To anwser jakub and PM seattle's questions above;

I planned my winter trip to conclude on a one way road that dead ends in the mountains, ensuring less and less traffic until it became 1 car an hour or less. A lot of the busier stretches were on bike trails, roads with adequate shoulder, or little used back roads. I still yielded the entire road AND shoulder to dump trucks and loggers when necessary by slacking it off into the ice and grit on the sides - very little "VC lane hogging" in the winter! At any time, if the roads had become closed in with snowbanks without adequate shoulder AND heavy traffic, I would have found an alternate route or been prepared to scrub the trip.

I'd say a trip to into national forest lands onto sparsely used roads plowed for winter recreationalists would be good choices for winter tours.

2) never use a stove inside a tent, I don't care how foul it is outside. I don't even recommend cooking in the vestibule, one stove flare up and your main shelter and maybe your sleeping bag is toast and you are left in a bad, bad way, staring old man winter right in the face.

You can cook right outside the door though, and digging a snow kitchen right there is handy for storing all the stove goodies, etc as well as block the wind. I only burn a candle lantern inside the tent. I try to cook while I'm in my sleeping bag in the morning, not at night.

3) hypothermia is a definite worry; and the best way to combat that is be very aware of your conditions. I've been winter camping for 25 years, have given myself hypo as a kid several times, and have plenty of experience as a both a mountain rescue volunteer and backcountry ski patroller at Mount Rainier Nat'l Park, so speak from experience... be ready to stop quick to add layers, but if you are still chilling out, you need to immediately stop, seek shelter, and brew up. Depending on conditions, you may want to tent up for the night, it's going to be dark in a few hours regardless.

I added a bunch of winter camping tips to the 'winter touring' thread if anyone wants a bunch more tips gleaned from years of sleeping in snowbanks and calling it fun...

these pics are totally off biking topic, but wanted to share... here's a picture of some men desperately trying to avoid hypothermia while staying stylish on the summit of Mount Saint Helens, Mother's Day 2003...you can't do that anymore!

and a pic of me trying to not get hypothermia dangling from the bottom hatch of a Chinook twin rotor chopper on mountain rescue training ops above Mount Rainier.