How to Survive in the Wilderness

Transcript The things that may happen to you in a back country, most commonly are cuts, and athletic injuries, like, sprains. So I happen to have a little gash here, a little flap. With something that’s like a cut, that’s not bleeding very much, if you pack a very simple First Aid kit, and I’m …

Transcript Another way to tell north, south, east, and west is by using a watch. And the way we do that is to take the hour hand, this is in the northern hemisphere, by the way, if you were at the equator, if you’re in arctic, it doesn’t work, and if you’re south of the …

Transcript The problem with round stones is that they’re very difficult to pick up because they’re very, very hot. So we can make a set of fire tongs that’ll help us pick those up. And to make a set of fire tongs, what I’ve done is just found a stick, broken in half, that has …

Transcript The bed itself is going to be right down underneath here. Before I even think about sleeping in here, the ground itself is really, really wet. It’s been raining for the last couple days. That’s something that I wouldn’t lay on. This ground will suck the heat right out of you and reduce your …

Transcript To purify water, one of the ways that you can purify it is to take rocks, hot rocks, and grabbing them from the fire with your tongs, cleaning them off and then picking them up, and putting them in your water. So I clean them off first and then put them in the water. …

Transcript So one of the things people are oftentimes really concerned about when they’re out in the wilderness, out camping, is animals, and animals really aren’t as big a concern as usually people make them out to be. So there’s a lot of animals out here that people are worried about, bears probably being number …

Transcript All snares, or at least spring snares like this, are an exercise and an adjustment. So you adjust a little bit, and you see how well it works. Trim a little here, trim a little there, and hopefully you’ll hit the perfect combination of sensitivity and security. You can have a secure trigger that …

Transcript The traditional signal for help is three of anything. So, if you were signalling by fire for an aircraft you’d have a triangle with three fires. Three fires would indicate that you needed help. If you needed to call someone by whistling a lot of backpacks have whistles on them now. So, you’d blow …

Transcript Hi, my name is Marko. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a long time. I went camping, and fishing, and hunting with my family when I was little and I did that until I was 13, and then I decided I don’t need them anymore, I’ll do it on my own. So …

Transcript If you have to signal someone and the aircraft or someone that’s distant on the horizon, one of the ways that you can use the sun to signal is by having a reflective surface. Right here, I have a mirror. You can also use something like a CD or DVD. That will give you …

Transcript So we have our tree bent down. We have a notch in the lower tree. We have a notch in the trigger mechanism. There’s a hook tied to a piece of found fishing line. The hook is a safety pin. So the idea is to bring this tree down. Get in the notch. Get …

Transcript Right over here, we have a beautiful shelter that’s already made for us. We don’t really have to work on it. We’ve got this tree that’s fallen and underneath it, we have this beautiful root ball cave. We have a roof. We have three and a half walls. Inside, it’s relatively dry. It’s rain …

Transcript We have a piece of oak that has a little notch in it that’s going to attach to the birch tree that’s going to be a spring. And the very top, we cut another notch that’s going to hold this piece of cordage. The cordage, I put a clove hitch in; you can put …

Transcript A knife is a great tool to have if you’re making a cutting board for your fish, it’s a great tool if you’re making kindling, it’s a great tool if you’re making a bow drill. You don’t always have a knife. You should, but if you don’t, you can make the same tools out …

Transcript One of the things that’s a big concern, or a big factor, that’s going to influence how you do things when you’re out in the wilderness is what sort of weather you’re having. People like to know in advance what the weather’s going to be like. Oftentimes, that means pulling out your iPhone and …

Transcript So I’ve been adding stones and also turning the stones over. Just turning them over kicks up the heat because… [rock explodes] Hand-grenade stone. I’m okay. That’s an important point. Sometimes you have rocks that soak up a lot of water, you don’t want to put them in the fire because they will explode. …

Transcript So right now we have a nice hot fire with a lot of coals. Not really a tall fire, but we have just what we need to cook on. Even getting it down a little bit lower and having a little bit less flame and a little bit hotter coals is going to give …

Transcript As I get boiling water in here, what I’m going to do is take some of these rocks out and replace it with an egg. This is going to be how to boil your eggs. You want to boil for, I don’t know, three minutes or so. You’ve got a really hard rolling boil …

Transcript What I have here is a kit that I carry when I am with a group. It has in it everything that I would need to take care of myself and another person or a couple people in a situation where we were stuck out for a long time, and we had to deal …

Transcript How does one keep clean and smelling fresh in the outdoors? To take care of yourself as far as keeping clean and odor free in the wilderness, there’s some traditional methods that work really, really well. In fact, some of the traditional methods are now being used by clothing companies that want to create …

Transcript There are many ways to cook our fish. We could just lay it in the coals. We can take a couple sticks, lay them over the coals, and put our fish right over, so that it’s not totally burning on the fire, but it’s getting enough heat to cook it. That should cook pretty …

Transcript Hopefully we’re going to have fish for dinner tonight. In order to get that, we’re going to set up a fishing snare. To make a fishing snare, we need a lake, hopefully that has some fish in it; a hook which I don’t have, so I’m going to use a safety pin; some fishing …

Transcript In the survival kit itself, there’s a variety of items. You might notice that most of my items are geared towards taking care of the big five things which are, shelter, fire, food, water, and also being found. So to start off with being found, I have a flare. A flare is excellent for …

