Choosing a Camp Site, Making a Shelter and Fire

It's very wet. There's a slight channel and a tiny little stream coming down this bank side. Therefore, I'll follow that down, get a little bit nearer the river. Hopefully I should find a reasonable, reliable source of clean water. The river's in flood because we've had two days of solid rain. Hello. Awesome. I've been here ten minutes, seen a deer already. Everything is absolutely saturated. And although I have got dry tinder firelighting gear in my pack, I really want to show you if it's possible to light a fire without any of that stuff, with just... So as I've been walking along here, I've been looking for things to light fires. And we've got a great big silver birch tree here. The outer bark is peeling off. Ordinarily, you'd just strip that off, give it a little bit of a rub with your knife, get a little bit of dust going, drop a spark in, boom, the whole lot goes up. A lot of tar, and it burns with a very hot flame, and it burns long as well, so it gets your kindling going well. Unfortunately all of this stuff is soaking wet but I'm determined to find something that will light a fire in the rain because as soon as it stops raining and I start building camp the midges are going to go absolutely berserk here. If I can have a fire going it'll keep them away. I'm going to take some of that, it may just be the outer bit that's wet, I'll try and peel it off to get to the inner part. Yeah the inner bit's not bad. Now here I've just stumbled across a big badger set and if you think it doesn't look very big check this out. Excavated all of this soil, chucked it over the bank side, and there must be a dozen holes, and it stinks as well, so I don't want to be anywhere near this. I don't want to be anywhere near where there's badgers snuffling about and disturbing us in the middle of the night. That'll do me. Tinder fungus there. It's not the Alfred's Cakes, i.e. it isn't the little small hard black ball ones, which are probably the best. This one is the, it's known as Devil's Hoof Fungus. It normally grows out. Pretty much like a hoof, but this one's on a fallen tree, so it's kind of started growing, and then the tree's fallen, and then it's become all deformed as the tree's died. Actually feels quite dry. Probably won't take a spark very well, tends to smolder, but if I can get one or two of these going around the camp, these are going to smolder, put a little bit of smoke into the air, and keep the midges away very, very nicely. Look at that. Marvellous. Beautiful. Excellent, excellent, excellent. Right, this place seems as good as any. It's well hidden from the river, in fact there's no footpaths or anything anywhere near this, but I am very near the river, good access for water, it's nice and flat, it's well drained here because it isn't boggy, I've got a good source of ferns behind the camera, and this particular area, this hazel tree, has got a natural V in it, which means I'm going to be able to put a big beam in across here, make a simple little camp here. The ground's already been cleared off for large parts, probably by deer or badgers. Although I can't see any badger crap, which is good. So that means fire lighting is going to be pretty good as well. It's going to be nice and safe. So we've got good access to the river and some pretty good resources here as well. There's quite a few hazel trees. I'm going to get a lot of straight branches from them. There's some fallen logs. I might be able to get a bit of dry kindling from there. Yeah, it's looking pretty good. This is the place. Just looking over there that looks like quite a nice pool so I might be able to catch some supper which is spot on, don't have to go very far. I do have a waterproof jacket and you might be saying why the hell aren't you wearing it because it's raining. Well if you're walking about and you're carrying a heavy pack you tend to sweat quite a lot and even a good Gore-Tex jacket if you're traveling up and down hills and climbing over things like I've been doing it builds up moisture This is probably no wetter than it would have been if I'd been fully waterproofed in a good jacket. So I've got my jacket rolled up on the back there, it'll still be lovely and dry. Take the backpack off, put it against this tree, and then put the coat on top of the backpack. So it keeps everything nice and dry for when I need it. Before I do anything about lighting a fire or anything like that, I'm going to make double sure that this is exactly where I want the shelter, clear a little bit of space, clear some of these overhanging branches, which are just going to be a damn nuisance. Then probably light a little fire to keep the midges away and get on building the shelter. That'll split nice and dry inside. As I'm clearing space I'll sort out the stuff that might make good kindling and good firewood, put it in one pile. I will chop some live branches off as well just to clear this up a little bit but I'll use those on the shelter. Right we've got a lump chopped off there. This has also got a V