Bushcraft Skill Day.

Hey folks, we're out today on a bushcraft skills day. Got new buddy Rob and Davis with me. And we're gonna teach Davis some bushcraft skills. Rob's an outdoorsman himself, an accomplished hunter. We're at a new spot, and yeah, there's still a lot of snow. I say hi guys. Hi guys. Just donned our snowshoes because we were all post-holing through quite a bit. Middle of April and snowshoes are still needed, so it's a real winter. Whoa! Even with snowshoes. Dirty old rotten snow. How do you guys feel about this spot? Nice and sunny. There's a bunch of hardwood up there. We can get firewood from. And if we want any boughs or anything, there's boughs there. It's relatively flat. We can flatten it out. This spot, it is. Let's make up some hooks, hangers for our backpacks. Do you have some paracord on you? Yeah. You want to grab paracord for me, if you don't mind. What are your front pouches, son? So see how, this is one tree. And it's growing up and it's got limbs shooting out that are kind of on an upward angle, right? Yeah. So those, if you imagine, if you cut that, that bottom part is gone. Yeah. And you cut that there or even there for what we're using, and then you cut this off, you're gonna have just this little checkmark of a pot or sorry of a hanger, right? Mhm. So that's what we'll do. We can get two. Probably three off of this one, so and we don't want to cut it this high up because it's unsightly and it could be potentially, uh. Hazardous for people if they fall onto it or whatever, so we always want to cut it low, and we can still use the rest of it for other things too. So, if you want to cut it, or I can, whatever you want to do. We're gonna try to get down right at the snow level. Your good hand and hold up high, okay, and then. Put a put a cut like that, and then back and forth. Here you try. Underneath, if you have to, get on your knees if you have to. I think hold the saw maybe lower on the yeah, yeah. Good job. There you go. Bow saw the blade is very flexible, so you gotta. That's right. Dad knows. Yeah. Try to use the length of the. There you go, bud. Still going. Nice, dude. Right about there, Joe. Yep. Do you have Do you have a knife on you, Davis? Okay, we'll use that. We'll use that in a minute too. All right, we're in luck. We have this downed log here that seems pretty stable. Up on this other stump, it's very stable, and the snow has melted off of it or whatever, so we can use this as a little bit of a platform. So we're not just unwieldly using our knives in the air. Maybe you you come over on this side, just right here. Let me put this down for a sec. Get your knife out. Right, right about there, and you're just gonna on an angle push away from yourself. Yeah, go in and down if you can. misi Try and do it down here, like like this. I'll do it above where you need to do it. Probably this, or even if that's not gonna cut it, we can baton it. But right about, we hold it here and just kind of push in and down hard and away. Yeah, always cut away from yourself, son. There's a saying: cut towards your buddy, not your body. We say that all the time. It's a dad saying. It's a good one. You almost got it. You're almost there. Maybe try to put your thumb. Yeah, put your thumb in here like this, around. No. Yep. Yep. Exactly. Might get a little bit more oomph. Here, try this one, bud. That one might just need a little bit of a sharpen. I'm not sure. Oh no, she's sharp. So use the. No, you are. You are strong enough. 100 percent. Yeah. Use. Hold on. What's up? Just use the. Try to use the base. The base of the blade, inside the top. Yeah. I'm just gonna I'm just gonna move your hands a little bit, and push away like that. Hey! See. It's just it's muscle memory too, man. You'll get it. It's it's no big deal. Good job. Actually, you know what? What's what's what's another option too is I just made one just by cutting the twig off, which would be a lot easier. But this is a bushcraft day, right? Exactly. That's what we're doing. So I'm just gonna make it. Make it not sharp. So, come over here. Wrap your paracord around. I'll grab. Throw my stick over. I'll grab it. Thank you. No worries. This is what we're gonna do. I'll just show you a practice. So I'm gonna put my my stick on the side. I'm gonna wrap my paracord around. And we want it to. Oh, you know what? I put my I put my notch on the up on the wrong side of the stick. No worries, it doesn't matter. We can just put it down low. And tie it on like this. But with this kind of thing, we just do like an overhand granny knot. Doesn't matter. Wrap it around itself again, and tie another one. So it's just an overhand like shoelace knot. So do that. And I'll help you out. Yep. Here, can we? Let's come over here just so the camera sees it. All right. There you go. Yeah. Wrap it around the back of the tree and the, and