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You are “misplaced” in the woods and
this is your bed tonight, picture by the author.
So,
it happened! It had to happen to you
eventually, you know; it happens to everyone eventually. Maybe you got turned around and now you are
“misplaced”, and you have no idea on how to get back to where you were. Maybe, you slipped and fell, and now you are
too injured to get out of the woods by yourself. Or, maybe the Sun is going down behind the
trees and you have less than two of daylight left. What do you do now?
You
need to find shelter, of course! But
what should you look for?
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Graphic by the author.
Summer
or winter, it doesn’t matter, the elements are your worst enemy; humans can’t
survive heat or cold, wet or wind for long without a shelter. Because protecting yourself from the elements
means different things in different climates and at different times of the
year, the type of shelter that you build will depend on where and when you are
building it. It is true, that a lot
could, and has, been written about how to build a shelter, however today, I am
writing about things that you should think about before, and as, you build your
shelter.
Location,
location, location…and the 5 W’s
Whenever
you set up a campsite in the wilderness, you should always consider the 5 W’s,
wind, water, widow-makers, wood and wildlife, before you choose a location.
Wind
You
must treat wind with respect and plan for it when you choose the location of
your shelter, because in a survival situation wind can be your enemy and kill
you fast if you let it. Wind and wind-chill
it can lower the “real-feel temperature” and bring on hypothermia; it can suck
the moisture out of you and bring on dehydration, or it can blow down branches
and trees on you and squash you flat. On
the other hand, wind can blow mosquitos and other bugs away from you and your
campsite. So, what type of winds are
there?
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Prevailing winds worldwide, from Moon
Joon Kim
Prevailing
winds are, according to the Oxford dictionary, “a wind from the direction
that is predominant at a particular place or season”. It is always important when you travel or
camp in the wilderness to know the usual wind direction, when canoeing it can
help you stay in the calm water on the sheltered lee side of the shore or if
you put your camp on the windward shore, it can help blow the bugs away from
your camp. It is important to remember
that prevailing winds are not constant all day long, as Alan Innes-Taylor noted
on page 53, when he wrote of prevailing winds in the Arctic Survival Guide:
“Fair weather winds usually decrease at night”. In Algonquin Provincial Park and much of
northeast Canada and the United States, fair weather winds usually blow from
the northwest to the southeast during the day.
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Windward and leeward sides of hills
or mountains, modified from Eliane Truccolo
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Offshore, onshore and valley winds,
modified from Eliane Truccolo
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Onshore winds, from Fig. 2-10, Aviation
Weather Student Guide
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Offshore winds, from Fig. 2-11, Aviation
Weather Student Guide
Offshore, onshore and valley winds are all very similar and are both generated by the daily warming and cooling of the
land. The differences in the specific
heat of land and water causes the land to warm and cool more quickly than water,
during the day this causes warming and rising air over the land and descending
or cooling air over the water resulting in an onshore or sea breeze. At night the process reverses with the land
cooling quicker faster than the water, which cause descending cool air over the
land and rising warm air over the water and creates an offshore of land
breeze. Onshore breezes seldom penetrate
far inland, but they are usually stronger than offshore breezes.
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Mountain and valley winds, from Fig.
2-12, Aviation Weather Student Guide
In
the daytime mountain slopes and hillsides are heated more quickly by the Sun
than valley bottoms, and these slopes warm the surrounding air through
conduction. This warmed air rises and then
later cools and sinks back down towards the valley floor, forcing the air from
the valley floor up the mountain or hillside, completing the cycle of
circulation and creating an upslope and up valley wind. At night the air in contact with the mountain
slope or hillside cools faster than the valley bottom because of outgoing
terrestrial radiation and this denser cool air flows down slope and down valley
and forces warmer valley bottom air upwards, creating a circulation pattern and
downslope and down valley winds.
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| Excerpts from the Arctic Survival Guide, p. 53, by Alan Innes-Taylor |
All
of this is important, because you want to face your shelter so that the front
is perpendicular to the general flow of the wind.
Water
and Widow-makers
The second and third of the 5 W’s are water and
widow-makers. While you want to be near
drinking water, setting up your shelter near that babbling brook is often a bad
idea, as a storm far upstream can quickly turn that tame stream into a raging
torrent and wash you away. Also, you
should look for a level area half-way between the summit of the hill and the valley
bottom, as the cold night air collects in low spots and valleys and the summits
of hills are always cold. It is
often significantly warmer half-way up a hillside, between the crest of the
hill and the valley bottom and far safer from flooding. Always look up and around your planned campsite
and make sure there a no dead trees, snags or widow-makers stuck in the
branches above you, just waiting for the right wind to come crashing down on
you. And lastly, don’t shelter under the
tallest tree in the forest, it is a lightening rod! If possible, shelter in a grove of equal
sized trees. Also avoid hill-tops and
exposed cliff faces can also attract lightening, so don’t shelter at the base
of the tallest cliff in the area or on the top of the hill.
Wood
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An excerpt from “How Not To Get
Lost”, by Charles Elliott
The
fourth of the 5 W’s is wood, the area that you choose for your campsite should
have plenty of firewood and building materials, such as leaves, boughs, bark,
branches, etc.
Wildlife
The
last of the 5 W’s is wildlife, be careful of setting up your shelter on game
trails, near swampy areas that breed mosquitos or in a rock shelter that is
already called home by one of the locals.
