Alright, let's get right into it. For long-term wilderness living, the primary concerns for gear selection is effectiveness, durability and the ability to be maintained in the field. They can be divided into categories; food, water, fire, clothing, shelter, containers, tools, materials, maintenance, medical/hygiene and knowledge. In this post I'll cover food and related items. Provisions Provisions should be primarily pemmican, jerky and salt. Carbohydrate sources generally cannot be found in temperate or northern climates in any substantial quantities. To avoid the lull in energy that comes with shifting your energy source from carbs to fat, it is best in my opinion to already be in a ketogenic state and be highly efficient at utilizing fat for energy. Salt is...
In this post I'm going over finding your home territory and establishing camp. I know I stated in the previous post that I would be covering the specific gear you need for long-term wilderness living, but I got ahead of myself. As I stated previously, your gear must be heavy-duty and will not be able to fit in a single pack. To ensure we have all that we need then, we must create caches. To create caches, we must first create a home territory and a permanent camp Having a home territory has many benefits. If every time you go out you're going to new places, you will never discover all the available resources or build a close relationship with...
In this post I'm going to discuss the difference between wilderness survival and long-term wilderness living as it pertains to bushcrafters and other practitioners of wilderness living skills. It is my opinion that what passes as modern bushcraft largely has become really just wilderness survival with a side of handicrafts. There seems to be a large number of military vets teaching bushcraft nowadays. I too served in the Army (A/27 Infantry, Rock of the Marne) and I can tell you most assuredly that no branch of the military in any nation teaches long-term wilderness living. Some do excel in temporary survival, emergency medicine, and disaster preparedness; all important skills to know and invaluable when desperately needed. I would never discourage the...
In my experience, the earth shelter is the ideal wilderness home. In this post I'll first discuss what makes the earth shelter so effective and advantageous. Then I'll cover the various methods for construction and lastly, special considerations that need to be made based on available materials and environmental conditions. There are a lot of subtleties when picking the location, depth and geometry of the shelter. Earth shelters cover a wide variety of styles and materials but what they all share in common is that the majority of their structure is covered in earth. Some are buried so deep that the roof is at ground level. Others are built in not much more than an indentation and others into the...
I have built a multitude of debris shelters in the three decades of my wilderness living experience and they have their place, but in truth, they are just about useless outside of very specific situations. First, let us cover what the standard debris shelter consists of and their practical uses. Then we will cover their downfalls and lastly, ways to make them far more functional. The standard method in building a debris shelter is to build a basic frame, here in the States we tend to use a wickiup style. Over the frame we either lay or weave in thinner sticks to form a mesh to lay the debris over. In a coniferous forest, we might forego this step and...