the and the hanger. We'll put it low on the hanger. Above the notch, but lower. Yep, right there, and then if it wraps around again, even better. Pull it tight, pull real tight, yeah, and do it again, yeah. You can probably tie it off there. Come around this side. No sinky, keep it tight. Pull tight again. And now just tie it like like you would tie your shoes. There you go, pull tight, and you're golden. Go grab your backpack. And with your handle that you're holding, you can place it right on there. Bam! Look at that, bud. Good job. Thank you. Now you're an experienced outdoorsman. Maybe not yet. Getting there. Getting there. Good job. We're gonna have a nice lunch made by Rob. He's gonna cook up some moose steaks and stuff. So, Rob's a good cook. I'm looking forward to that. We need a lot of good firewood. Here is a nice piece. This is elm. You can start to just get a grasp of what types of trees they are after you learn them and stuff, even when they're dead. This is elm. Elm is a good firewood. It's very hard, dense. So it's dead standing. It's shed its bark. You can see and feel how dry it is. There is a check on this side. Oh, maybe not. Yeah, there's a little check going through it, which is a crack in it. Tells you it's seasoned nicely. So we're gonna take that. One thing I like to do before I start to cut is just to maybe just watch your head when I do this, just to shake, because sometimes the top will break off. And it'll come down on you when you're sawing, but that seems pretty decent, so we're not in too much worry there. And then there's a bunch of twigs here that we can collect too for early stage stuff. You you kind of want to go like. Pencil pencil lead thickness, pencil thickness, finger thickness as as like a gauge, for your kindling. So, anyways, there's a ton of it around. We don't really need to be too worried about that. But we're gonna cut this down same kind of way that we cut the other one. You want to do it or you want me to do it? You want to start it? We can share it. We can share the work too. That's fine too. You and Joe work on one. I'm gonna go find another one. Here, how about you cut this smaller one here? Watch your hands, son. Uh, no, that one just breaks right out. Yeah, watch your hands is right. So, what what what hand are you? Right or left? Right-handed, maybe come around this way. And I would start down here, not in this fat area. There's no real sense in cutting it right here because it's the fattest spot. It kind of narrows out right around here, and like since there's so much snow already, it's already going to be two or three feet high above the ground. So let's cut it right about here at the nice straight spot. I'll get a good start for you. And then on a tree this big, you can even use two hands because it's not shaking everywhere. See how I'm using the full length of the blade? The only thing you want to watch on that is like if you go too far, you're gonna punch the tree and it busts your knuckles up big time. But there you go. You can start that, and we can share the work too. It's no big deal. Yeah, I'd probably kneel down or squat down as much as you can. Yeah, there you go, buddy. Nice smooth strokes. Trying to bend the blade too much. There you go, nice bud. You gotta breathe too. It's part of it. No, eh? Again, it's all muscle memory. It comes to you. And if you, when you're cutting, if you try to keep it straight, as far as instead of angling it, you'll you'll cut less because if you angle, you have a lot more to cut through. You want to just push slightly that way for me on the tree. Yep. Thank you. There she goes, and then another thing you got to watch when it falls is sometimes it kicks back. Yeah. So if it's starting to do that, get get out of get out of dodge. So you can back up. And timber, we did it. Good job. Yeah, that's dry, dry. So yeah, like you can tell, that's really good wood. We're gonna earn our keep today. I am just gonna cut the rust off of this. It'll be a good piece to use. It's a nice piece of firewood right there. At least we get a couple bigger ones like that. We're gonna raise. There you are, Davis. Thank you. Working out for sweat, all righty, man. It's summertime. All right, what kind of birch is it, David? Yellow birch. Yellow birch, right? And why is that? Cool. Yeah, tinted yellow. It's got the ribbony, ribbony bark. Exactly, the whiter paper yet. So when we're taking birch bark off the tree, we don't really want to scar it by pulling thick pieces and ripping it off. So anything. Yeah, anything that's just kind of fluffing off, just kind of take that type of stuff, and that's more than more than good. We'll have enough. There's a bunch of good stuff right over here too. Need some, but exactly, exactly, dude. You know what you're doing. Get a bunch of this stuff. And this isn't uncommon. See how