Can I Survive Alaskan Winter with No Sleeping Bag, No Tent & No Tarp?

What a beautiful spot. First things first, I need to find a place to sleep. It needs to be sandy, flat, and dry. There's standing water down there. Looks like more ice, more frozen water, more ice there. I can see some gravel under that log. This log is frozen to the ground, so I've got to free that. We've got a pretty stiff breeze coming from this direction, so just getting underneath this log behind the snowbank really makes a difference. I'm a little worried about my sleeping situation though. I need dry sand or gravel to sleep on. I've got clean gravel here, got clean gravel here, but I've got a giant frozen puddle right here with probably three to five gallons of water frozen. So I need to go and thaw out this ground and dry it out in order to be able to sleep on some warm dry gravel. Melting ice takes a lot of heat and energy. It's going to take a lot of fuel, a lot of fire, and a lot of time to thaw this all out. I've got a bunch of these root balls here I can chop up, get a lot of good dead firewood out of that. There's a lot of wood around here, but it's all frozen and covered in snow. I luckily found a little stash of some dry stuff. Look at all this. This is bone dry driftwood. That is going to help me out a lot. Got all this nice dry wood. I want to keep it dry. I'm not going to lay it down in the snow. All right, got the fire going, but now we need to make it big, real big. So I better get more wood. It's getting hot in there, but I gotta keep adding wood. I've been chopping and hauling firewood for three, four hours now. Gotta keep going. I am exhausted. That is a lot of wood. I can feel the heat of the fire all the way over here, and that heat is getting stored inside that big log and in the gravel and in the surroundings. That is hot. I want to get in there and start fussing with it, but it's so hot it's hard to stand near that thing. I'm just going to kind of let this fire die down a bit so I can get in there, and then I'll start scraping the coals around and we'll see what we got underneath. The gravel's coming along better than I thought. Right over here is all thawed and mostly dried, so I'm gonna dig this down really deep, pile it all up right here, make a nice little trench, and I'm gonna build a fire over this frozen part to thaw it out. I'm gonna put some fire in that trench as well. Well, we're making good progress, but it looks like I'm gonna have to get a lot more wood. All right, off we go. Tell you what, I'm tired. I'm working non-stop. I haven't eaten. I've been doing nothing but cutting wood and stoking this fire for hours. All right, I'm gonna let all this new firewood dry, and once it's dry, I'm gonna stack it up. Well, right now the fire's going where my bed's gonna be, so I'm gonna move the big pieces of wood over to where the fire pit's gonna be. I'm gonna try to get a fire going over there, then we're gonna take care of the bed. All right, got a nice bed of coals, some really hot sand. We're gonna spread it out nice and even, get my bed ready. I'm trying to bury the coals with the dry sand so that doesn't extinguish the coals. It just kind of smothers them. Well, just for fun, I brought along one of these laser thermometers, and we're gonna take some readings of the ground and see how well this sand and these coals radiate heat. On top of the coals right now, we're getting about 108. Over here, we're getting like 115, and we're getting like 130 right here. So it's about 100 degrees on top of the coals, but we have a few hot spots where it's over 130 degrees. Oh my, it is toasty in here. Just getting the heat from the fire and from the wood and from the ground, and I am hungry. I think I need to start cooking some food. I've got this bread dough that I made up, and it needs to rise just a little bit, so I'm gonna get it warm. So I'm just gonna lay it down on this warm gravel I'm sitting on. I'm just gonna bury it just a little bit. And I got some honey and butter in this little jar here. Let that honey and butter melt right there. A nice little steak we seasoned earlier. Let's go ahead and put that straight on the coals. The steak's just cooking away on the coals. Let's check out our temperature here. It's at 320 on the surface. Man, that's pretty close to what I would be cooking at it in a skillet. That's pretty cool. For having cooked that just on the coals, that is a pretty beautiful medium. Look at that. Man, that hits the spot. Mix up that honey and that butter. It's all melty. There you go. Oh, that's heavenly. Butter and honey just dripping off it. Oh, it's been a long, long day. It's about 10 30 at night right now, and I need to start thinking about getting ready for bed here. I'm gonna bust out my blanket. All right, you want to use wool blankets when you're sleeping next to the fire because they're fire retardant. You want to be really careful when sleeping next to fires. Before we get ready for bed, let's see what the temperature of the ground is. Got 74 degrees right there. 