Lost in the Wilderness - How to NOT Freeze to Death! Winter Survival & Bushcraft | No Tent or Bag

I'm going to light that thing on fire because that's what's going to keep me warm. That thing is going to go up like a Roman candle. Now it seems like every year, every couple of years, we hear about a hunter, a hiker, maybe cross country skier, something like that, gets turned around, gets lost, can't find their way back to their vehicle, and they are forced to spend an unplanned, unprepared night in the winter woods. Last night it got down to negative 13 Fahrenheit and it's probably going to get very very close to that if not colder than that tonight. Have no sleeping bag, no shelter, what do I do? This is the time when people panic. If you do find yourself in a situation like this, what you do, what you need to do to survive the night, because these are temperatures that can and will kill you, but what you need to do to survive the night is going to depend on the resources that you have available. And so, I'm in the northwest, I'm in a conifer forest, I look around, I'm surrounded by pine trees. What I do here may be very different than what I would need to do in the northeast or in the desert southwest or anywhere else in the world. The reason that I've stopped right here is because behind me I've got a giant fatwood stump. I'm in a conifer forest and one of the byproducts of pine trees is fatwood. Now typically you wouldn't want to get firewood that's half buried and laying on the ground like this stump is, but one of the features of fatwood is that it's so resinous, it's so saturated with pine sap that the water doesn't really penetrate into it. And even though this stuff can be buried underground, it'll still burn and burn very hot and burn for a long time. Alright, so I've got enough peeled off there to get a small fire going, but in order to get that stump to catch fire, we're going to have to generate a lot of heat because there's just not a lot of surface area to it. So we have to generate heat from the outside to get that resin to start bubbling out. Once that happens, then the stump will catch and burn. But in order to generate that much heat, I'm going to have to gather some other firewood. So I'm going to find some dry wood and just kind of stack it around, stack it on top, so we can drive that heat into that stump, get that thing to catch. Alright, so I think once those pieces of that stump get going, this thing should catch and burn. So you can see all of that resin coming out of that stump. That stuff is obviously super flammable. But the great thing about these stumps is this whole thing is just full of that resin. And it'll burn like this for quite some time. So if you are truly in a survival situation and are trying to get out, one added benefit to lighting a pine stump on fire like this is that it pumps out just this big cloud of black smoke. And in the wintertime when everything is covered in snow, it really stands out. My buddy Xander gave me this saw last time he was down here. I've never seen one like this, but it's pretty slick the way it goes together like that. Fairly lightweight too. So I'm going to go ahead and just cut one of these little fir trees back here to make a lean-to to keep this snow off of me and a bow bed to lay on to keep me up out of the snow. Now before I go to cutting this poor little tree down, I want to make one note. Because anytime I cut a tree down on YouTube, I get hate mail. If you were to fly over this place, North Idaho, there are like a hundred billion trees out here. They're freaking everywhere. But I'm on my own property here and we have a little wood lot. And I've picked out two Doug firs behind me here. They're growing pretty much side by side. And if they were to continue to grow like this, basically they're going to grow at around half the rate that they would if they were an individual tree. So by taking one of these trees down, you're actually benefiting the other one and the health of the forest. So don't judge me harshly for cutting a tree down. There's plenty of them. And by cutting some trees, you can actually do good things. So you might be looking at this setup and saying, man, that is really close to that fire. And you're right. This is very close to have a conifer bough bed next to an open fire. But without a sleeping bag, I really don't have a choice. I'm going to have to be this close to stay warm all night because it is going to get cold. It's already dropped down to four degrees Fahrenheit, and it's probably going to get well into the negatives tonight. With no sleeping bag, that can kill you. So we've got just a little bit left till sunset. I'm going to go ahead and get cracking on this lean-to heat reflector. I'm just basically trying to keep the snow off of me, keep the wind off of me, and reflect some of this heat, hold some of this heat in here. But sitting right here, it is really warm. It's super nice right here. You go 15 feet that way, it is damn cold. So I think instead of an actual lean-to, I think I'm going to do like a tripod, almost like a wickiup style of shelter windbreak thing. I'm going to make a cross pole right here, put a couple of other poles right here, and then just start piling boughs around it. The walls are pretty