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Notes from Tom Brown’s Wilderness Survival School
The order of Survival includes:
Shelter
Water
Fire
and
Food
Rules for making a good Fire:
Tips:
Don’t collect the wood right around your camp. This 200-500 yard area should be reserved in case of emergency. This is called “stocking the cupboard.”
Tinder is first. Tinder should be light, dry and fibrous plant material such as a jute twine, dry grasses, cattails, inner bark, and dry leaves.
Tinder fungus – a coal extender like dry mushrooms
For a long-term fire: oak, hickory, ash, and maple can be used.
Wet wood burns 3x4x longer than dry wood. Green wood burns 8x longer. You can use all three for a very successful fire.
Build a fire wall in a semi circle (reflecting wall) with wood, rock, anything.
Fuel collection – the best wood to start a fire with is dry and dead. If it has just rained, collect dead material from low, dying branches
If you are on hilly or mountainious land in the northern hemisphere, south facing slopes are ideal, as the wood will be drier.
Heat rocks up in a fire, they provide warmth after the fire dies down. Don’t gather rocks from riverbeds for your fire – they could explode!
The Bow Drill and the Hand Drill: these are universal tools.
A Bow Drill needs to reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit
Parts:
Fireboard: just as thick as your thumb, 2 spindles wider, long enough to step on 1/8” between the edge of the board. Make pie slice just shy of the center.
Bow: learning bow, simple stick with a split on one end. Tie one end permanently and the other with the split is adjusted. Thumb thick and armpit to palm length.
Handhold: needs to fit into your hand easily. It could be wood or rock A soap, tree wax sap or an oil to coat the handhold indentation and the bow stick spindle top.
Spindle: a similar hardness of wood. Pinky to thumb tip length. The top of your spindle should be sharp, and the bottom should be dull. Wood types commonly used for a Bow Drill include: Beech, cedar, cottonwood, willow, sage, alder, buckeye, sycamore, tamarack, juniper, elderberry, basswood, sumac, birch, mesquite, poplar, maple, palm, fruit trees, desert willow, mule fat, kayo rush, (avoid resin-based woods)
The Hand Drill
Use goldenrod, primrose and fireweed or other pithy-centered stalks for this fire making technique.
These are harvested at the end of the year, and the ideal length is 1.5’ to 16”
The stock needs a flat edge. To make one, roll the stalk while perforating it with your knife or sharpened stone before breaking it clean. Remove all nubs, and this should be pinky finger width. (The thinner the stick, the easier it is to use) The fireboard needs to be very thin, around 3/8” thick.
To use this method, it must be a very dry atmosphere. It produces a very small coal.
Technique: make sure both hands are working equally, and use the softest wood possible for a fireboard.
Note: Your first line of shelter is your clothing so stuff your clothes with leaves.
Debris Hut:
This is the best shelter to avoid acute or chronic hypothermia in wood-dense areas.
When building a debris hut, look for good drainage, dry land, and don’t build too close to a body of water. Avoid mold, moisture, and animal bedding areas, also avoid the “widow maker” half-fallen tree. In 30-degree weather you need debris that is 3 feet thick. In 0 degrees your debris hut will need to be four feet thick, and in -20 degrees you need 5-6 feet of debris.
For a debris shelter’s skeleton, a ridgepole will be needed.
Add a lattice between the debris layers (if this lattice layering is thinner than 2 feet thick it won’t work). If the debris is wet, increase the quantities by 1/3
Put a grass mat on the ground, or more debris. Make a door plug. This could also be a grass mat. Smoking out your shelter will help get rid of any critters.
Camouflage:
Look, Smell and Movement
Our scent
A dog can smell 30x what humans can smell
A black bear can smell 1000x and a white tail deer can smell 3000x what we can smell
Scent: don’t eat spicy foods and wash clothes often let them dry outside in natural soap. Remove our scent by showering frequently. Use a Carbon blast (a liquid carbon spray that is a great de-smeller). Fasting and sweating works too.
Crush fragrant plants in hands and rub them on skin and clothes (oak, pine, cattails, and grasses). Approach an animal from downwind. Make a pot of tea from existing plants and put the solution in a spray bottle. Utilize the smoke from a campfire (this also kills bacteria).
Your clothing should be warm and dry. The best outdoor fabric is wool because it will keep you warm even when wet, it is very durable, very quiet, and absorbs while breaking up light reflectivity
Wash you wool in a lanolin once in a while
Fleece is a close second, really because if fire/melting properties
Look for a heavyweight capillary base layer
Polypropylene with silver
Kevlar and activated carbon fibers
Gortex is very noisy, and has its limits on water resistance
Goose down: not good in the rain, but otherwise will keep you very warm
Tanning and smoking buckskin makes it water repellant as well as warm.
“Nature Gear” is biomimicry-based clothing
Face camouflage: depends on where you are but charcoal, mud, or clay work well.
Apply dust: dry, white wood ash (wet, white wood ash makes lye)
Take handfuls of debris and stick it to yourself
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