Tree Tracks -- A secret clue in the forest that reveals many things

Description

Tree Tracks are a single feature of many woodlands that can reveal the cardinal directions, the presence of old human settlements, weather patterns, as well as giving you a great hiding spot, place to sleep, and reveal clues as the the history of the land.

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods,tree tracks

Video Transcription

what if there was one feature in the forest that you could learn that was there after give you information on prevailing weather directions the cardinal directions will give you a hiding place give you a great place to sleep at night at your camping and we'd help you find old human settlements old ruins or homesteads with all the advantages that come with being able to spot those in the woods well there is one simple feature that you can learn I call them tree tracks and teach you about them right here one of the things I love about the woods is that there's an infinite variety of things to learn about since we moved up into the North Woods of Wisconsin I've been able to begin learning about the new plants here the lichens wildlife is different and the terrain is very different I'm sitting on something that I call a tree track

it's mound here then it goes down into a gift if you live in an environment where there's larger trees or there were larger trees in the past then you probably have these around you some people call them pillows and cradles now in my childhood these were just very very useful features in the woods you can probably think of how they're useful I mean if you're hiding from somebody and you're playing games you can slip down into one of these and there's a commanding view of the forests around you but you're very protected down there from the sight of others unless they're just looking at precisely the right angle

a lot has been using one of the cradles up in part of the forest over here as is place to sleep it tends sometimes be very soft bottoms very much like a cradle and you can Nestle yourself in down into there and in entering like this especially where it's very rocky and there's a lot of debris on the forest floor can be hard to find a place that your body can bend and sculpt to in order to sleep sometimes these cradles are the perfect place but there's a story behind these and I'd like to share a little bit of what you can learn from them how they're formed I call them tree tracks because these are essentially the ancient cracks of trees you might already know or I figured out how these are formed so when a tree falls in the woods down it goes and it has that big root structure rips all that root ball is going to decay and it has a lot of soil around it and it leaves this mound where the root ball pulled out of the earth a depression is left and so what we get is just depression and this mound and this marks the place where long ago a large tree was standing here's one in the process of formation you can see the tree fell quite some time ago it's an old saw and here their lips are decaying down that's going to leave a big mound over here is the dip or that root ball pulled up out of the earth now a couple of things about these these tend to only form when there's been a live standing tree that is fought it's a dead tree the roots are going to tend to separate from the trunk when it falls it's going to be a breaking so the average dead rotted tree is going to fall somewhere along the length of its of its trunk instead of pulling the roots out of the ground to be able to pull the roots out of the ground we usually need a live tree and that also tells us that it's almost always going to be a blowdown event in other words high winds that blow down a live tree that tends to be when you see one of these formed like a little sleuthing I can look at the depression I can look at the mound and then I can visualize the direction in which the tree fell once I have that then I can understand probably which way the winds were blowing and often if I'm scanning around through a forest and I'm looking at some of the big tree tracks that I see and small one over here there's that big one that I just pointed out probably can't see this one right over the rise I might start to see that a lot of them are going to be all in the same direction that tells me one of a couple of things either a these all blew down in the same event or I'm tending to see the prevailing wind direction in most places weather moves and some moving in a fairly predictable direction not all the time but there's that prevailing winds and then I can look around and I can say oh okay this tends to be the direction that that winds come that storms come and often that weather in general is going to be traveling so sometimes if I look around in a forest and I know the prevailing wind direction then I can look at a bunch of these blowdown events bunch of these tree tracks and I can get at least an educated guess of the direction so here in Wisconsin where I am most of the weather is coming from west to and if I look at this example this is facing north west to east and this would be a perfect example of a tree track that's going to say that's east in addition to the prevailing winds and giving me a clue as to the directions these tree tracks can often tell me a little bit about the age of a woodland by the age of the woodland what I mean is how long this has been in an uncultivated state we look around here we see here's one tree track it's pointing off in that direction got another one down here is pointing in that direction we've got a small one here it's pointing in that direction got one here that's going with the prevailing that one's going with the prevailing but at least one of these was going in a different direction and so that could be a clue that what I have here are multiple blowdown events if I have looked out into a woodland and I see a bunch of these pointing in different directions