solid, but what I want to do now is just take a bunch of this fine stuff and just kind of pack around the inside of it, kind of make this thing more like a squirrel's nest. Well, I think I'm just about ready for the night. There's just one more thing that I want to do. There's another pine stump down here that's kind of loose in the ground. I think I can get it out, and it's fairly good size. And so I'm going to try to get that, bring it up here. And when it starts to really get cold, or if this stump doesn't keep burning, I'll just throw it on there and build this fire up really big. And that one should burn for a pretty good little while. Let's go grab it. So what happens with these pine stumps, or down south we call them lighter knots, is that everything rots away. You can see that there used to be wood here, here. I mean everything rots away except for the wood that's saturated with that pine sap or that resin. And that's the stuff. I mean this stuff will sit in the ground for hundreds of years and be perfectly sound. It doesn't rot. And so you can still find, like in some of the southern forests, you can still find longleaf pine stumps like this that were cut over a hundred years ago, and they're still perfectly sound. So there you go, four degrees. It'll be interesting to see what it gets down to tonight. So these pine stumps are great. They burn for a long time. They burn hot. They're super easy to get going. You can light them on fire basically in any kind of weather. One of the downsides is that they smoke like crazy. So all conifers are going to have some resin content, but you're not going to be able to do this with all of them. There's only a few species that have resin in concentrations that you could do this with. Ponderosa pine is a great one, longleaf pine in the southeastern U.S. Sometimes lodgepole pine will do it. Sometimes doug fir will do it. So I know some of you are going to have questions about the gear that I'm using. I'll put links down in the video description if you're curious about that and want to check that out. This shirt is custom made by my wife though. She did a fantastic job on that. It was a Christmas present. Just set that up there, melt some of that snow, get it ready. I'm going to go ahead and put that on there just for the heck of it. See if we can't burn this shelter down. So I wouldn't normally cook on a fire made out of fatwood, but I really like to have some tea. So I'm going to boil some water and make a little bit of tea. The reason I don't like cooking on this stuff is, well one, it makes your food taste like crap, but it also, there's so much tar in it, it just sticks to your cooking vessel, your pot or your pan or whatever, and just makes it really gummy. But I'm going to make some tea. I can scrub this thing off later. So I found a couple of decent sized stones. I'm just going to put them around the campfire, let them heat up slowly. Now a couple of notes if you're going to do this is, one, don't get your rocks out of the creek bottom. You don't want rocks that are wet. These came off of a dry hillside. Reason being is that if your rocks come out of the water or have been waterlogged or wet, if there's water inside of them in a pocket, that water is going to expand and it can cause the rock to explode. And I've had that happen. And so if you get your rocks from a drier hillside, the chances of that happening are much much reduced, although I have had it happen with rocks that have come off of a dry hillside, so it's not a guarantee. Just heat them up slowly and don't heat them up so hot that you can't handle them. If you follow those couple of rules, you should be pretty safe. When you're heating these rocks, it's really easy to get one side super hot and then the other side will be cold. And so if you just kind of back them away from the heat a little bit and keep rotating them and let them just heat up slowly, it's much easier to regulate that temperature. You want them to be almost too hot to handle, but you still want to be able to handle them because you don't want them, you know, if you put it up against your body, you don't want to burn yourself, you don't want to melt your clothing or anything like that. But once these rocks are heated all the way through, they'll stay hot for several hours. I've taken them, I've taken a big stone, say maybe 10 pounds or so, heated it like this and put it in the toe of my sleeping bag and 10-12 hours later, it's still warm. I don't think I'm going to get that kind of longevity out of them here because there's no insulation around them. It's only like 7 o'clock and I'm tired. Only 12 and a half hours to sunrise. Are we going to survive? Oh! My stump fell. Well, I'm going to hang my light right here. I'm going to try to get some sleep before I have to get back up and readjust this fire because I know it's not going to stay like this. Yawn a little bit. This fire's already been burning for almost 5 hours, but the night is about 14 hours long. That's, uh, I don't know what time. Maybe close to midnight. Fire's still going good. There's still, the stump's definitely burning away but there's still quite a bit of it left so I think we're going to be good until the morning-ish because we've got a long time until sunrise. So I'm definitely