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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 not a real fan of carrying a huge kit, all you have to do is apply direct pressure to a cut. So direct pressure will stop bleeding and hold it there. So if I hold that flap of skin down, I’m holding it with my thumb, holding it for a few minutes, it’ll stop and the skin will adhere back to the rest of your body.

If you have injuries that are athletic injuries, like, you twist your knee, you twist your ankle, there are a lot of great things that you can use in the environment to take care of those injuries. They have an Ace bandage that works really well. I don’t have an Ace bandage in my kit, but you want to, RICE an athletic injury, which is rest it, ice it, or cool it down, compress it and elevate it.

Elevation is easy. Resting is easy. Not really. A lot of people want to keep walking on it. That just causes more injury. Cooling it down. You can cool it down with mud. You can cool it down with sphagnum moss, which grows all around here. So you can pack it with moss, you can wrap it with a t-shirt that gives you compression, that gives you coolness, and that will take care of a sprain, or strain, or something like that.

So with a cut you want direct pressure, and then you want to clean your injury. In my kit I carry band-aids, some larger band-aids, some big gauze pads. I carry duct tape. Inside of here is safety pins. I also carry some hand warmers.

One of the other things that I carry in my First Aid kit is a mirror. A mirror works great for signaling. And this all goes in my emergency kit by the way. So I can signal with this. But it also allows me to search for dangerous animals, aka, ticks in places that I might not normally be able to see. So this is an important piece of First Aid equipment that also allows you to take things out of your eye.

So if you get something in your eye, that’s another common injury, you get a stick or a piece of trash in your eye, allows you to look into your eye and wipe it out. I just happen to have a little mask if I’m doing CPR or rescue breathing. I have a iodine wipes, again, band-aids.

Band-aids can be used as steri-strips to close big wounds. Oftentimes I will carry something that’s like a Pepto and a pain-killer in my First Aid kit, that if you do have something that’s stomach or a medical condition you have something to take care of that.

So athletic injuries and cuts and stuff are the most often things you’ll get. In addition to that, you may get blisters, and somewhere in here, I believe I have some moleskin. Moleskin is great to put over blisters. There’s actually better stuff out there now that’s gel packs that you can put over blisters that work really well.

So these simple items are what I carry with me. That, and improvisation will allow you to take care of almost all your back country injuries.

One thing that also works really well in combination with your First Aid kit is iodine tablets so you can make an iodine solution, irrigate your wound. Have some iodine wipes in there.

So this is a really simple, really lightweight First Aid kit that you can carry with you. All this fits into about half this bag and weighs a pound or so. So it’s really light, really easy, and really useful to carry with you in the back country.

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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 equator, it’s the opposite. But if you take the hour hand of the watch, right now it’s almost 3:00, and we point the hour hand at the sun, the distance between the hour hand and 1:00, because it’s Daylight Savings Time now, if we split that distance, which would be 2:00, that’s going to give us our southerly direction. And the opposite of 2:00, which is 8:00, will be our northerly direction. So our hour hand’s pointing towards the sun, the half a distance between 3:00 and 1:00 is 2:00, 2:00 will be pointing directly south, and 8:00 will be pointing directly north. So here’s our north/south line.

And this stick and shadow should agree with the watch stick and shadow. But basically, we’ve got south right there, north right there. And if we have the north star, Polaris, it would be right there.

So once we get a nice shadow, about 10 minutes from now, we have our north/south line from the watch, we’ll have our east/west line from the shadow stick, and they should agree with each other, and we’ll be able to tell which direction is north, south, east, and west.

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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 something that’s joining it in the middle. And that can be bark, or it can be a piece of stick like this that has a natural fork in it that I can close together and pick things up. So if I want to pick up a rock . . . these are a little bit flimsy, but if I want to pick up a rock, I can pick up a hot rock and I’m not going to burn my hand. So I can pick it up and move it around the fire, or I can pick it up and put it in my bowl to burn with.