then I can start to get an idea that these are maybe not caused by the same storm possibly a tornado that came through and had had some winds that shifted direction a lot but in general this is going to tell me that this has been multiple events and in the woodland here I'm not sure how easy it is to tell with this camera now tons of tree tracks in here I recently learned that these tree tracks they can stay here for hundreds maybe even a thousand years or more as soon as humans come through and we cultivate the land in some way so we're going to put in gardens or we're going to build a row or we're going to level an area or a homestead all these tree tracks disappear because we level the ground when that happens then the force is going to appear very very differently so here I'm seeing a forest with all these tree tracks

it's a predominant terrain actually they're going in different directions it tells me that this woodland has not been with the ground the soil has not been cultivated or flattened for many hundreds of years if ever some of you might be thinking well that's cool you can tell that the woodland not been altered for a long time but what good does that do me in a practical sense well here's what happened not too long ago wandering through these woodlands I was heading off here kind of to the northwest and and here are all these tree tracks

grounds is like waves and all suddenly disappeared and the ground is very flat as soon as you see the ground flat you start to become suspicious there's been human activity right just a little bit of looking around and sure enough here are the ruins of an old homestead and there were some things there that would have made a huge difference in a survival situation or a bushcraft situation there's an apple tree there's an old well pump that still worked there's old glass and metal containers could be used to boil water I was walking through the woods I didn't know about tree tracks I would have completely just saw there's flat land who cares it's easier to walk that's the only thing I know about it I keep going but now walking through these woods by I see flat ground I stop and I know that around here it was human activity and more than once that human activity has proven to involve ruins of some kind which are not only fun to explore but make a huge difference again in a survival of bushcraft e-type situation learning to recognize tree tracks is not only fun but it's a survival skill and the more you do it the more you'll start to really notice those areas where the terrain not been touched for a long long time in those areas where there's been cultivation of some sort a couple notes on this that are important to remember first of all if your soil is very sandy you're not going to tend to get three tracks you can imagine a sandy soil and the tree topples over you have that pit and the sand just sort of fills back in and very quickly sand filters down erosion and you don't get a tree track farming game with clay type soils roots don't go deep deep into the clay in the same way you tend to be more superficial and so goes over and you don't get the same kind of tracks that you see in soil I like this finally in swamps wetlands again trees will often have a spreading profile to the roots and you're not going to get those long lasting tree tracks like you see here the other thing to remember is that there's some human interventions on the land and sometimes will look like tree tracks the most common one is that somebody will be moving earth or dirt and there'll be a pile so you'll see a pile there won't be a corresponding dip usually unless somebody's dug a hole and put the soil right next to it in which case you can get something that years later really does look like a tree track you have the thing to note is that some of the modern logging techniques where they come through with machines that afterwards actually just churn up the and then kind of level everything down they don't really level it they leave giant furrows and so it will often look like tree tracks but if you look you're going to see that there's rows and it will be very very different than this organic wavy terrain that shows real live woodland tree tracks you learn about tree tracks and suddenly you have a tool that can help you find the direction can teach you something about the weather I can give you a place to hide or a place to sleep and often if you think about that and combine those because they can be really secretive places to sleep and finally they can help you find old human settlements old human roads things where humans have modified the forest and there's tons of benefits to that not just from the fun of adventuring and finding those old runs or seeing where that old road leads but often finding human artifacts it can make a huge difference if you're out in the woods on a survival experience adventuring doing minimalist kind of things where you're trying to use things you find in your environment finding some of those old ruins can make a huge difference thank you for watching I appreciate your likes and subscriptions and especially comments have you used these before did you know about them if you get it try it out see what you can discover what you learn there's even more depth to these than I've gone into but see what you can learn and share any of your experiences in the comments below thank you much my friend Gunther you