it goes? It's red right here. That happens a lot. Sometimes they turn all pink. The yellow birds. Is you don't have cargo pockets? What I do is I put it in my cargo pocket just to dry it out even more. Even though today it's really dry, and just to store it here. I'll grab that from you. Thank you. We should have plenty with this. So now we go get some kindling. Stuff like that, like like small pieces of, what makes really good, like, first stage fuel is like. Conifers, uh, so like. Pine and and spruce branches, so they have resins in them. So I see some over here. Let's go get some of these. So a good way to tell if they're ready to be burned and stuff is this finger snap method. So if you can. If you hear it snap, which these aren't really. There you go, like that. Yeah, nice and easy, so we can just grab a weight up. Collect it easy too. See how there's a V here. If you just pull it apart. At the V, they really come off nice and easy. And we'll get all our stages just from this. There'll be pencil lead, pencil, thumb thickness, all just from this this twig here. You can also just break it normally. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, dude. We're just out in the woods, grown men having fun in the woods. You know. Playing bushcraft. We're gonna split some stuff down to make the the size that we're missing in between. So what I want to do is use a platform, and since we have some big logs here and there's snow, it won't roll around too much. We can use one of these as a platform to work on. So let's come over here. You hold this. And we're gonna use. You want to use an axe? Sure. Okay. We're gonna be careful. We're gonna use an axe. So what? When you want to split stuff in the woods, it's hard to like set it up like this, like you would at home and chop down into it. There's really like there's snow now, but it will just get driven into the snow. So a good way to do it is get your platform here, and then you're gonna put it on the platform. You don't want to put it in the middle because if you hit it here, it's gonna just be like a teeter totter and fling back at your face. Yeah, right. And you don't want to put it here because you're swinging too close to yourself. What you always want to do is put it on the end, on the end pushing that way and have it so that this this is not gonna be teeter tottering. So that means this doesn't hang over that. Yeah, it goes right in the middle there. Okay. Right in the middle, and what you want to do. Let me just have it for a second. Yes, just split it. But you want to—I won't do it. But you just want to kind of have your feet spread like your dad said, away from. Because if you swing and miss, it's just going to go into the air or the snow, not into your ankle, which would not be a good time, right? So what I would do, and again, I'm not going to do it. So bring it up above my head. Come down and confidently, try to hit it right in the middle there, and hard enough because if you just tap it, then you're stuck having to swing again and again and again. With this, it'll split. Yeah, yeah, you don't want to tap. You want to hit it. About that hard, okay, but right on there. And if you miss, that's fine. As long as your feet are spread apart. Okay, hold on one sec for me, please. Yep. Set it up again, and try again. Push it. Yep. Push it. Yeah. See. You know. You'll get it. Push it farther on. Yep. Okay. Now you can you can you can just. Yeah, you can just start again, or you could leave it on and try again. Try to hit it after. No pressure, eh? The camera and everything. All right, go ahead if you want. Hey! Now we'll get rid of that because we can use that. And now you're hammering it so far into the ground too. See, this is the problem with snow. Yeah, but that's what we have where we live. Lots of snow. Where? Yeah, I can tell you. That's where I grew up. Not at all. Yeah. Yeah, everything. Grass is always greener. All right, so we're gonna flip it around so you can see it a little bit better, even, and. What I would, if you don't always have to, you see, I would start from like. Here, don't bring it up so high. Yeah, I think so. Maybe right here where you can kind of center it and just. Yeah. Yeah. Try that one. Go get it, even if it takes a couple. Hey, look at that! Right on the bunny. All right now. Because it's already half split, ah, you can do smooth again. Yeah. Try to aim for right there. Look at you, okay. Now that's split, man. Like it's done, right? So that's a piece that we need. That is also be could be a piece that we're good with. And then let's do this one. All right. Give her hell. Look at that, dude! First try, nice. Nice, dude. Now hold on. You see, because sometimes instead of trying to split it again, you can just snap it. Yeah, hold the axe in there and. Yeah, twist the axe a bit. Yes, exactly, dude. Exactly, exactly. That's