Beginners Guide to Wilderness Survival and Primitive Skills Part 1

The realm of the skills used by our ancestors, and survival in general can, to some, seem like a daunting and overwhelming place, fraught with hardship and discouraging moments which all too often lead to a "this just isn't my thing" mentality. On a regular basis when I mention the skills i practice and teach, I am greeted with the all too familiar retort: "I would die if i got lost in the woods."
This mental barrier of doubt gets in the way of learning new skills, the though that because it implies leaving your TV behind and cooking on a fire, it is somehow a difficult and painful way to get by, or live. The purpose of this, and others that will follow it are to give some guidelines and direction to those who are interested, but have no idea where to start when it comes to learning these skills.

First of all, locate a teacher or mentor if possible. When I began, I managed to get by for a short while by teaching myself to sew leather, knap small arrowheads, and generally spend lots of time in the woods making various odds and ends, but when it came to the desire to learn the hard skills like fire making, shelter building, finding water, or more advanced knapping skills, I realized I would need a teacher (or teachers) if I wanted to progress to a proficient level. My answer was MAPS Group at the time, where I attended many gatherings and learned many of the skills I know today. Other teachers seemed to find me, my friend Bill Ewing happened to have extensive bow drill knowledge, and had a very natural way of teaching me which woods to use and how to adjust the set to make it work.
Look up nearby tracking groups, anthropology departments at some universities teach knapping, or atleast have someone on staff who knows something of knapping. If you are on the east coast in the Mid Atlantic Area, there are several schools you can take classes from such as Ancestral Knowledge and Earth Connection. MAPS Group also has a list of people who can offer advice on certain skills.

Which skills should I learn first?
Good question. Perhaps a good way to decide is to put it into perspective. Eventualy you will hear of the Order of Survival. No, its not some mysterious cult dating back to a group of 15th century survival monks, the Order of Survival is the 4 things you need to live on a day to day basis, and in the long term, which are:

Shelter
Water
Fire
Food

This order is not set in stone however, since your situation will dictate which is more important, but this is more or less the order of importance of these 4 things.
That being said, I personally consider fire making one of the first things you should learn and become proficient with. It can be learned any where you are, there are a number of ways to go about it, and it covers a lot of your physical and mental needs. Being able to make fire can dramaticly increase your chances, so it is always a good thing to have a number of ways to do it on hand (and have some level of mastery of those ways).
I'm a big proponent of controlled chaos, putting yourself into less than desirable situation in order to take your skills (and your edge) to new levels. Its important to always push your limits, do not simply make a fire with a bow drill then put it away and decide you have mastered it, because you haven't (can you ever truly master anything?). Start adding in new factors, new obstacles, new challenges. Try it in the rain, in the snow, in a hail storm, break your arm and fine a way to make it work then. Well.. don't actually break your arm obviously, you can just tie it behind your back or something, but you get my point!
I'd like to share a story I often share with my students when teaching fire making.
Last Febuary on a particularly cold day, I was in the hilly woodlands of central Maryland. I was showing my girlfriend (at the time) around a patch of woods I had been going to for a number of years. THis particular patch of woods was a steep sided valley with a fairly deep, and at times wide creek running through it. It was cold enough that ice covered large patches. So, being the manly survival so-called "expert" that I was thinking I was, I decided it was a very good idea to show her how to cross ice without falling through. We found a patch of ice in a rather deep section of the creek and I laid down on my stomach and army crawled across the ice. No problem. Not so much as a crack. Once reaching the other side I coaxed ehr into doing the same, so she got on her stomach and started to crawl across the ice. About halfway across, she pushed down onto the ice to inch her way forward (instead of inch-worming your way across with arms out-stretched) and cracks immediately shot in every direction. Luckily she stopped moving and I was able to grab her hand and pull her across without the ice stressing any more.
We proceed down stream until we reached a series of rapids with deep pools, and we came upon a bridge crossing the creek from one side to the other, with open holes on either side. Once again my "man vs wild" mentality took over and I proceeded onto the ice bridge to show her how it could hold my weight, which it did, up until I started hitting the side of it with my boot. I remember looking back to her to say "wow it isn't breaking" or something to that effect, and that's when I heard a definite crack. I remember looking down in time to see the ice disappear beneath me and water come up to meet me. First thing I noticed was how fast the current was, it literally grabbed hold of my legs and tried to force me under a nearby sheet of ice. Another thing is that everything they say about trying to get out once you've fallen through ice is true. It's wet, cold, slippery, and tiring. I did manage to pull myself out however, at which point my clothes were completely soaked.
I don't remember feeling especialy cold, but I do remember rapidly decideing whether I was going to walk out of the woods, or stay put and make a fire. I settled on fire making, it was about 30 atleast in a snow filled valley.
The only fire making device I had on me was a bow drill, and a ball of tinder which had both gone into the creek with me when I fell through, so I immediatly handed it all to my girlfriend (who had done bow drill once or twice prior). After about a minute trying it became clear that she had not practiced since the last time she made a fire, and was not going to get a coal in time, so I had to take over and managed to get the fastest coal I think I've ever made (amazing what a little motivation can do). Within about 5 minutes of going into the water I had a fire going and my clothes drying by it. At first I felt slightly embarrassed, I had put myself in a position to get seriously hurt or killed, but I saw a different side of it. Using the skills I had practiced so much up until then, I had used them to better my situation, and perhaps save my life.
From that experience, I have come to appreciate the value of scenarios. Putting yourself in situations that are uncomfortable or perhaps risky to push your edge and test yourself. Making a fire in your backyard on a nice day is vastly different from making it in heavy rain t 40 degrees in a t-shirt and a pair of Carhartts. So I encourage you, challenge yourself, be uncomfortable, learn to adapt.

