I happened to see The Revenant this weekend in the theater, and in many ways it reminded me of Mad Max, only with ice instead of deserts. Food, fire, and clothing become the scarce resources in such a setting--and that's not even a fully iced over area; there were still plenty of trees and sources of running water for people to take advantage of. A howling wasteland of ice and snow would be another level entirely.
Cold survival is more difficult in many ways than in the desert. There's so many little ways to get killed in the cold. Let the fire go out, you die. Lose your flint and steel in the snow, you die. Get your clothes too wet, you die. Crevasses, avalanches, blizzards, slipping on the ice, breaking through the ice, caught outside at night, die die die die die.