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| Basic Cold Weather Manual FM 31-70, p 55 |
Imagine that you are caught out in the wilderness, for
one reason or the other and you are now having an unexpected adventure. At 35o Fahrenheit, it is warm for early
January, but you know that tonight it will drop into the low 20s . You know that you will lose a great deal of
heat to ground conduction and that you need to make an emergency bough bed. Bough beds are also called ground beds, bush
beds or browse beds and are used to insulate you from the heat robbing
ground. But how do you make one? And how many boughs do you need?
Since I didn’t know the answer to the second question
and since it is the week after New Year’s and it is time to repurpose the old
Christmas tree I did an experiment…
You can use anything to make a bough bed as long as it
is fine at the tips and no thicker than your thumb at the stem, other materials
are things like branches with or without leaves, cattails, golden-rod stems,
ferns, clover or grasses. They should be
dry, so shake off any moisture or snow before putting them into your bough bed.
All of the old books speak of pushing the stem end of
the bough into the ground to make the most comfortable mattress. However, in a survival situation you are not
interested in maximizing your comfort: you are interested in minimizing the
time it takes to build the bough bed, your energy expenditure and your sweat. In a survival situation, you should use the Mors
Kochanski method, with the branches in a chevron pattern and the boughs making
an angle close to 90o.
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Chevron Pattern, drawn by the author, per Mors
Kochanski
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Bush Bed, drawn by the author, per Mors Kochanski
Remember whatever you use to build your bough bed is
going to compress under your weight. So
how much should you use?
Mors Kochanski wrote that to make a bough bed you need
to have a compressed thickness of at least 4 fingers or about 3-1/2 inches of
dead air space between you and the ground or snow as insulation. However, more is better, and some experts
recommend 2 to 3 feet of uncompressed branches.
I cut the limbs off a 7-foot tall balsam fir tree, and
after trimming the branches off the trunk, I had about 50 branches. This made a pile 28 inches square on a side
and 28 inches tall. When I compressed
this pile, it compacted down to just 18 inches tall.
A pile 28 inches by 28 inches is a big enough bough
bed for me to sit on, which is fine if I am going to spend the night leaning up
against a tree. However, since the
boughs compressed to 18 inches deep I could also spread them out so that the bough
bed measured 28 inches wide by 56 inches long and still have 9 inches of
compressed boughs beneath me, if you want to lay down.
That is the basics of building an emergency bough bed.
However, before you decide to practice this outdoors, first
let us talk about safety.
The first time that you practice this, you should do
it in a controlled setting, like in your back yard or just off the trailhead within
100 yards or so from your car. In
addition, whenever you go into the wilderness you should always take a buddy
with you.
The most important thing to remember when building an
emergency bough bed is location, location, location! You should always check the following, wind,
water, widow-makers and wildlife.
Remember that at night the winds will reverse and will
flow downhills, valleys and gullies. If
possible, find a spot that has a windbreak on two sides to protect you from
both downhill and down valley winds.
It is never a good idea to shelter in valley bottoms
and low spots since they can flood.
Always try to build your shelter half way up the valley wall or the
hillside as the cold air will settle in valley bottoms and other low spots at
night and hilltops can be cold as well.
If you have to shelter near creeks or rivers, look for grass and debris
caught in the branches of shrubs, as this is evidence of past floods. Also on the trunks of trees near the creek or
river, look for chipped bark and other damage, as this can be an indication of
ice jams and flooding.
Always look up before you set up your shelter, to make
sure there aren’t snags, broken limbs or other widow-makers hanging in the
branches above you that can come crashing down on your shelter.
Use common sense when it comes to wildlife, don’t camp
on a game trail, near beehives or near mosquito breeding grounds, or you might
have unwelcome visitors.
Much like Native Americans, trappers and other early
explorers of the North American Wilderness and like modern survival experts,
such as Les Stroud, I always bring an axe with me. It is not impossible to make a bough bed
without an axe, but it is much harder.
If you don’t have an ax, you can still make a bough bed; however, you
are limited in what you can use to build it, to things that you can break with
your hands. It is easier to build a bough
bed without an ax in the summer than in the winter, but I have done it in both
seasons.
Bernard Mason, writing about ax safety, in Woodsmanship
said it best, when he recommended that you always swing your ax over your head
and in a circle parallel to the ground to make sure that you ax doesn’t catch
or get deflected by anything before you start cutting. The Boys Scouts of America call this checking
you blood circle. Axes that are caught
or deflected can cut you and by insuring that no one is within the reach of
your ax, you can prevent your unexpected adventure from turning into a medical
emergency.
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| Woodsmanship, Bernard S Mason, p 19 |
Bernard Mason also noted that lopping off branches can
be very dangerous, because if the ax glances off and it hits you then you will
be adding a medical emergency to you unexpected adventure which could have
serious or fatal results. When you cut
off the branches, to be safe, always stand so that the trunk is between your
legs and the branch you are cutting, start at the base of the trunk and cut
toward the crown, and cut the branches off parallel to the trunk. The author of Woodsmanship also
recommended, that instead of cutting off dead and dry branches with the blade
of the ax, that you should break them off with the poll, also known as the
butt, of the ax head, since the hard, dead branches can dull your ax.
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| Woodsmanship, Bernard S Mason p 21 |
The last safety measure to consider when you build an
emergency bough bed is take your time, don’t work up a sweat, remove layers as
you warm up, in an unexpected adventure wet clothes KILL!
A video presentation of this article can be found
[HERE]. Look for me on YouTube at
Bandanaman Productions for other related videos [HERE].
And as always, until next time, Happy Trails
Sources:
Headquarters, Department of the Army, Basic Cold
Weather Manual FM 31-70, [Washington D.C., April 12, 1968] p 55 (accessed
1/24/2019) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/FM-31-70-Basic-Cold-Weather-Manual.pdf
Mors L. Kochanski, Bush Craft, [Partners
Publishing, Edmonton, AB., 2014] p.174
Bernard S. Mason, Woodsmanship, [A. S. Barnes
and Company, New York, 1954] p 19 & 21 (accessed 1/24/2019) https://archive.org/details/Woodsmanship_Bernard_Mason/page/n19
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