And this might be a better set right here. These ends aren’t even on this set of fire tongs, so if I want to even out the ends, which is important; they have to be the same length, I can slowly cut away. And when I’m cutting, I’m just taking the stroke of the knife and pushing it with my thumb, using it as a fulcrum. So I can cut like this, and that’ll allow me to cut. One of the other ways that I can cut deeper is to take my knife and put it vertically, and hit it with another stick, which is called a billet. And that’ll allow me to cut into that piece of wood. And not quite ready to break yet.

So we’ll do the same from the other side. So I’ll cut deep. I’ll cut a little bit into it, kind of whittle it away. And this is the same technique that you’d use to do any sort of woodworking, or any sort of cutting with your wood. Now it’s ready to pop off. So our ends are a little bit closer to even, and we can trim off the other one, too.

Usually when you’re chopping, I’m chopping onto this piece of stone. You want to have a piece of wood underneath, especially if you’re using a billet, so you don’t drive your knife into the stone. And it makes, if you look at it, a really nice flat end. Almost looks like it was cut with a saw. And this is a good way to grab things. We’ve got some sticks in the way. We can get rid of those as well.

So I have these tongs that’ll help me pick up stones that I’ll be able to use to cook.

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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 temperature to about 45 degrees, which is about the temperature of the ground. So one of my concerns is going to be building a platform or a bed, and then covering that will a really nice, well-insulated mattress.

Since my bed slopes downhill, what I’m doing is building kind of a backstop. And the backstop is going to both keep me from rolling down hill and give me a place to put crossmembers for my bed to keep it level. This is going to be both for comfort and insulation. I’m kind of sweeping the duff over in this direction, which is the area that’s going to be our bed. This, again is wet, so we’re going to take some of the grass that we’ve harvested previously and cover that with the nice dry grass from the field.

So I want to put a nice bed in here. I want to get myself off the ground. I want to break some sticks in order to do that. If you had a saw, it would be ideal. A lot of times, you don’t have a saw, you don’t have the tools that you want, but you can still break pretty big sticks. If you find a fork in a tree, I believe if you put this is here like that and pull back on it, it breaks pretty easily.

Without having to stomp and do things that might otherwise injure you, you can sort of get these pieces to make crossmembers for your bed. This is going to keep me off the ground, and that’ll keep me a lot warmer. When I’m working on my bed, what I often do is test it out, try it out for size, see if it fits and how comfortable it is, and which way my head is, up or down. So this way is pretty flat. I could use a pillow, but other than that, I’m not rolling in one direction or another, and it fits. It’s not to too short, not too long, so I’m not rolled up in a ball. It’s just the right size. It’s kind of a Goldilocks thing.

I’ve already piled leaves under. I’m going to throw some grass on top, and we’ll be good to go. Here we are in a beautiful lean-to. Nice fire, nice heat-reflecting wall. Totally protected from the weather up top and from all directions. It’s a great place to spend the night, and quite warm and cozy.

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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. You don’t have to clean them off. You can drink the charcoaly, but it’s nicer if you clean them off a little bit. And if we look, we can start to see bubbles coming up in our water. One more should do it. Actually this is boiling right now. If you look in there, you’ll see this it’s boiling really pretty hard. So, this one will boil in a second as well. If you don’t have access to a pot, you would make your own pot and you can boil water in it. And if you look right now, you can see there are little bubbles and this water’s pretty close to boiled right now. Actually, now you can see bigger bubbles. So, I’ve got a few rocks left in the fire here which is what I want. I want to have a bunch of rocks so that I can reheat rocks basically. So this water’s heating up really pretty well. And I might want to put newer, hot rocks in so I can get an older rock out. And this is where it pays to have a nice set of tongs to put a hotter rock in.