Friction Fire Class- August 2nd, 2008

If you are in the area of Oregon Ridge Nature Center, you may be interested in a Fire Making Class I am teaching there . It will be from 9-5 on Saturday August 2nd, 2008. Registration is handled through Oregon Ridge Nature Center. Cost for the class is $80.00 per person and the minimum age requirement is 18 years of age. If you're interested in more classes such as this, or this class in particular, you can find more information at www.earth-connection.com or Oregon Ridge Nature Center

Ancestral Knowledge and Living Earth School

Lately I have begun my work with Ancestral Knowledge Inc., based out of Mt Rainier, Maryland. We work mostly with providing summer camps and workshops for home schooled kids, at risk youth, as well as schools and boy scout troops to teach ancient life ways, wilderness awareness, and sustainable living skills. Above all, we like to get the kids out in the woods and streams, learning by doing, and experiencing nature the way their ancestors have for eons. We operate mostly in the Mid-Atlantic area.

I also work for Living Earth School based out of Charlottesville, Virginia. Living Earth runs weeklong overnight and day camps.

Ancestral Knowledge Inc.:
http://www.ancestralknowledge.org

Living Earth School:
http://www.circleofseeds.com/LES.html

Here are some pictures from past events and Camps:

Demonstrating the bow drill with an over-sized set.

Making cordage

Oneof my favorite parts of spending time in the woods is discovering new and interesting places. This is an old Limestone Quarry, potentially over 100 deep.

Eastern Box Turtle

This is a print I am trying to identify. I could only find one. 5 toes, no claws visible. Don't tell me what it is if you know, simply give me a hint in the comment section or email it to me.

Improvised Bow Drill

Yesterday my friend and I were hiking in the nearby woods, and we decided to test her bow drill skills. It seems that everything that could pose a problem, did. First, finding adequate tinder, then her soapstone handhold was too soft, so the spindle had drilled almost all the way through at this point, then we realized the bow (with buckskin string) had been dropped somewhere in our travels. So we had to come up with some solutions to fix these problems and ultimately achieve fire.
First, a string for the bow. While I had a backup bow, we were testing her skills, not mine, as well as her equipment on hand. I was merely an observer in this. So after a moments thought, she produced a fine shoelace from her shoe, which served perfectly.
Next, tinder. We managed to locate a piece of bark with somewhat fibrous inner layer.
After giving the set a go, we found problems with the spindle, and realized the wooden spindle had actually bored deep enough into the stone that it was not spinning as freely as one would like, so we needed to find something to replace it, preferably without too much time needed. We weren't the first to visit this spot, and some others had seen this area as a good place to consume alcohol. As such, there was a few beer cans around, so why not try the bottom of a beer can? This worked rather well, surprisingly.
And so we were able to achieve an ember, and with some coaxing, a flame.

Above you can see the shoelace, beer can, and set used. The green coloured stone is the soapstone handhold.

