No tent, No sleeping bag - Extreme Winter Survival Camping (0F/-18C)

Luke here at the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel and it's a cold winter day here in Alaska. I'm going to spend the night out here with no tent, no sleeping bag, no tarp and I'm going to be surviving well. I'm going to show you how to do it too. I'm going to try to go up in those mountains. No trail so we're just gonna have to find our way. As you can see there's a lot of dead wood around. That's why I chose this place. Plenty of firewood, plenty of wood to make my shelter. There's also a lot of rabbits around. I'm seeing snowshoe hare tracks everywhere. There are snowshoe hare tracks. If we see one we're definitely taking it for dinner. More snowshoe hare tracks. That'd be a great place to set a snare. Well I got a late start and the sun's gonna set on me in a few hours so I'm really looking for a campsite. I don't have time to build an elaborate structure so I need a site that will allow me to get something comfy quick. I'm not sure exactly what that will be. There's a lot of good firewood around here. All this standing deadwood is perfect. You can rip it right off without a saw so it's very quick and easy and it's standing so it's not covered in ice and snow so it'll burn well. I can also tell from the type of trees that this isn't muddy swampy ground. You really don't want to set up your camp on top of a frozen swamp only to have it thaw out and turn into a mud hole. Check it out looks like a bulldozer just went through the forest. That's from a windstorm. Fire came through this forest and killed most of the trees a number of years ago and then a windstorm came up and all the dead trees didn't have the strength anymore and they just flattened them. It only flattened this area on the ridge because the ridge is more exposed to the wind. I see something down there that might make a good campsite. It's hard to walk amongst all these downed trees. They're covered with just enough snow that you can't really see where the holes are. I keep punching through and falling down. I am so hungry. It's almost sunset and I haven't had anything to eat since breakfast. It took me way too long to get out here and the hiking has been harder than I expected. All right this is what I was looking for. One of these large dead trees has fallen over in the windstorm and this root ball is pulled up. It's a giant fireproof wall I don't have to build and that's a really good thing. Not a lot of wind today but I'm in this little nook along this ridge so it's pretty sheltered over here and certainly is a lot of dead wood. So I think we need to start get going and build a fire. Man I'll tell you what it is cold. It's about zero degrees Fahrenheit right now. I was all sweaty when I was walking around but I am starting to get cold in a hurry. I got a piece of flint and a steel striker so I'm going to need a piece of char cloth. This is just an old linen shirt that I charred in a fire. You want to hold it somewhere close to where the sparks are going to go. Just need one of these sparks to hit the char cloth. See there we go. Got a little ember in there. Now we're going to wrap that in a cotton ball. There we go. It's burning. Okay let's get this down in here. There we go. I'm gonna throw these pieces of birch bark in there. Try to get this thing going. There we go. Starting to catch. Oh I'm gonna warm my fingers up. That didn't want to light. I had to use all my char cloth and all my cotton balls to get that started. Really don't want this fire to go out. It's gonna get even colder tonight I'm sure of it. All right we're gonna need a lot more wood. I'm just building the biggest bonfire I can. I want to melt all the snow around my shelter. I want to heat up the ground and heat up that root ball. By the time I get ready for bed everything's got to be bone dry and warm. You don't want to build the fire up tall because all the heat just goes up. I want to spread it out so it'll melt that ground as evenly and quickly as possible. All right next to my agenda I need to find 10 straight small spruce trees. This time of year the sun sets around 5 p.m. and won't be up until 10 a.m. That's about 17 hours of darkness so I've got to have a lot of firewood if I'm gonna keep from freezing tonight. Because I've got to work in the dark so much I've got to bring a ton of lights both for the camera and for myself. Every time I do one of these trips I bring about five to ten pounds worth of batteries and lights. I'm getting pretty thirsty so I'm gonna start melting some snow. I filled that pot full of snow up to the brim and you can see it's only about a third full of water. You got to melt a lot of snow to get water. You see there's a bunch of dirt and pieces of wood in the bottom of the pot. No matter how clean the snow looks there's always stuff in it. It's harmless but you know you don't want to drink it. I'm going to probably have to do this four times tonight. I need a lot of water. My feels like it's getting below zero degrees fahrenheit. All my batteries and lights and everything will start getting really affected by the cold. That's a decent pile of wood. That's a good start. Well there we go. Got myself a shelter. Took me about three and a half hours to build it and it is roasting hot in here. It's like sitting inside a pizza oven. All this dirt below me and behind me holds the heat really well. So I've got heat radiating on my back. I got heat coming up from below and I got the fire off to my left. It's uh it's pretty toasty. These logs are still a bit cold but they'll warm up soon enough. I've got a few more things I want to do before I go to sleep but I am so hungry I need to stop and make some dinner. All right for dinner I brought along some moose ribs. These are just two ribs from the moose I shot this fall. Got some garlic salt and pepper. All right we want to cook these on a low heat very slowly. Well there we go. Got the moose ribs buried in hot coals and dirt. The coals are really hot right now but they're gonna cool off pretty quick and we'll just let that sit for a couple hours. Gloves are pretty wet already. Let me just hang them out and dry them. Gotta get everything dry before bedtime. You can see how wet my boots are. Look at the steam coming off them. I gotta get those dry too. While I wait for those ribs to cook I'm gonna go ahead and make up some bread dough. We've got some bread flour and yeast in here and I'm just gonna add a little water to it. Got my bread dough mixed up. I'm gonna