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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 one. There are coyotes, there are bobcats, and various other animals that are kind of scary and scary in movies. Coyotes, not too much to worry about. They’re solitary. They usually stay away from people. Bobcats, they look scary, but they’re really just a little cat. They might eat your cat, but they’re not going to eat you. Snakes are also of very little concern. Here in the Northeast, there are not that many venomous snakes. We do have rattlesnakes. We do have copperheads. They’re going to take off. If they hear you coming, they’re gone, and there’s not really a lot of chance of interaction with them, unless you try to pick them up, which is the case with almost all animals. If you try to pick them up and handle them, or if you treat them with disrespect, they’re going to bite. Raccoons, squirrels, anything like that can bite you, and they’re usually going to bite you because you did something inappropriate.

Some other animals that we don’t have here, that are in other places, that people are worried about, wolves, unlike in The Grey, wolves don’t really hunt down people. They stay to themselves and take off, so wolves are not really a problem. Wolverines, great X Men character, and this is a bit of wolverine fur, only way up north in Canada and Alaska, also something to not worry about. It’s in the weasel family, really cool to watch. If you’re a sheep, you might worry about some of those animals (?) sheep. But the animals that are potentially dangerous and statistically kill the most people are the animals you don’t think about, and that’s from collisions with cars, deer, moose, things like that.

When you’re in New York, or anywhere in the wilderness, the animals that you do want to be concerned about are animals you probably wouldn’t expect. The animals that are most dangerous are bees. That’s because a lot of people have an allergic reaction to bees. Most people that do have a reaction probably know and maybe carry epinephrine or something to counteract the bee sting. But bees can kill people because they close off their airway. Other animals in the same family that might cause an anaphylactic reaction would be wasps, ants, things like that. So insects are probably our most problematic, most dangerous animal, bees number one. We do have some poisonous spiders, nothing that’s fatal, nothing that’s lethal. It’ll cause some local pain. Brown recluses cause some necrotic tissue. Black widows, again, not going to kill you, cause a lot of muscle cramping, but not fatal.

Another problematic animal is ticks, in this area especially. We’re in an area where Lyme disease is prevalent, and one of the things that you want to do if you are camping in the Northeast, or anywhere in tick country, is make sure you do a really good tick check, which means looking at all your exposed skin and seeing if there are no ticks attached. If ticks are attached, you want to remove them without squishing them as quickly as possible. So getting ticks off of you is a good way to prevent disease, because they do have bacteria that causes Lyme disease. It is something that’s treatable.

So in opposition to what most people think, bears aren’t something to worry about, mountain lions aren’t something to worry about. Bees, ticks, and things like that are your biggest concern.

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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 the fish won’t be able to trip. That won’t do you any good. Or you can have a trigger that’ll pop when the wind blows. And that won’t do you any good. So we want to find something just in between the two.

This might be it. I’m having fun doing this, and I can tell you that this is actually how you would do it if you needed to. And that is I don’t have the materials that I would normally use if I wanted to set a really nice snare. What I have is some materials that I found and materials that are in my emergency bag that I always carry with me. Those materials are a Leatherman, a safety pin, some parachute cord.

I have a few other things in there, but I don’t really have fishing materials. Fishing materials would be a good idea to have in, but the idea for doing it like this is we’re not going to spend all our day fishing. We’re going to let the tree do the fishing for us if we can set it up with a good trigger system.

There we go. That’s what we want. Perfect.

Now I’m going to take fishing line. I’m going to take the fishing hook. And there are several ways you can attach the hook to the line. Thread the needle. I like to wrap it a couple of times before I do anything, so go around a few times. Thread the needle again, and again, bring it through, and then when we’re here finish it off by going around, and around, and back through. Okay. So we’ve got a nice, secure knot.

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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 three blasts, and that’s your signal for help from a whistle on a backpack. You can improvise whistles as well. Acorns make really great whistles. And to improvise an acorn whistle you make a V with your fingers and blow across the top, like that.

Three gun blasts would also be an indication that you need help. Three of anything is kind of the universal sign. Writing SOS is, of course, a great signal from the air.

A big thing that people use now are personal locator beacons. A personal locator beacon, I don’t have one to show you, but they’re available pretty cheap for what they give you. And that is if you’re in trouble you can push the button and it sends a signal up to a satellite that alerts EMS wherever you are and they’ll come out and get you. So that’s a personal locator beacon. It’s sort of like a black box on an airplane. They have them on boats. They have them on airplanes. But now people can have them as well.