perfect. That's all we're looking for. We can use this stuff to make some shavings too because it's nice and soft. So let's do that. Look at that axe, man! Axe man. Take that, and let me just show you. What we're doing, and then you can you can practice. Make the shavings on this thing. So let's put the plate right here. Right there, and then this is our piece of wood. So what I like to do is to find like an an edge, like so this is. This is all round. Here's a nice edge. Here's a really nice edge. Here's a really nice edge too. These two are better because this one is kind of on the outside and it would have got weathered and like wet and stuff like that. Exactly the bark, yeah. So what I would like to do sometimes is just clean the bark off. Yeah. Before I start. I hold the piece of wood, and again, careful because this is slippery. I hold the piece of wood. And I start up here, and I just want to make some curls like this. It's like, it's light, yeah. And you're using as much length of it as you can, yeah. And they don't have to all be like. Perfect little. Spirals like curly like pigtails, but yeah, a lot of them are supposed to be like that. But some can just even be like this. It's fine. But what you're really looking for, for the most part. Are these little guys? Yeah, and if they stay on the stick, they're called feather sticks. That's fine. If they come off, they're called shavings. Both work really well. Yep, but like, see how it just kind of. And you can use. I would use. The belly of the blade, the middle way through. Yeah, exactly. And those will help us immensely, and you can even use your fire still on these sometimes, or you can use it on birch bark, whatever you want to do, but they both work. So you try that out. You can use whatever knife you feel like. Give that a shot. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So kneel down like Joe was doing, bud. Yeah. Careful when you pull that when you pull that one out. Put your thumb right there to push off as well. Uh right. Let me just show you. So I would pull and push at the same time. Pull and push. The old pull push. Hey there! You go. Let's throw the sheet down. That's fine. There you go. You can. Just watch that knife. Sharp, yeah. With that knife being a little bit bigger, let's try to use. That spot of the blade, yeah. I'm gonna get you another piece of wood too, 'cause we kind of made that a little flat. I would. Start here and here. Just light, like not such. Yeah, yeah, less of an angle, exactly. Yeah. Keep doing that, son, and you get like five, six curls, and then you break the chunk off and you hold it exactly. One sec. Put the knife. One sec. Yeah. You might have to push a little bit harder on this. Yeah. See on that angle. Yeah, there you go, dude. When you were there, kind of. A very useful thing to know and how to split down some wood that's too small to use an axe with, and or you don't have an axe with you, or you just want to, is called batoning. So. If you take a piece of wood like this, and you need a baton, this would be your stick, your baton. Watch out for a sec, and you'd put your knife on it and hold it in place like that. Put your hand towards the back of the knife, and. Yeah. Tappy tappy tappy. Oh yeah, I've seen that. Right. Until you split through, and that way you can get kindling good and yeah. Yeah. So let's try. So you. Take this. Put your knife on the top. Watch your fingers. Put it in the middle of the blade. A little bit more, yep, exactly right there. Hold it with your left hand. Cause you're right-handed, right? Yep. Now, tappy, tappy. No, at the front here, yeah. And you can hold on, you can oh you're good, but you can also like re reper re reposition the knife there. Yeah, very good man, very good. So then here's some nice straight pieces that you can shape make shavings from too. Oh yeah, very good, very good. I'm doing good, man. To fix that, we're gonna do a constricting knot. This is called the Canadian Jam. It's a or just the jam, but let's let's take. Canadian jam for sure. So what we want to do is just put a. Uh, one stopper knot about an inch away from the tail. Right, we'll call this the tail, and then you're gonna make another knot and not tie it tight, just right above that. So another just overhand knot, but leave it loose. Okay. So. Hold that up there. Hold your hold your sorry your your your your peg up against the tree. You're you're peg. I'm sorry, you're peg. Yeah, yeah. My bad. No worries. Uh, so we want it on there, and we're gonna take the running end and put it through that loose knot. Okay. So now, drop your bag. Yeah, just grab this and pull that. Pull tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, tight. And now what these two knots are going to do are going to come together, and they're going to stop, and they're going to push