning for safety. In my days as a forest fire fighter, I saw first hand what can happen when you mix exhaustion with pulaskis and chainsaws. It takes a lot of very purposeful concentration to stay safe with tools when you are exhausted.

Open fires in front of lean tos are going to be less efficient at heating so you'll want to bias towards the larger tool kits.

Once the snow gets deep enough, the Voile Telepro is always along. It's the real deal for moving a lot of snow quickly and an improved tree well that offers a heck of a lot of shelter can be had in about 5 minutes.

Oh... don't forget about insulation underneath you. Be it closed cell foam in the form of a camp chair or foam pad, or tree limbs or whatever, you need something between you and the snow.

For fire starter, 9 times out of 10 a 2x2" square of bicycle innertube is all I need to get a fire started. Trioxane handles that tenth time. I must admit to using a *lot* of trioxane from time to time in Big W's neck of the woods. A pocket rocket was used as a blowtorch once too. I'm not going to say that a bottle of outright fuel is a bad idea in those conditions. It's not quite that wet where you are though Jesse.

I tend to take a larger stove and smaller tent in the winter if possible. The insulating value of snow is very good. I know this past weekend there was a couple inches of snow on the tent at 2 am and it had been 4 hours since the last load of wood, and the temp inside the tent must have been near 50 while outside it was in the teens.
To bad you can't count on that or that I can't find a reliable way to engineer it. I do have a couple ideas though, but it requires deep snow.

I'm digging this thread... I've camped on snow plenty, but it's usually been spring bear season, or rifle season in November.

This winter, I'm planning on doing it in January and Febuary, on purpose. The logic is, if you can survive dead of winter with your kit, the rest of the year will be a picnic with a backpack on.

my daughter comes home from college on Sat and is looking forward to snow camping. She's pretty cool, IMO.

For me in the Sierras, I worry more about transitional seasons where I get rain/snow/thaw/freeze than just cold. Way easier for me to stay dry & warm when it's constantly below freezing and without rain.

Sort of. The dirty secret is that, as long as you stay with terrain that allows for pulling a sled, winter camping is way more luxurious. You can take more heavy tasty food, have a bigger cushier bedroll, and you can dig a central footwell into the snow that makes tent life downright civilized. The days are shorter so you sleep more. It's a good time for telling stories around the wood stove.

Your not doing the winter camping I am doing.

Location makes such a big difference in what you need. I am going tomorrow for a quick overnight trip with my BCS and roll-up stove to to some prototype testing. I plan on burning a fire for quite a few hours but doubt I will take a saw, an ax or more than my little neck knife. The area I am going is covered with beetle killed Ponderosa pine and there is plenty of wood in limb wood from small twigs to a couple inches in diameter. All wood that size can be broken by hand or foot.

The biggest safety advantage that I see in batoning with a knife over a hatchet or ax is in making kindling. It is one thing to use a full size ax to make kindling at the cabin where I have stable chopping blocks and another on snow covered ground with cold hands.