Fires of the New Year

I was planning on making a video today, but when I arrived at my old debris hut, I found I had left the memory card to my camera at home, and while my house wasn't that far, I didn't feel like walking back to get a 1"x1" piece of plastic and metal. So I pulled out my basswood bowdrill and started an ember. For tinder I used some birch bark collected in Montana with Tulip Poplar in the center. For kindling, even though it's been wet and rainy around here recently, there was plenty of dead rose bushes, box elder twigs and dead grapevine. The fire produced is of the scout fire variety. Small, enough to keep you warm, provide you with spiritual comfort, some light, and easily extinguished if need be.
The debris hut I have is in very poor condition. The skeleton of the structure can be seen, and the ridgepole has snapped in half. It's also located in a wet area, so it has a tendency to rot away so by this time each year it needs to be pulled apart and reconstructed. I hope to get a series of pictures when I rebuild the hut to demonstrate how it's all put together.

Snow in Missoula (gathing wood broken by snow)

Last night we got about a foot of snow. This is the first real snow we've had in Missoula this year. This also made for great snowball fights, but when morning came it also brought many broken and downed trees. Some of these trees were Basswood (American Linden). I've been waiting for a sizable branch from one of these trees to come down so I can get some new parts for my bow drill set. There's good trees around here for bow drill, but I like using Basswood for my set, and teaching others.

Here's a juniper that fell completely over from the weight of the snow.

When I got to the center of campus, there were stacks of branches piled up next to their respective trees (some had been but up into convenient pieces).

I cut several branches with my flint knife. The key to cutting with a knife like this is sawing around the stick to form a weak point, then snapping it in half. Continue sawing if the branch doesn't snap.

I'm also working on a pair of snow shoes. I have the frame of one completed, but I'll save picture from that for another post.

UPDATE: Its about 6 months from when I constructed my flint knife (box elder handle with raw Texas chert blade), and I compared it with a picture from when I posted about it in July (here)it is still going strong, with virtually no change, with the exception of a few flakes, but even those are minimal. Its been used extensively for cutting wood, boring holes, and various other tasks, and is still holding strong. I started out hafted with commercial tanned leather, but now sports brain tanned antelope hide bindings.

Camping the Rattlesnake

Jared, Mariah, and I camped up in the Rattlesnake Wilderness last night. We brought some elk meat, sweet potatoes, dough, onions, and a few other food stuffs for dinner and breakfast. We found that the bears are indeed still moving around. When we arrived at the Rattlesnake creek and got out of the car, we saw a bear cub (probably Black Bear), on the other side of the road. It apparently didn't like us much, because it started to climb a nearby tree.
We used the handrill to make the fire, since my bow drill wasn't working well. I'll be collecting new parts for it soon.
Dinner was excellent, of course, and we all slept well.
The next morning we explored the surroundings a bit, and I gathered some Kinnikinik berries and leaves. I plan to dry the leaves, and use the berries to make pemmican. The berries are very starchy and tend to keep rather well, not unlike a potato. It's also a medicinal plant, used in many places to treat or cure a variety of illnesses. It grows as a groundcover in patches.

Here are the berries, which I gathered using my new elk ear pouch, as well as the branches with leaves.

There are also these green fungi type things? It grows on dead pondarosa pine branches in the rattlesnake and its bright green. If anyone knows what this is, send me an email.

Elk in Montana

I was invited to Jared's fathers house to help butcher an elk that was shot on the plateau near his house. The area is an amazing play, and I'm told the plateau is a viciously cold place, which makes it all the more interesting. We made a nice handdrill fire (yucca on cottonwood root) and slept by it. It turned out to be very nice night, considering it had been 18 degrees the morning before.
Anyway, the elk was a beautiful cow. It was an all day job, but very interesting. I'd never done any butchering, or skinned something that large. I used a chert blade of course to do all the cutting. We got the hide, many bones, tendons, leg skins, and even made a pouch from the ear (inspired from Torgus' blog post here). We also got some meat of course.

We had a couple of dogs who did their best to take advantage of my generosity with the scraps. Elk meat is very good, so I can't blame them.

Some of the things we wanted were cannon bones, scapulas, ribs (good for bow drill bows and scrapeing tools) as well as an ulna bone. I'll post pictures of that particular bone when we start to work on it. Also the leg skins were saved (much to the dismay of the dogs who happen to like to eat that part). The ear pouch idea was very interesting, so I'll focus on that.