against each other and stop it from going even farther. So what you can do is wrench, pull it back. And wrench again, sir, up above it. Pull hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard as you can. Now, while you're pulling hard, bring it this way above. Yes, now keep coming this way. Okay, we got it on there. See how. You hear it tensioning up, so that's really on there now. Now, grab your bag. And and without being gentle, just drop it right on there. Just to test how strong it is. See, now just slide it down. You're great. Now that's solid on there. And then when you want to take it off, what the really cool thing about this knot is. I'm just going to take this off again. I'm sorry. What the really cool thing about this knot is, is when you want to take this this rope off, you don't have to like worry about untying it or cutting it. You just grab the tail. See how easy it comes off, loosens right up. Yeah. Okay, so it's a constricting knot that opens up easily. So we'll just redo this. And you could even wrap it again for a good measure if you felt like it, and you can drop your bag right there again. You're good. Love it. Good job, bud. Find your fire steel. That is a good not to know. What up? I think it's in this bag, Dad. Okay, well, look in the bag. Showed you what you have in there. And let them have a look. You want to come over here and put it on top of the cooler? You can put your stuff out. Show them. That's how you do it. If you were doing a bigger tree, you wrap around. You just pull back and forth. Okay, grab your plate, o tinder and birch bark. So this is an awesome platform your dad built for us. This will be easy to work on, and it'll it'll keep the fire up off of the snow, which is good because the snow is. So deep. So let's. You got your fire steel. Yep. And you have a striker on there too. Okay. So let's let's see how good that let's see how that thing works. So kneel down, please. And see how this is kind of flat. Let's use this. It's kind of flat. So put your fire steel. Plant it right in there. Push against it with the fire steel. The fire steel. Push the fire steel right in there and hold it there. Take your striker. Yeah, I feel you. Okay, and see, there should be. Is there a sharper part of that? Yeah, I think this this side maybe. Let's try that. No push. Yep. Okay, that's exactly what you want to do. That's that's perfect, dude. Okay, so let's take the most ribbony piece. And what we what I like to do is have enough so that once this starts to go, I'll take the rest of it and put it right on top because other than that, you're stuck with it burning at the top and not really burning too much. You might have to flip it upside down, but it's easier just to add to it, right? Okay. So we'll put this fluffy stuff here. Sometimes what you want to do is even fluff it up even more. Put it in there and plant it right in there like you like you had it on the wood. Put it right in where my finger is and push down. Yes, exactly now. Just go go slow and hard, and your your snowshoes are messing you up, eh? Yeah. Yeah. So go not not too fast, and and try to push down hard. I might put some more in there for you. One second, you can keep going. I'll I'll just do this while you're doing that. So if it starts to get all thrown everywhere, we're gonna stop and re. Re uh. I know what the word is. Put it all back together. Reposition. Reposition. That's the word. I knew that. See how I'm fluffing it up. And stuff's coming out of it, making it all more birds nasty. Yeah. So you'll get this. Don't don't don't be. Frustrated. It'll take. It might take a second, so put it in right in the middle. Yep. Yep. Yep. And I'll strike it. Use some force. Hey. There we go. Okay, so now grab a handful of the birch bark. Put it right on top. Don't be don't be shy about it. No, grab a whole handful. Yep, right on top. Right on top. Now just back away a little bit so it doesn't burn you. Very good, dude. Very good, and that was pretty quick, honestly. Yeah. So now we got all that on. We should get a brace so that once we start to put our stuff on, it doesn't smother it. Can you grab a like a wrist thick piece, like right around there? There. Yep, because when we lay our twigs, grab your twigs. As much as you can, yeah, all at once. And we're gonna lay them across, not the same way we put the brace, but across this way. So here, put them all down at the same time, all in. This way, yes. So now it's not gonna smother anything because it's held up by that. Right. Yeah. Now grab all that stuff. Everything. Yep. See how there's no rush either. This is already a good sustained fire, and you're doing good because we had enough prep. But if we didn't have enough birch bark and stuff, it might be a little bit quicker. Yeah. But you're doing great. Throw it right on top as well. My guy, perfect. And