Toboggans

One of the joys of winter camping, assuming you are pulling some sort of sled, is the extra gear you can bring on trail; gear that really goes a long way towards blurring the line between camping and living in the bush.  As opposed to carrying your gear in a backpack, where space is at a premium and, if you are at all like me, you start questioning your choices in life when your pack starts reaching the 50 pound mark, pulling gear on a toboggan, all things being equal, allows you to bring more gear and also a different variety of gear with you on trail.  For example, on our trip we will be hauling along a canvas winter tent and a stove to go with it, both together weighing close to 40 pounds.  It sounds like a heavy load, but considering that the stove and tent will be split up on multiple toboggans, it really only adds roughly 20 pounds per toboggan.  What that setup allows us, as opposed to cold camping, are warm evenings and mornings where gear can be dried out and where we can lounge and relax regardless of what the weather decides to do.  
Traveling with toboggans offers other advantages- the amount of time out on trail without a resupply is longer than if you were backpacking, the food that can be brought is different (better unless you are a fan of monotony or of store bought camping grub), and as opposed to lugging a heavy pack which is always heavy no matter what surface you find yourself on- ice, snow, slush, a fully loaded toboggan on a smooth lake, or even better on ice, pulls with very little effort at all.  Of course cold camping with backpacking tents and the such has its place, say in the mountains where the topography would make it ridiculously hard to pull a sled or for short trips into the back country, but from my experience the extra weight you haul on a toboggan more than pays for itself in the quality of the experience.

The toboggans we will be using from Black River Sleds

Just like any piece of kit, there are many different styles of sleds people use to pull their gear ranging from toboggans to pulks to whatever-you-can-find-at-the-hardware-store models.  If you want to spend a day reading all the pros and cons of each, there is a wealth of opinion and debate on discussion forums like WinterTrekking.com, but for this article we'll just look at the toboggan as that is what we will use for this Boundary Waters trip.

Toboggans have been used for a long time to haul gear and, much like the canoe, come in a variety of shapes, materials and styles.  The up-curve at the front of a toboggan is important as it floats the toboggan up onto the snow pack instead of plowing into the deep snow, but the degree to which it curves up, in some cases forming a candy cane curl or more, is up for debate.  Suffice it to say the nose should curve up to some degree.  The body of the toboggan should be widest in the middle and taper towards the end, much like a coffin shape. This shape allows the toboggan to be turned easier than if it were of uniform width the whole length.

Inexpensive plastic sled hauling firewood

The overall length is more dependent on the amount of time you'll be on trail, but typically a 8-12 foot toboggan is used for back country trips.  There are two main materials to choose from: the more traditional wood or the modern HDPE (plastic).  Both are flexible, durable and make a great toboggan.  The wood requires a bit more care and more maintenance than the HDPE but flows more smoothly and has the advantage of being easily repairable (much like the difference between plastic and wood/canvas canoes). The plastic toboggans on the other hand are more forgiving of abuse and can be rolled up and packed into the back of a truck, whereas a wood toboggan is sometimes an unruly piece of gear to get around.  
As with any gear there is a wide spectrum of options fitting most needs and price ranges. For years I used the $40 hardware store "expedition" toboggan (the orange beauty in the picture above), which although the plastic gets brittle at sub-zero temperatures and is too short for long trips, they do pull nicely and have the added benefit of being easily replaceable.  Ultimately, if you go to far down the worm hole researching gear, you may find yourself sitting at home in front of your computer burning your eye balls reading forum posts while waiting to find that perfect toboggan, where as if you just would have strapped you gear to a upturned folding card table and started puling you'd be out enjoying the thrill of winter on trail.