not, I mean it's not, I'm not freezing to death. I'm fairly warm but one thing that I'm noticing is that the boughs are, they're a little bit cooler than I would like them to be. They're definitely sucking some heat out of me. Not nearly as bad as if I was on the ground, like way better than if I was just straight on the ground. I wouldn't be able to do that, I mean it'd just suck all the heat out of me. But they're definitely not like, you know, it's not like sitting on a, or sleeping on a thermarest or something. Would have to, probably have to make some adjustments to that if I was going to stay out here another night. So the rocks are really what's keeping me warm. I mean the fire is keeping my front side warm but anything that's, you know, the side of me that's down on this mat of boughs is pretty cold. And so I'm just rotating these rocks. You can just put them anywhere that there's a lot of blood flow, like stick them up underneath your armpits, kind of in between your legs, up in your crotch, you know places like that because that blood will take that heat from the rock and as it circulates through your body it just kind of distributes it. I like to take a heavy one, a warm one, just put it right on my chest, it really helps. Alright, I think I can get another half hour, half hour of sleep. There we go. So it's probably, I don't know, 5am, something like that. Still got a couple hours till sunrise. Most of the big stump that I put on here burned away, there's just a little bit left and I just put that back in the middle of it to build this fire up because I'm freezing. That feels so good. So this fire, it put out heat, a lot of heat all night but not enough to keep me comfortable which I knew that was, I knew I wasn't going to be comfortable but you know without this, without proper gear, you know those kind of temperatures, I gotta look at the thermometer and see what it got down to but those kind of temperatures really can and do kill people. I definitely learned some things on this one, I've never done this before, I've never tried this before but one of the things I learned is that the bowels that I was sleeping on are not as insulative as I thought they would be and so that was sucking a lot of my body heat away. And so if I end up doing this again, probably what I'll do is either build a long fire and warm the ground up and then put my, let that burn down and then put my bowel bed over that or collect a lot more rocks and then put hot rocks down and then put my bowel bed over that just to kind of warm that up a little bit because although it was a lot warmer than just going straight on the ground, like way, way, way warmer, it still, you know, it still took a lot of energy, man that's hot, it still took a lot of energy away from me, you know just constantly sucking it out of my body, I feel like I got run over by a herd of buffalo but I survived, time for some coffee, I don't know if you can see that or not, oh it's celsius 1.2 degrees, it says we had a low of negative 4 last night, I don't know, it's damn cold take this up to the shelter and see what it is in there, so according to the thermometer last night we had a low of negative 4 and a high of 127 that must have been when I brought it in the shelter and had it close to the fire, but right now we're at almost 40 degrees, so when you make coffee like this just throwing the grounds in there, there's grounds floating all around, there's grounds all around the edge, a little tip for you is if you've got some cold water you can sprinkle it over the top and that sinks the grounds and it does pretty good, but if you have snow around you take just a little handful of snow and throw on there, it'll sink all of those grounds to the bottom and you can drink your coffee and then throw away the sludge after, you don't have to sift the coffee grounds through your teeth, well I can't say that I was comfortable, but I did survive, burning the pine stump worked fantastic, I mean it was, it put off a lot of heat and it put off heat all night long, there was a couple of times I had to get up and kind of adjust things and you know just build the fire back up, but it never died down completely. The other lesson is that these bowels that I was sleeping on are not as insulated as I thought they were going to be, my bottom side where I was laying on these bowels was pretty cold and I was relying pretty heavily on those rocks, just putting the rocks around me to keep myself warm and in that way I was able to get some sleep, I didn't get a lot of sleep, but you know got some. You know you can read about things, you can watch videos and learn a lot in that way, but until you come out here and go through what you think you know, in theory anyway, you really don't know. Often times those little details, those little nuances, you just can't get from a book or a video, you have to be out here experiencing these things and often times those little details are what makes a huge difference. I know I certainly learned some things that I can apply on the next one and to that end I've got some plans to do more things like that, like this, this winter. Cut! Be sure to subscribe and we'll see you on the next one. I'm getting smoked out so I'm going to have to cut. See y'all on the next one.