And then the last thing I have is a flare which is really very simple. This is a Skyblazer flare, and it’s kind of just a piece of firework. You pull it. I’ve been told by pilots, and I do a lot of heli-guiding, that if you do have to signal an aircraft you want to lead the aircaft with your flare so that you’re firing at the front of it and it’s not going up behind the aircraft and you can see it.

So, to fire a flare you pull the pin on the bottom. And this one is a dud. So it’s a good thing I have a mirror. The flares do have an expiration date, by the way, so just like any other thing with an expiration date you should probably use them when they’re fresh. This one might be expired. So much for the big bang. Use the mirror, use the whistle, build a fire.

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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 I kind of set off with my buddy, around about 13. I went up to the mountains and got dropped off by my parents. They left me up there for a week and they came back. It was the most fun ever, and since then I’ve been hooked on it. I’ve been doing it ever since.

I live and work all over the world, kind of in the arctic in the summertime, temperate, or the US in the fall and spring and then I’ll go tropical in the wintertime. So, I am kind of migratory, and that allows me to really explore and get to learn new things, which is really my passion and that’s learning things and seeing things, and experiencing things for the first time that I haven’t done before.

So I kind of seek out different environments, and different cultures, different places that have something to offer that I can learn something new from. And that’s really my favorite thing to do, is to explore, and find out new things, and see new places. Along with that, I really like introducing people who haven’t been in the outdoors, or people who have been in the outdoors and want to learn a little bit more, that’s one of the things that is really nice about my job.

Another thing that is great about this job, is that everybody I have is having a good time. It’s not like going to an office where everybody’s grumpy, and not enjoying where they’re at. If people come, and are in the outdoors, for the most part, they’re always smiling, and that’s a great environment to work in. So I do classes for groups, individuals, schools, in wilderness skills, like we’re looking at now, also in climbing and paddling. So if you guys would like to go out and experience this for real, have an adventure, learn wilderness skills, I’ll be glad to take you out. You can contact me through my website or you can contact me through Outwardbound. My email address is myurachek@nycoutwardbound.org.

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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 enough shine to make a reflection.

The way that I use my mirror is to shine onto my hand–I don’t know if you can see that shining on my hand–that light is what’s going to reflect wherever I aim. If I use my thumb and my forefinger or make a sight right here between my two fingers, I can take that sight and move it to wherever I want to shine. I can make that shine in the direction that I want to signal.

If you were signaling an aircraft, you’d want to put the aircraft right here in your V and put the light on both sides of your fingers so you’d get that shine, and you’d be able to signal.

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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 the trigger set so that it doesn’t pop. Here we go. So this is tightened on here and I want to make sure that I find the hook so that it doesn’t go in my foot.

So the final step is, or you could do it in any order, it could be the first step, is finding worms for your hook. Oftentimes if you turn over… Oh, I’ve got two nice worms here. One, two, three, so we have some nice worms that were underneath this rock and we’ll turn it back so we can maybe harvest more worms later. But we’ve got a few earthworms that we can use for bait.

So I’m just going to put the tail on. If I put the whole arm on, it’s quite possible that it’s going to get nibbled off and not caught. So this is just about the right amount for my hook. We’re going to put the worm all the way around, like so. So our hook is completely hidden by the worm. Anything that takes it is going to get hooked. All right?

So we have one worm hook. We have one prickly hair trigger. We’re going to bend our tree down, get it in the notch. So, there we go. Earlier we set a spring snare to hopefully catch a fish, and we’re going to go back and check it now and see if it’s produced any dinner. So we can see that the snare has been sprung and it’s definitely got a fish on it and he’s definitely swimming around. Here’s our fish and he’s still kicking.

So it looks like we have caught a beautiful little bluegill. There is our fish and the spring snare works. So it’s a great way to get your dinner while you’re out doing something else. Had we set several of these, we may have several fish by this time.