see that brace. See that stuff is all thick, and it might smother it. But because that brace is there, it's not going to. It's going to burn. Airflow is is key, right? See, you got it, man. Now we can go grab some. More fuel-sized pieces, and and then now I would start to put them this way instead of this way. Oh my knee kneeling in that snow, man! Holy smokes! This is why I'm in the gym three to four times a week. What is a gym? Some guy you know. The coolest gym I know is Jim Baird. Him and his brother won Alone Season Two. Yeah, he's a legit dude. What's that? Trying to get a tan on my arm. I hear ya. All right. Let's set up that tarp you got. So to set up a tarp, we need a couple things. We need some rope. We need some knowledge, and we need a tarp. There's, I struggled a lot when I was first trying to set up tarp because I didn't know the right knots to use. The right knots help everything. So let's put up our ridge line first. We're gonna go between this tree and this tree. So come on over here. Yeah, I just set that down for now. If you want, the knot that I like to use to set up a ridge line is called tot tot line hitch. So you can get it really tight or taut. So what I'm gonna do, I'll show you this one, then you can do it on the next one. So we wrap it around. We wrap it around the tree, and we're going to take the tail, and. You see how I made this little bit of a loop? Yeah. We're gonna go with the tail. We're gonna go on the inside of the loop twice. One. Two. And then take it, and then go on the outside of what I just did once, and this is all just over. That that's an overhand. Pull it tight, and what this allows us to do is to make it loose, or tight. Right, so that's why it's called the taut line hitch, and then it holds its place there. Okay, so it's nice and easy. So you hold this for a sec. Actually, take that and walk over to that tree, please. Snowshoes on, you know. Yeah, she'll do that. Yeah, come on over here. No. Put this over top. You can drop the big part. It's fine. It might, yeah, and pinch there. And you want to take your tail, your running end, whichever, call them, put it through here once. This this would be the tail or the running end. I always get it mixed up, but I'll just call this the tail. Put it through the the loop you just made, and I'll pull it down all the way. So that's one. How many times are we gonna go on the inside? Twice. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Keep your keep that. Now put it through again on the inside. Yes. Now on the outside, how many times? Once, my guy. Yep. I put it on the outside. And do an overhand knot. So slide it over around here, and pull it up through itself here. Yes, exactly. Yeah, and then do the knot like. I'm sorry. Give me one second. Give me one second. I'm gonna mess that up. Yeah. Just yeah. Just pull this through. Yep. What? Oh yeah. Yeah they are. There's a turkey hawk behind it, or what is a turkey vulture behind it? And address the knot. Just like that, and you did it right. This can slide back and forth properly. Okay, so very good. So what we want to do just to make it tight is pull it a little bit. Tighter, and now it's good. So let's. Leave that on that side like that. We'll leave it a little bit loose. I'm going to tighten this side up because we need a little bit loose to put the toggles in and make the tarp correct. Said this is a ten by thirteen, I think. To attach this. These toggle these tie-outs to our cordage. We want to use these, which are called toggles, which we just made. Hold onto those for two seconds. Well, I'm gonna just loosen it again by just pushing again. That's part of the reason the top line hitch is so useful, right? See how quick and easy that was. I'll show you on this one, then you're gonna do that one, okay? Give me one of those toggles, please. What you want to do. Make a loop, with the cordage, and because it's so loose, it's nice and easy. You're gonna slide that loop through, the tab. Sometimes it's a little bit finicky. You can pull it through and hold it open wide. We have these wide toggles so that doesn't slip. If you put thin toggles in, it'll slip everywhere. See, I'm even. Hold it. No, I got it. But you, just showing you, like it's not, it's not like easy, easy. So you put it in, and now that's grippy. See that barely wants to move. And what you can do is move that all the way over, and then once that's in, we're gonna do that with that, and it'll stay tight. So you got your toggle. You got your loop. We're just gonna make it maybe a little bit looser, so you have more room. Make a loop there next to this guy. Pull hard. Yeah, there you go, and I'll slow. That's all right. That's all right. Just pinch it hard. Yep, and I slide that through your tarp loop. Exactly. Grab your. Right. See what I mean? It's not that easy. Sometimes it just got the weight to it. There you got it. Now hold that there, and slide your toggle through. Yep, you're doing it. Yes. Exactly. Good job. Now she's on there. That's it. It's easy, easy, easy as that. Now what we want to do is tighten up our line. So do you remember how to tighten up the paracord? That's loose. You want to do the opposite to tighten. Yeah. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Keep going. And give it some slack. Pull this tight here, so that's not so much on there. Pull this part right here. Grabber here, or there is fine. Yeah, yeah, and pull at this. Push up here and pull this one at the same time. And push that one. Pull, pull. Yeah. See how it's tightening and getting taut. Yeah. Now let me see. Let's go down there and pull the whole tarp that way, just so we have more room to work on this side. Because depending on the space that you have in between your trees, and depending on the length of the tarp, you know what I mean. Sometimes you have to do this. It might not be centered completely between the two trees, but that's fine. So grab your toggle, yank. Keep going, man. Keep going, hard as you can. You're good. That's good. That's golden. That's golden. It's nice and taut. So honestly, that's super useful, man. That's like a really important thing. Like if I could teach you, if you could take away something from today, that's a really useful thing to know. Like that's on there. If you tried to take a piece of paracord and tie it from the tab to the tree and that one on there, it's gonna be loose and dangly everywhere. With this, a storm could come and you're you're solid. So now what we have to do is get get the bottom tabs tied out and to make it into an A-frame type thing. The fire's kind of there too, so we might just do one side A-frame and put, we can put the other sides up in the air. All right. Grab the one of those pieces of orange cord, please. So with a snow stake, the the move is isn't to go like when you stake out a tent or a tarp, usually it's like this, right? But the move with a snow stake is sideways underneath the snow. Yeah, and like completely underneath the snow, like. Dig on a spot for the stick, and put it in down, and then you're gonna cover it back up with snow and bury it. Now it's gonna hold strong. This is hormone-free meat. This is from moose that I was in on with a couple guys this past fall. That looks like a bagel meat, bro. Nice. I'm looking forward to it. With the snow steak. Right, we want to pull it out onto an angle. See how it's it's not not up here, not way out here. It's just following the same angle that the corner is. Okay, and we want to pull it to the ground. It's gonna be a rope here. Honestly, we could even wrap it around this tree if it was a bit longer, or if we we made it work. But this is teaching, so this is what we're gonna do. So this is about where we want to put it in. I'm gonna mark the snow. With my snow stake, I'm gonna make a groove out of the snow where I can put the stick in, the snow moose stake. So that's it. It's nice and easy, and it's as simple as wrapping a piece of par. We pull a tight piece of paracord around. The stick a few times, and maybe around itself a couple times, just so that it's really on there, and now you're gonna. What's that? Put it where we made the line. Exactly, dude. Stick it in there as hard as you can with your hand. Bury it. Now I want you to stomp. After this is all buried, you stomp on this with your snowshoe, and it's going to solidify. So go ahead, stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Perfect, dude. That's it. That's as easy as that's as easy as it is, man. And that's gonna be on there. And if you if you camped out here, that would be into the ground in the morning. It would take like an axe or a piece of wood to try to chop it out a little bit. The back of the axe. Okay, Davis. Grab that piece of paracord, please. Do you remember the way we're going to attach it? Yeah. Okay. Let's do that. Okay. We'll quiet for a second. It's a B-roll of the steaks cooking. No, I get it. Believe me, preaching the choir. All righty. What are we gonna do? Yeah. See what near near the end of this, you gotta make a loop. Here, come down here, please, so the camera can see. Thank you, appreciate that, man. Yep, make a big loop at near the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. Now slide that through this guy. Now both of the ends, so this has to have more of a tail on it. Grab it again. Yep. Now both of those ends need to come through this, that, and the long one. Need to come through. Yes, need to come through this paracord. Yeah. Pull them both to. Short side's gonna come through first, obviously. No, no, try it again. It's fine. I'll show you what I did, and then you can do it. So, near the end, you're gonna make a loop and have a long tail. Put