54, 72. So definitely a lot cooler. Definitely a lot cooler, but still not too bad. Well, right now my feet are warm, but they're kind of wet because I've built up a bit of a sweat. So I got to pull off my boots, my socks, and dry my feet off and dry my socks before I go to bed so I don't wake up with cold feet. I gotta be really careful I don't melt my boots. I'm just sitting here drying my socks and shoes and I can hear the ice moving on the frozen lake behind me. It's groaning and cracking and you can hear ice sheets being pushed up on top of one another. It's pretty cool actually. Look at all that steam coming out of my boot. That's water. That water will make you cold. Well, my sons Tom, Nate, and Jake have been coming with me on a lot of these campouts. I bet a lot of you guys are wondering where they are tonight. Well, Tom and Nate had school so they couldn't come. And Jake, well... Hey Jacob, you want to go camping with me? Well, Jake's out having a good time with his mom and that's that's important. One thing I got to do tonight is I gotta get all this firewood and organize it and put it with an arm's reach of my bed so I can stoke the fire all night. A lot of this wood needs to get dried out too so I gotta do that as well. Oh, it's nice to lay down. My back's killing me. I'm gonna sit here and watch a movie and kind of relax. We'll just kind of take it easy. It's a lovely night tonight. It's been about five hours since I buried the coals. Let's check the temperatures. Got 89 degrees right there. 76 and 59. Definitely still got heat. Man, you can still feel it. Here's my pillow for tonight. I must have been tired because it's 5am and I slept pretty good. So I stoked the fire up really good and that feels really nice. My feet are really cold so I rolled some logs down that way and built a fire and hopefully that'll warm my feet up here in a little bit. Oh, good morning. It's actually nine o'clock. Well, the ground's really hard but I'm warm. The fire by my feet is keeping my feet warm. I feel some warmth in the ground still. Not a ton but a little bit. Usually when I sit on the ground it just sucks all the heat out of you. I mean, even in the summertime but not now. It's pretty nice. Oh, my back didn't melt my boots. Always a concern. Well, I'm curious to see how warm the the gravel is. 46. I mean, that's still pretty good. 71. So we got about 60 degrees here and we got about 22 degrees over here. So yeah, big difference. I'll tell you what, sleeping on 70 degree gravel versus ice and water makes a huge difference. Smoked pork jowl bacon. All right, we got our little setup here. Let's start cooking. I need a better dinner plate. We're gonna make one. Look at that. Just cook the face of it till it's nice and crispy. Then you slice a little bit off the edge, eat it, put it back on the fire, crisp up the next piece. Look at that. I still got some honey butter left. I'm gonna make me another piece of flatbread. As dough is almost frozen, gotta let it warm up a little bit. There we go. Lovely piece of warm bread. I know exactly what I'm gonna do with this. Oh, it's so good. Smoked meat, butter, honey, flour. These are all survival foods of the past. They're so delicious. I love them. Oh, that was good. I'll tell you what, building a big bonfire and burying my coals worked great. Kept me warm and this was really comfortable. But it reminds me of that movie, Jeremiah Johnson. Robert Redford plays this mountain man and an old timer shows him this trick. And in the movie, it looks super easy. They just dig a hole and throw some coals in it. And it's a fun movie, but it's not accurate. If you've got two feet of snow on the ground, you can't just dig a hole. You've got to thaw the ground out first. Additionally, you need the right type of soil. You've got to have something dry. If you throw wet, mucky stuff on top of your coals, you'll just put them out. Additionally, if you go into the woods over there, you're going to have 12 to 18 inches of moss and organic matter on top of the soil. And you've got to burn all the way through that stuff before you can even get to the soil. And it takes hours to burn your campfire down to soil when you build a campfire in there. So you really need coarse sand or pea gravel or something like that. So it has to be like a frozen riverbed or a frozen beach or a sand pile or something like that in order for this trick to work well. Otherwise, you're just going to use an enormous amount of fuel and time. And in survival situations, time is a scarce resource. But I'll tell you what, if you have the opportunity and the resources to do this, it works really well. Sleeping on 70 degree sand as opposed to 10 degree ice makes all the difference in the world. Well, guys, it's been fun, but I think it's time to pack this party up. Once again, if you guys are going to do this, make sure you use a real wool blanket. If you use a synthetic blanket, it'll melt when sparks land on it. Ah, she's been a good shelter, but it's time to go home. It's been a beautiful spot and a wonderful trip. I hope you guys have enjoyed watching this video as much as I've enjoyed filming it. If you guys want to see more amazing camping adventures, check out the camping adventure playlist from the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel. And don't forget to click subscribe. We put out new videos every Saturday morning. I'll see you then. If you like this video, don't forget to check out the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel where we have hundreds of videos just like this. And don't forget to click subscribe so you can see other great videos every Saturday morning. Hit that bell button, you'll get notifications. Thanks for watching. Becca, why do we have a dog?