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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 proof. It’s wind proof. It’s just the right size for one person. If you were to move this earth that’s in front of it out just a little bit, you could put a perfect fire here. You’ve got great fire resources, even if you didn’t have a flint and steel, a lighter, any tinder; all of the tinder and everything that you need is right here in this spot. This tree that fell, fell on a cedar tree. A cedar tree is what we can use to start a bow-drill fire. You can use the scrapings from a cedar as your tinder bundle. You have all the rocks that you need right here to cut your tinder, your fire board; everything can be cut out of what you have on the ground right here. You have a nice keyhole tree right here for breaking your wood; stick it in there and snap it. It’s perfect. Here’s a fantastic example of a ready-made shelter.

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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 anything really that will get a good bite and hold. So this is going to hook to the bottom part of the birch. This is going to go up to the top part. When the fish pulls out, the whole thing should snap up in the air. So now, it’s time to go swimming. So what I’m doing is adjusting my notch so that he gets a better bite in the bottom part of the trigger. Because of the curve of the tree, I have to do a little more adjusting then. I’m cutting the notch in a lower part, lower branch so that my top part of my trap trigger will hook in here. Let’s see how this works out. I’ve got a nice notch. It’s a hair trigger. Hopefully it’s going to hold. I have a feeling I’m going to have to re-cut it. It’s not quite getting the bite I need, so we just keep re-trimming it until we get the perfect bite. I’m slowly using up a good part of my wood, but I think we’re going to get a good bite.

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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 of stone or bone or antler. It’s been done for a long, long time. Not so much anymore. I have an antler, I have a rock. Between the two of these, we can make a great cutting edge.

And there’s three or four different types of stone I have here. I have some obsidian, which is a volcanic stone. I have some flint, I have some chert. All those are great stones for throwing a really sharp edge. That’s what we’re doing to try to do here, is throw a sharp edge by banging on the stone and getting a flake. Let’s see, we’ll try this one. I now have very sharp knife here, very sharp knife here. This’ll easily open up, cut, and gut my fish, skin a deer, or do any cutting needs that I might have. In fact, this is a piece of deer hide, a piece of leather. And to show how sharp these edges are, I can just take this and slice through it really easily. So leather’s no problem for it, fish shouldn’t be a problem for it.

Beyond that, we can improve these and make them sharper, or give them a handle, which turns them into a knife. So if I wanted to make a handle for this, I could stick it into a piece of wood that I’ve split, like so, take a piece of cordage, throw this on here, and wrap it, pull it really tight so that it’s holding it. I wrap this around and around. I’m going to get a good, nice, tight bite. So I’ve wrapped it in cordage and I’m going to tie it off. This gives me a nice, tight grip on this stone, so that when I go to cut with it, it’ll hold. I’ve got a couple wraps on here and I’m just tying this off. I’m going to pull it tight again. So I’ve taken a piece of obsidian, thrown a nice edge by striking it and breaking it off of a big chunk.

Actually, I threw a couple of edges. By “throwing edges” I mean making a sharp piece that you can use either with a handle by wrapping it, using it as a knife, or by having a chunk that you can hold in your hand and use as a blade. Those’ll work for skinning animals, for cutting wood, whatever you like.

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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 looking at it. Sometimes, the weather’s different than it says on your phone. I have people out, and I’ll let them know that the phone’s for making phone calls, and holding out your hand is how you find out what the weather’s doing.

If you would like to know what the weather is going to do, there are certain signs that you can look for in the environment. Right now, we have a beautiful, blue-sky day. We also have a lot of wind. Wind means that there’s temperature change somewhere. Wind occurs when there’s a temperature change going on. So wind is a big indicator of weather change.

If you’re in a mountain environment, some of the things you can look for are cloud patterns. And unfortunately, we don’t have any clouds today to demonstrate this, but when you see long, thin, wispy clouds, or sort of a white pass with clouds streaking off of it that almost look like contrails from an airplane, those are called mare’s tails. And mare’s tails indicate that you’re at the edge of a front, because there’s a lot of high-altitude wind trading place. That’s a real indicator that the weather’s going to change relatively soon. Probably in the next 24, 36 hours, you may get a different type of weather than you’re experiencing.