Transcript If you are faced with the situation where you might have to spend the night outside; you’ve been hiking, you get turned around, you can’t find your way back, you can’t get back, you need to spend the night where you’re at. Some of the things you want to look for are natural shelter, …

Transcript In order to make my fireplace, what I’m going to do is scrape away a lot of the leaves that are right here. Again, very, very wet, but once I get a fire going, it’ll dry all this out, really dry, and potentially light it. So we don’t want that to happen. We’re going …

Transcript A lot of the time people ask me about making their own cordage when they’re out in the wilderness. I can tell you about some traditional cordages which is probably not the first thing I would recommend, but work really well if you didn’t have anything else to go with. Sinew, which is tendon, …

Transcript The trigger is going to be two notched pieces of wood that pop open when the fish bites, and that is going to hopefully set the hook and bring us some dinner. So the first part of my trigger is going to be a hard wood, and I’ve selected this piece of oak from …

Transcript We’ll take our fish out, dip it in this bowl. And the cutting board is a piece of cedar. I had another little knife I made. We can use this to cut through our fish, right here behind this gill. We’re going to take off his head. Actually, there’s some nice meat right there …

Transcript Now that we’ve built a basic roof frame, what we’re going to do is sort of add shingles and insulation. What I found was a dead oak, an oak tree that fell over. Perfect for what we need, in that we don’t have to rake up everything to begin with because there’s a lot …

Transcript One of the things I’m doing now is collecting wood to take over to my shelter site. This is going to provide the framework for the shelter itself. The rock wall is going to be part of the shelter. It’s going to be kind of the ridge line. This stuff can kind of be …

Transcript If you had a pot it would be easy to cook. If you have a nice campfire, a nice cooking fire, sometimes you might find yourself without a pot. If you don’t have a pot you’re going to need to improvise and make a bowl. The bowl that I’ve made right here, or I’m …

Transcript A way to tell direction with using the sun and a stick is to place a stick in the ground. The sun is going to cast a shadow. When the shadow is cast you’re going to put a mark right here. There we go. We have a nice shadow line right here. And we’re …

Transcript We definitely got a nice water source here. If we had to leave here and go some place where we didn’t know whether there was water, how may we go about taking water with us? Well, there are several ways that we could transport water without a water bottle. However, most of them involve …

Transcript So right now, if we’re looking for food, one of the things that we want to bear in mind is what is growing in this season. Right now all the beautiful spring greens, the fiddlehead ferns, all the spring and summer time fruits, the berries that would be blooming in the summer time, are …

Transcript We talked about going up high to find water. When we were standing on top of the little nob we could see that there was all sorts of water down below us. About a hundred meters from where we were standing there’s another water source. And one of the nice things about going up …

Transcript So now we have food. We have fish and we have eggs. We probably could eat them all right now. However, if we had a cache of food, if we hiked in with food, if you’re backpacking with food, and you’re not carrying it on you, you’re going to sleep for the night, you …

Transcript So this is the beginning of our fire. What I would do is eventually spread this fire, once we get a good bed of coals, all the way down to both ends of our hearth. Right now our fire needs a little attention. One of the things that your fire is going to require …

Transcript I’m just going to take this and kind of get our teepee structure set up. One of the big mistakes that people make when they’re making their fire is they think you need to put bigger sticks like this on to start. That’s pretty hard to get lit especially if you have bad weather, …

Transcript Now that we have our house, we’re going to make a fire to keep it warm. There are several woods that we could use and several things that we can use for tinder. We collected grass, so we have a lot of grass like this, which is great. And instead of river grass, this …

Transcript We’ve looked at starting a fire with a flint and steel. We talked about starting a fire with a lighter. The traditional way that people started fires for a long time is with the classic rubbing two sticks together, and that’s what this is. This is a bow drill fire. It’s made by getting …

Transcript Water is one of the big five most important things that you’re going to need to have if you’re out in a wilderness situation. Lack of water, dehydration, or hypernatremia as it’s being referred to now is very, very problematic and one of the things that you need to ensure so that you function …

Transcript This beautiful purple plant that we’re looking at here is called poke sallet or pokeweed and sometimes also called inkberry. These berries turn really, really purple; the ones I have here are dried out, but they make a great purple dye. The nice thing about this plant, this one obviously doesn’t have very much …

Transcript Okay, so I’m not going to go over acorns, because most people know what an acorn looks like. But this is a tree that’s a shag bark hickory. You can tell why it’s called a shag bark hickory if you look at the bark, it looks relatively shaggy and it produces hickory nuts. Shag …

Transcript We’ve walked through the woods. We’ve found an open field. Totally different environment that we’d been walking through in a hardwood forest, and now we’ve come to this beautiful open field which has a lot, a lot of resources for us. We saw dry leaves that we could use in the woodland. Now that …

Transcript So there’s a lot of wild animals in this area. There’s a lot of mammal evidence. This tree right here in itself is a run for a raccoon. It’s got some raccoon droppings on it. It would be a great place to set up a trap. Just like the tree we saw earlier that …

Transcript So we’ll see how this works. The bow is a piece of parachute cord tied between the two ends of a piece of birch. So when you’re making a bow drill fire, you want to lock your wrist along your shin and draw the bow back and forth. Nice, smooth, long strokes. And when …