And
now that you have some ideas on where to build your shelter, the first and most
basic shelter you need, is the one that will insulate you from the cold, cold
ground. If you have ever slept directly on
the ground, when the night-time temperatures drop close to freezing, as I have
once upon a time, you will know how painful it is as the ground sucks the heat
out of your kidneys! I can tell you from
personal experience that, insulation between you and the ground is your
friend. You should always build a
shelter bed before you build any other shelter. Mors Kochanski, a well-known survival expert,
wrote that shelter beds or emergency bough beds should 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.
Earlier in 2019, I experimented with making a bough bed and discovered
that a 28 inch (72 cm) high pile of boughs compressed down to 18 inches (46 cm)
of insulation when I sat down on it.
Shelter beds insulate your sleeping body from the cold ground and make
you more comfortable and allow you to sleep better. For more on shelter beds, read “Making an
Emergency Bough Bed”, HERE and watch “Building An Emergency Bough Bed”, HERE.
There
are two types of shelters, found shelters and built shelters, and of most are
reflector shelters. Found shelters are
exactly as they sound, shelters that you find in the wilderness and they can be
a rock shelter, cliffside or big boulder, a blown down log or an uprooted tree;
or simply a large tree that you can lean against during the night. Built shelters are lean-to’s, debris beds or
double trench fires, these last two are the only two that are not reflector
shelters. Reflector shelters are any
open or roofed shelter where you are between the reflector and your fire. Lean-to’s or debris shelters take more time
and energy to build but, are the most weatherproof of shelters. Below are some examples of shelters that you
could find or build in an emergency.
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| An illustration of a found, reflector type of shelter from “But If You Do Get Lost”, Kenneth Cole, p. 90 |
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A blown down tree and upturned root ball, a found, reflector type of shelter, photo by the author
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Looking out from underneath a rock
shelter, an example of a found reflector type of shelter, photo by the author
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| An illustration of a built reflector type of shelter from Arctic Survival Guide, by Alan Innes-Taylor, p. 54 |
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| An illustration of a built reflector type of shelter from Arctic
Survival Guide, by Alan Innes-Taylor, p. 54 |
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An illustration of a built reflector
type of shelter from Arctic Survival Guide, by Alan Innes-Taylor, p. 55
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An illustration of a built shelter
which may or may not be a reflector type of shelter from “But If You Do Get Lost”,
by Kenneth Cole, p. 90
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An illustration of a built
non-reflector type of debris shelter, from Outdoor Survival Training For
Alaska’s Youth, by Dolly Garza
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An illustration of a built
non-reflector type of shelter from “But If You Do Get Lost”, by Kenneth Cole,
p. 90
This
is a thumbnail sketch of building or finding a shelter in a survival emergency.
Hopefully you will never have to build
or find one in a real emergency, however they are a lot of fun to find or build
for practice.
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An upturned root ball reflector
shelter, nighty-night, photo by the author.
I
hope that you continue to enjoy The Woodsman’s Journal Online and my videos at
BandanaMan Productions and don’t forget to follow me on both The Woodsman’s
Journal Online and subscribe to BandanaMan Productions on YouTube, and if you
have questions, as always, feel free to leave a comment on either site. I announce new articles on Facebook at Eric
Reynolds, on Instagram at bandanamanaproductions, and on VK at Eric Reynolds,
so watch for me.
Sources
Cole,
Kenneth M., Jr.; “But If You Do Get Lost”, Outdoor USA: 1967 Yearbook of Agriculture [United
States Department of Agriculture, United States Government Printing Office,
Washington, DC, 1967] p. 89-91, https://archive.org/stream/yoa1967/yoa1967_djvu.txt,
accessed 6/16/14
Elliott,
Charles; “How Not To Get Lost”, Outdoor USA: 1967 Yearbook of Agriculture
[United States Department of Agriculture, United States Government Printing
Office, Washington, DC, 1967] p. 87-89, https://archive.org/stream/yoa1967/yoa1967_djvu.txt,
accessed 6/16/14
Garza,
Dolly; Outdoor Survival Training For Alaska’s Youth: Student Manual,
[Alaska Sea Grant College Program, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1998], p. 13,
https://www.nwarctic.org/cms/lib/AK01001584/Centricity/Domain/507/OutdoorSurvivalTraining-StudentManual.pdf
, accessed 12/4/2017
Kim,
Moon Joon; “Essays on Long-Range Transport of Air Pollution and Its Health
Outcomes”, [Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North
Carolina, 2017], p. 4, https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/bitstream/handle/1840.20/34686/etd.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y,
accessed 9/28/19
Kochanski
Mors L.; Bush Craft, [Partners Publishing, Edmonton, AB., 2014] p.174
Aviation Weather Student Guide, “Atmospheric
Mechanics of Winds, Clouds and Moisture, and Atmospheric Stability”, http://navyflightmanuals.tpub.com/P-303/Sea-And-Land-Breezes-43.htm,
[Integrated Publishing, Inc.], p. 2-11 to 2-13, accessed 9/28/19
Truccolo,
Eliane; “Assessment of the wind behavior in the northern coast of Santa
Catarina”, Revista Brasileira de Meteorologia, Vol 26, 3, September 2011,
p. 451-460, http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-77862011000300011,
accessed 9/28/19
Vliet,
Russ; A Manual of Woodslore Survival, [Philmont Scout Ranch, Cimarron,
New Mexico, 1950], p. 7-8
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