Another thing to be aware of is the local weather patterns. Local weather patterns happen in micro-climates. So there might be an area that gets a thunderstorm every day at 3:00 p.m. A lot of places in Florida, you can count on it raining every afternoon and then stopping within 45 minutes. So be aware of local weather patterns when you’re out.

If you’re down low in the trees, there are some indicators that you can use that’ll kind of give you an idea of what the pressure’s doing. High pressure and low pressure definitely are going to be affecting your weather. High pressure is going to be nice, sunny, clear weather. Low pressure is going to be possibly warmer, but more wetter weather. One of the ways that you can tell that is, if you’re building a campfire at night and you’re looking at your fire, if the smoke is rising straight up, it’s an indicator that you have high pressure in the area. If your smoke is staying close to the ground, sort of spreading out, it’s an indication that you have a lower pressure in the area.

One of the other indicators that you have low pressure, or you’re about to get rain, is the insect activity. If you’re out and it’s a day like today and there’s no bugs, nothing’s bothering you, everything’s happy, then chances are, it’s not going to rain, and you’re going to be nice and dry and continue to be happy. If you’re being pestered really bad by mosquitoes, by blackflies, and by gnats, and they’re really swarming, the flying insects, the biting insects, will get especially active just before a change in the weather, before it rains. They’re going to get a last meal in before it starts raining on them.

Those are some tips that’ll help you predict the weather for camping, for travelling in the outdoors. One of the old sayings that is usually pretty accurate is, “Red sky at night, camper’s delight. Red sky in morning, campers take warning.” So I think originally it was sailors, but it works for campers too.

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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. That was one that just blew. If you have river stones, you want to keep them out of the fire because they will have water inside. The water will build up pressure in the form of steam, and they can explode.These stones I thought were pretty safe. They are river stones though, but obviously one of them did kick up and pop. That shrapnel can be pretty dangerous. You want to make sure that when you’re cooking with river stones you don’t have something that’s going to explode on you like one of them seems to just have done. Fortunately I came out alive.

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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 us a really good fire to cook on. Also, if you want your fire to go all night, you can get a really good bed of this hot coals and then slowly add one or two pieces every now and then. And that’s going to allow you to have a fire through the night. Instead of having a big blaze, it’s going to keep you warm for a little while and then it’s all going to go cold. When you want to extend your fire, maybe you want to extend this a little longer, you can take your pieces that are burning on one end and flip them over, and now we’re getting a longer fire that’s burning out this way and we can throw additional sticks on to the coals at one end and at the other end. So, you can make your fire grow longer. One of the things that’s in this fire are all these stones. We’ve placed some round stones in the fire. Round stones are really nice for making boiling water which is one way to purify your water. They’re also nice for cooking things that you want boiled so if you want hot soups and things like that, the hot stones are really good. So, maintaining our fire, we want to get a nice bed of coals. What we’re trying to do is make a nice cooking fire with a nice long bed of coals and some big wood in there and I think we have a really good fire to cook on right here. We have hot rocks to boil. We can bring our fire out this way onto a nice slab that we can use for frying. And I’ll move our fire out a little bit so we have a nice frying fire. And we have some rocks in it, good bed of coals. We’ve got a good breeze keeping it going. We might want to put a little more wood on it and we’re going to come back and cook our breakfast.

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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 going with our eggs. One of the other ways you can cook with your rock boil is you can lay grass over the top and lay vegetables or any other items you want to steam on top. It doesn’t have to be grass. It can be sticks. You can lay sticks over the top and put your greens or whatever vegetables–say you’re steaming dandelion greens–you can put those over the top. Cattails you can put them over the top.

You can also roast some of those in the fire. This is a nice bamboo steamer. Just put whatever plant material you have over the top and put your things that you want to steam on top. There you go.