them both through. Its own loop with the paracord itself. Pull them, pull them both through. Okay, got it. Yes, both both of them through. Yes, exactly. Pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull. Very good. That's it. Now tighten it up just with with the one with the long one. Yep, you're good. Now we can make our snow trench and our. Pull it out on the on the corner on the angle, like I showed you on the other side, to make it. Come out where? Yeah, exactly. Right about there. Okay, now stab your stake into the ground right around there. Okay. Yeah, just to mark it exactly. Now you can let go your stuff and make your make your your trench with your with your stick. But make sure you have enough cord. So bring it down there to do it, so you don't do too tight. Yes, exactly. Yeah, just wrap it tight. You don't even have to put it there. You can put it closer if you need to. It's not a big deal. Yeah. So just just let it go. Yeah. There you go. Exactly. Stick it down in there. Okay. Now you gotta bury it. Dump her down, bud. Very good. Now we got this hot setup here. And the only thing we have to worry about now is the front. For like sleeping, you can't really beat an A-frame. An A-frame being like where it comes up down on both sides, just like this side does. Okay, but for this type of thing, we don't really need that. We don't want to go hunch, hunt, huddle under there. We want it kind of open more, right? So this is good for like sometimes when it's not too rainy, and or you want a breeze, or you want to see. Say you're by a lake and you want to see see the scenic by your. Looking for moose or something like that, you need more view, so we can set it up. To where the front top is like an open porch. So we'll grab some paracord and do that too. But here, first you grab this side. I'll go grab the other side, and we'll just pull it up to see where about it's gonna be. Your dad's cooking. We want to have a view of your dad cooking, right? Yeah. So pull up high, high, high. And I can see a tree over there that this will. Oh, look a butterfly! No way. Awesome. I can see a tree over there that this will go to, and you have a tree behind you on the diagonal that that'll go to. Yes, exactly, man. So okay, we can check that out. I'll go. Let's go grab some paracord, and we could do a couple things. We could do a taut line hitch, but it's not really necessary if we just. Reef on it. As tight as it'll go. And then it's already on there, right? So we'll just tie it off to the tree next to it. We can use a wrap, overhand knot, and we're laughing. Okay, now we have a shelter that is suitable to camp under or hang out under for the day. We're getting spoiled today. Look at that moose steaks. Moostakes, garlic bread, and veggies fried up. Holy smokes! Oh. No peasant life for us. Take the bottle-shaped baby raisins off her hand. Yeah. Another stick. Okay. There you go. And go sit down, buddy. Thank you. I'll just fiddle around with my camera, you know. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, hold on, hold on. We're gonna try that. You got your knife, bud. Baby, raise on your stick. Oh, these are cooked perfectly. Here, steak sauce. Oh boy! You said you marinated those all night. Yeah, it tastes like it. That is good. What did you use to marinate, or was it a secret? I use just barbecue sauce, Worcestershire. Uh. A bit of soya, some fresh garlic, juice from a lime, a bit of olive oil, and some just carbonated water. Well, yeah, threw in a sprig, a couple sprigs of rosemary. Fancy pants. This is super good, dude. Yeah, thanks. Thank you. Oh, that was fantastic! Moose burgers, garlic bread, vegetables, steak—not burgers. What am I talking about? It was very good, very good. I think we're going to. Chill out for a bit, break down camp, and head out. Today was a perfect day. Sun shining, I think we got suntans. Sitting under the under the shade just to get out of the sun, and that's that's unbelievable for this for right now after a winter of gloom and doom. Never-ending winter is right. Oh, me too, Bud. Me too. Right there with you. Remember the name of this knot? The Canadian. Jelly. Jelly. Oh. There you are, buddy. Good job. All right, you're gonna grab the tail, the the small one. If pull it that way, if it doesn't come off, pull it this way. There you go. Just keep yanking though. First, get it nice and loose. I'll hold this part. You pull. There we go. There we are. The Canadian raspberry nut. Strawberry jam's better. Yeah. All right, boys. What'd you think of today? It was good. Good, awesome day in the blood. You had a good time, bud. Yep. You did a very good job, man. We did, yeah. Thank you, thank you very much. Thanks, that man. All right, yeah. All right, guys. You'll see these guys again, I'm sure. Everybody have a good day. Thank you for watching. Thanks, everybody.