I started by cutting the ear from the head. I didnt cut all the way to the base, though I wish I did. I didnt use any tools, except my fingernails to seperate the skin from the cartilage. The trick, I found, was to use your fingernail to pick at the skin until it seperates. Its very thin on the inside of the ear, so I took my time and tried not to rush, but I accidently tore it slightly (nothing major, I'll sew it up later). I found the edges of the ear to be a bit tricky, but not impossible. One thing I found was that skinning an ear isnt difficult, just requires patience.

Once I got to the end, its a bit tricky to remove the cartilage, but you just pull it away from the skin. I was worried I'd tear open the bottom of the pouch, but it turned out alright.

Finally, you have your ear pouch. You can see the tear, which luckily doesn't go too far down. I left it inside out to dry, and worked it with my hands until it was no long stiff. I suppose you could brain it, but I'm not sure it would actualy penetrate the hide, because there seemed to be some membrane that would be hard to remove without tearing the ear. I agree with Torgus that this is a resource that has been overlooked, and I plan to make many of these pouches (a few friends have already asked for one). I like that I can get more than just a brain from the deer heads we pick up from the butchers.

Fired Pottery and Completed Shell Bead

Here is the completed shell bead. I already have two requests for more of these so apparently they're still as desirable as they were at Cahokia.
We also fired the pots yesterday. It turned out to be a perfect day and night for firing. We started in the afternoon Ashley used her bow drill kit to start the fire. It was the second time she's started a fire with her kit. Its a basswood on basswood set, but she also have a yucca on Western Red Cedar set she practices with. She used an elk knuckle (one I found at my friends ranch in Montana that we think may have been picked over by wolves. It was very white and clean when we found it), and tulip poplar tinder bundle with an oak gall in the center. Perhaps its because she's seen me do it so many times, but she really seems to pick up bow drill skills fairly quickly.
Once we got the fire going, we put the pots around to warm up and dry out more (we dried them for about two weeks or so prior to yesterday, and dried the larger one in the oven for a day. No drying cracks at all were visible.
We built the fire up pretty big and got it fairly hot, for about an hour before letting it burn down to coals and making a ring so we could put the pots in the center. Next step after putting the pots in is you start adding smaller pieces of wood and sticks on top of the ring of coals. These combusted fairly quickly. You continue to add on top of them and begin to place them so they form a kind of igloo of wood and fire over the pots. We added progressively larger pieces of wood, but not so large as to crush the other pieces of wood or risk breaking the pottery. You wouldn't want to put a large log on and accidentally break that nice cooking pot.
We continued to add wood and increase the temperature until I could see the pots glowing red. I was reading an article in a Society of Primitive Technology bulletin on firing pottery and I read that at this point, it is beginning to reach the temperature for ceramic change, and so you maintain this temperature for about 30-45 minutes. You could always keep it that hot for longer, but I suppose that's roughly the minimum amount of time.
You'll notice the edges of the pit are lined with bricks. I believe these might help with maintaining the temperature, or help focus the heat towards the pots.
We kept it going for another hour or so and let it die down. We left it to cool for the rest of the evening and the rest of the night. I did check it at 12 that night, but there were still embers and the pots were too hot to handle even with leather work gloves.
I pulled them out this morning and they turned out great. I did refire some pottery made with clay from Owego, New York, hoping it would harden up, but it's fairly week and still more of a soapstone consistency. Perhaps if I used some kind of grit it might have worked better.
The lighter coloured pot that you don't see in any of the other pictures is Ashley's. She made it at MAPS Meet 2007

Bow drill videos

At the end of last summer, I posted a couple videos on youtube of me using my bowdrill set. I'll probably put new ones up that might be a bit better than the two I posted before. But regardless, here they are:




The spindle I have is an extended spindle using a deer canon bone. I used this all summer and part of the following fall before it split when I forced a new bit in without supporting it. It worked very well, reduced wear on the string, and because of its irregular shape the string gripped it fairly well. The wood in that video I believe is yucca on box elder. Works quite nicely. Box elder on Box Elder works very well too.

First Post

Well, this is my first post in my Primitive/Ancestral Skills blog. I plan to post various gatherings, projects, etc. I do here. Hope its enjoyable, and I hope to atleast impart some knowledge to those who read it.

To the left are some of my tools and equipment on a braintanned shirt I made.