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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 with taking care of ourselves in a wilderness environment.

Some of the things that I have in here, you’ll notice it’s in a dry or dryish bag. The dry bag itself serves several purposes. It keeps the ingredients inside dry, relatively, but it also serves in a pinch as a water container. It serves as a pot to cook in. I can collect food in here. So the bag itself is an essential part of the kit.

Inside the bag, everything is in Ziploc bags which also, again I can collect water in, I can cook in. I have garbage bags, candle, and a lighter. Garbage bags can serve as a shelter. They can also serve with the candle as an emergency warm up kit so I can take care of somebody that’s hypothermic or if I’m cold myself, I can’t really function very well as far as getting a fire started or anything like that, this is a way to warm up.

I also have, for my own comfort and convenience, a little toilet paper and a wet wipe. Not necessary for survival, but keeps you less gross in the back country.

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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 odor free clothes.

One of the ways, and a great natural deodorant, is this stuff. Charcoal. So if you go to Cabela’s or a Bass Pro shop, any of the hunting stores, you’ll see lots of clothes that have, now, charcoal in them, that are odor free clothes. Scent lock and things like that. Really all they are is clothes that have charcoal in them. Charcoal absorbs odor. So if you want to have a natural deodorant that works really well, and charcoal actually has many, many benefits. It kind of makes you look dirty but it makes you smell good. This will absorb all your scent. hunters will use charcoal if they want to not leave scent for animals. So, charcoal is really good. The other thing that works really good is what makes charcoal, and that’s smoke. So standing in a fire with your clothes, the smoke will clean your clothes and leave them odor free.

Ways to wash your body. What makes you smell is bacteria and one of the plants that grow
out here is this sphagnum moss. Sphagnum moss has an anti-bacterial quality and you can wipe down with sphagnum moss. It’s great for cleaning all nooks and crannies that might normally smell a little bit odoriferous. Not only is it an antibacterial, but it also has water, which is something you want to clean yourself. So you can use this, it’s like a sponge, it has water in
it, it kills bacteria, it’s great for washing and this is a really nice resource to have. It grows all over kind of rocky tops here in New York.

So you have two things that make you really clean. You have charcoal which takes away odor, you have this that kills bacteria and has a nice, sponge-like quality. You have smoke from a fire. Some of the other ways would be to build a sweat lodge if you want to have like a sauna you can also clean in that and last but not least, there’s the bandana or t shirt that you can dip into water, get nice and wet and wipe down with that. If you were going to wipe down with this and you wanted to add deodorant, charcoal is a great way to go after that. So, those are some ways that you can keep clean and odor free in the outdoors.

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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 well, just like that. So we’ve got a lot of heat rising into it. That’ll cook our fish. We’ll give it a few minutes and it should be done and delicious. And our eggs have cooled off. We have one baked egg, one hard-boiled egg, so we have a couple eggs and a nice piece of fish, blue gill. Protein-rich breakfast. To complement it, we’ll probably go out and find some wild edibles, nuts and things like that, we’ll look for in a little bit.

All right. Our fish is just really perfectly done right now, our eggs are perfectly done. One of the things that I like to have with me in the back country, and this is kind of an ancient cooking secret, this is a piece of rawhide sewn with sinew, leg tendon, with a cork in top. It contains a magic ingredient, known as salt. It works great on your fish, works great on your eggs. Salt is a great things to have with you in the back country. You can make it if you’re at the ocean, or if you’re in Utah at the Great Salt Lake. It makes everything taste a lot better. Delicious.

Hard-boiling your eggs is a great way to carry them around with you if you find a bunch of eggs. By the way, eggs are among the easiest animals to hunt, because they don’t run very fast and they don’t hurt you and they’re all edible. If you’re hunting, eggs are easy prey to take.

Delicious. Our fish has cooked to a perfect consistency and deliciousness. You can pick the bones out, eat the meat off the bones, or just pull them off with your fingers. You can also save the bones, grind them up into bone meal, and eat the bones too. Again, great calcium. But this fish is cooked to perfection. I’m a fish snob, and there’s nothing like fish that just came out of the water and you’re eating right away. There’s no comparison to eating fish from a seafood market or a restaurant.

