A Hard Winter

[Tarrel]

Scythe, sounds like your local community is a bit like mine. Rural, smaller communities do seem to have a greater in-built level of resilience compared to interconnected and inter-dependent folks in the cities.

For what it's worth, camping gas stoves can be made much more effective in cold weather by inverting the cylinder. It's therefore a good idea to go for a stove that attaches to the canister by a flexible hose, rather than screwing directly onto the cylinder. Then you can invert the cylinder and mount it in a holder of some kind (home made or bought for the purpose). Also, the very popular "briefcase style" stoves that run on the long thin cylinders are butane only, rather than a butane/propane mix. This perform worse in cold weather, to the point of being useless (unless being used indoors of course).