on it. What I'm going to do I'm going to put that at the bottom end just to give it a little bit more stability, stop it rocking around and I've cut them to a point so I can jam that in the ground to keep it really steady. It's got a natural curve in it, so it's going to give me a little bit more headroom. And I'm pretty pleased about that one. That's it. Awesome. That seems about big enough. This extra one that I cut off, I'm going to run that down at an angle. So I can kind of sweep the shelter around here. Give me plenty of room in this nice flat area of ground. Just one thing to check before you put all the little thin branches on and then cover it in ferns. And make it really waterproof. Just check that it's big enough. Just check that all of these ribs that are on the outside of this main spine are angled outwards. They're angled inwards, and you've got quite a tight shelter like this. You might not have enough room. I've got loads of room in here. This is off a hazel tree. Some of the other ones are off beech. I've basically taken the smaller branches, I've brashed the trees, I've cleared them out. It's actually opened this part of the woodland up beautifully. But if you're going to be chopping live trees... Make sure you have permission from the landowner to be on the land and to cut down trees and branches. That is very important. Right, that's given us a pretty good coverage now. I'll grab the camera, have a quick spin round, let you have a look. I've probably got at least as many leafy branches still lying there. So instead of just piling all those on on top of these ones, I'm going to put an insulating layer. I'm going to cut a load of ferns down, pack all them on. And then I'm going to put the rest of those leafy branches on top to hold the ferns down. And that should really waterproof it and keep it extremely warm. That's covered up pretty well. Right, we've got quite a lot of ferns cut down, and I've put them in big piles at various points around the shelter, save me carrying them backwards and forwards. So now all we've got to do is just put them on top of the shelter. Ideally you want to put one layer on the bottom and then cover that with another layer a little bit like making tiles So your top layer hangs over your bottom layer that sheds the water You don't need to worry about packing these on tight Because the branches are going to hold them down as long as you can get them roughly in position Branches will take care of everything else. Looks pretty good. Very dark in there. Got enough ferns on there now So we've got the skeleton, leafy branches, ferns And now we're going to put more leafy branches on and that will be the shelter complete. That's all the branches used up now and to all intents and purposes the shelter is just about finished. If I didn't have a rolly mat I would put branches in there, close together, cover them in ferns and use that as a bed but I have got a rolly mat and I have got a very very light sleeping bag. Right, hopefully you can see that there's no fakery going on here. That's the stuff that I gathered on my way here, wet kindling. More wet kindling, and that to light it with. Reasonably difficult situation, but at least we've got the birch bark. It just takes one little flame there, and it doesn't really matter if it's slightly damp, it'll still burn. Right, so the first thing I want to do is just put a bed of birch bark down. I've already put some little branches in here to put the birch bark on. When it sparks, that'll create a good vehicle for the air to get in under the fire and really get it going. If it's just on the ground, the air's coming from above and it doesn't really get it going very well. Now if this was drier, I would probably get the knife and scrape the top of it until it made a dust. And that takes the spark beautifully. That's probably the best way to use this. But it's just too wet. That's why I'm going with the little ripped up strip sort of technique. When you rip it, you can see it curling up. And all those packed together just takes one to catch light then the next one and the next one and the next one and before you know it you've got a fire. Under normal circumstances it'll just take one or two strikes like that and it would go, but when it's this wet I'm going to shave off quite a lot from this stick then drop the spark in. Hopefully there'll be so much going on in there that something will take. Now all we're going to do is drop the spark in there hopefully that'll go That'll go. We'll get one little flame and then it'll make fire. I have got one or two bits that seem quite dry inside. So because I've had a couple of failed attempts at lighting this, I'm going to try and scrape a little bit of dust in. So close. Oh, you can hear it crackling. It's very, very wet, but it's going. And we've got back. Now we can have a brew and go to bed. That high wall is just throwing the heat back to me. Lovely. Going to get my backpack in, roll the mat out, get a brew on and have a nice kip. Catch you in the next video. Thanks for watching.