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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 line, which I happened to find near the edge of the lake; a tree that has some bend and spring in it; and some parts to make a trigger for the snare.

I’ll start by making a hook. And the hook, it’s going to be a safety pin, then we’re going to snip off the safety pin part, and bend into a hook. It looks pretty much like that. On the other end we have an eye we can run our line through.

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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 being located by air or by ground. I have another candle which goes along with fire. To go along with fire, again, I have a lighter, I have another lighter. So I have a torch lighter, I have a lighter-lighter, which also is a fuel for the torch lighter. On the back side of it, I have fire sticks tapes onto both, so that I can start a fire in inclement weather. This will also help me start a fire. If all of those fails, if everything gets wet, I have a flint and steel and it has a fire stick on it. There’s a lot of fire-starting material. I also have some magnesium for starting fire in really inclement weather and a couple other fire-starting kits. You might notice that fire is the most abundant thing that I have in here.

I have some cordage. The cordage is great for setting snares and traps. I have a couple zip-ties. These are convenient for repairing your gear. I have an extra flashlight with an extra battery. For water purification, if I’m not boiling my water, I have iodine tablets. Two of these go into a liter and will take care of your water. I have a space blanket. It’s great for lining your shelter and reflecting heat back to you.

If you need to get somewhere in the dark, one of the things that is quite problematic with people sometimes, they’ll have their camp, they’ll leave. If someone gets hurt, they’ll leave to go get help, they can’t find their way back. I have markers. These markers are little bright eyes, which are tacks that shine in the dark. There’s also some reflective twist-ties. In addition to that, there’s always a compass in my kit that’s going to give me the ability to navigate, other than using natural navigation tools.

And there’s always a cell phone. Cell phone doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does, an when it does, it’s great. If I’m on a remote trip, I’ll carry a satellite phone so that I can contact people in areas where I don’t have cell reception. A satellite phone is great in remote, remote locations. Here in the New York area, cell phone coverage is almost everywhere.

In addition to that is a Sharpie. A Sharpie is great for taking notes. I usually use my skin to take notes on. If I’m working with a patient in the back country, one that’s been insured, it’s great for writing any information about that patient on the patient, so when they’re evacuated, the people that are taking care of them know what’s going on with their history and stuff like that.

Wrapped around the Sharpie, you’ll notice a good length of fishing line. Fishing line that you’re going to set up a fishing snare. In fact, we set up a fishing snare already. I used the safety pins. Usually, this kit contains safety pins and a fishing line.

So the last item I have in my kit is a Swiss army knife, which has almost all the tools you might need. I also have a Leatherman in my other kit, a really good tool as well. So I like to have a knife with a multi-tool. That will allow me to repair things, cut things, make whatever tools I need.

These are some basic items that I carry in my survival kit. There’s probably a million variations of the same thing, and if you asked ten different people, you’d get ten different kits and items. For me, this is what I find works really well and gives me the ability to take care of myself and anyone that I’m travelling with in a wilderness situation.

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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, things that going to keep you warm, things that are going to keep you off the ground, and enough material that you can build a shelter. Here, we’re in upstate New York. There’s a lot of resources to be had. Some of the things you want to look for are a nice canopy over your head if there’s a light rain or drizzle, that’s going to stop a lot of the water before it even gets to your shelter.

If you have all the leaves on the ground here, you’re going to make a nice pile of leaves to protect you against any moisture that gets through and also to insulate you from any cold. Another nice feature of this particular location is that we have kind of a cliff band behind us. The rock itself will provide protection from the wind. It will provide protection from rain coming from that direction. If you have a little bit of overhang, you can put a fire at that base of the rock. That’s going to give you a surface behind to reflect heat back onto you. So the rock itself is going to be a really nice resource for building your shelter. So you have all the things you need to build a nice, warm, cozy shelter for the night right here in this location.