let it just sit by the fire tonight. By tomorrow it'll be nice and fermented and ready to make bread. While I wait for the ribs I'm gonna go ahead and make some soup for dinner. All right I'm gonna add a little ugali to my chicken noodle soup to give it a little bit more calories. Ugali is just ground up white corn maize and it's a staple food in East Africa. It tastes like grits and it's a great way to give a stew a little bit more body to it. Oh I can smell the moose. It's cooking a little too fast. Nothing fancy just a thick chicken noodle soup. Oh man it hits the spot. All right let's check out this moose. Oh yeah. Oh that's actually pretty soft. I think I nailed that. Look at that beautiful piece of moose meat. Oh that's so good. Moose ribs are good. We've been eating a lot of moose this fall. That moose I shot had 567 pounds of meat. We donated all but like 30-40 pounds of meat but still that's a lot. We've been really enjoying it. Some barbecue sauce here. Oh the barbecue sauce is mostly frozen. That came out just perfect. Oh that's good. There we go. That was delicious. Oh man I was so hungry. All right guys it's 10 30. Got a belly full of food. Got a roaring fire. Got firewood drying around the side of the fire and my bed's pretty warm. I think the biggest problem is going to be my back. This is this is not comfy. It's better than sleeping on concrete but only barely. The only thing to sleep in I brought was this wool blanket but honestly I'm going to use it as a pillow. I'm going to put my hip bone right on the balaclava to try to keep from hurting my hip in the middle of the night. We'll see what happens but I'm going to try to get some sleep. I'm pretty tired. At any rate I'm going to put the camera up and we'll see how this goes. All right good night. Hey it's about 7 40 in the morning and my back is killing me. Stayed mostly warm throughout the night. Had to get up and stoke the fire a bunch. Even had to go cut a little bit of firewood around 4 a.m. Man oh my back is sore. I never sleep well sleeping on wood beds like this. Oh yeah I mean it's better than sleeping on the ground but it's hard. My bread dough rose a bit. One side's frozen and the other side's warm. They're kind of like me. I need to get some more coals going for my breakfast so I'm using this thinner stuff to make coals. Didn't bring a cooking griddle or anything like that. This is real bare minimum camping today so we're gonna make bread straight on the coals. It's looking pretty good. Yeah oh my butter is so frozen. All right melted butter and warm honey. Oh that's pretty good. Flour is such a great backpacking food. It's so light it's non-perishable and it just makes the most delicious things. That's good. Well it's about 8 50 and we're starting to see some color in the sky. Sun's gonna be up probably in the next 30 minutes or so. I'll tell you what it was definitely below zero and uh I stayed warm. My back's killing me but I was warm. You know I've tried out a lot of different survival shelters and hands down this is my favorite one if you're dealing with cold weather. If you're getting rained on or snowed on or there's lots of wind a lean-to might be better but if you're just straight up trying to survive the cold this is the best. The shelter isn't complicated the key is just making sure you warm up the ground and warm up whatever's going to be behind you. The second key is to try to get your bed higher than the fire. Heat goes up and so that if you're slightly elevated you're going to catch a lot more of that fire's heat than if you were down on the ground with the fire. I think this shelter would work in even colder conditions than what I got right now. Just make these rails longer and then if you start to get cold in the middle of night because that root ball has cooled off too much or the ground underneath you's cooled off too much I would just take this fire and kick it underneath the bed then scoot the bed over here and switch places with the fire and you could just do that every couple hours and then constantly be above hot ground. I think if you had plenty of fuel and you just kept switching sides like that you could probably last in like negative 20 or some really awful temperatures. You wouldn't get much sleep but you would make it through the night. Well this has been fun but I think it's time to pack it up. Well you might have noticed this video is a bit shorter than my typical video and there's a couple reasons for that. One is I am exhausted. My wife Rebecca and I just got back from a trip to Palau and we're super jet lagged. Combining that with sleeping on that hardwood I'm wiped out. But it was one of those things where time was tight and if I was going to get any video I had to be a short video. Oh check out these wolf tracks. Oh man those look pretty fresh. There's another reason I'm keeping this video short. This month marks the 11th year I've been doing YouTube videos. I've done over a thousand videos and when I started doing YouTube videos it was a fun way for me and my sons to spend time together. But they're in school now and I can't just pull them out anytime I want to go do these adventures. So I end up going by myself and it's kind of blown up into this whole thing where now YouTube is taking me away from my children. And while there's a time and a place for dads to go do stuff on their own it's gotten a bit much. And when I'm gone like this it's a sacrifice to my family and my wife. So I'm going to keep this video short. I'll only be gone one night and try to get home and see my family. Oh look at this. This is a perfect walking stick. Oh yeah. Just following these wolf tracks seeing where they lead. They're kind of heading in the direction of my car. Check it out. Those are bull prints. It's a little mouse that lives under the snow. He popped up on top and hop hop and then dove down underneath the snow again. Foxes and owls love to eat those voles and they have really good hearing. So they'll sit there and listen for the voles scurrying under the snow. Oh look at this. See here's a fox print and you can see the fox was digging for a vole. Really close to the car I can hear the highway very loud now. Check it out. Those are the wolf prints. All right guys that's it for now. I'll see you next time. If you like that video make sure to check out the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel where we have hundreds of videos just like this. And if you want to see our newest adventures make sure to click subscribe so you'll get notifications.