Winter Bushcraft & Survival: Generating Water From Snow

Description

http://paulkirtley.co.uk Winter Bushcraft and Survival from professional instructor Paul Kirtley.

Even in the cold of winter, obtaining water is still high up your list of priorities. In fact, in the freeze-dried air of severely cold environments, you need to consume more water than in milder temperatures.

When obvious water sources such as streams, rivers and lakes are all frozen over. Bodies of water can be sealed with several feet of inpenetrable ice. How do we, then, access water? How do we obtain water in the frozen north?

Well, the answer is fire. As long as you can light a fire, you can produce the water you need by melting snow. Melting snow for water is very easy if you have a metal container (and is part of the mainstay of every winter camper and hot-tenter.

But even if you find yourself without any metal containers, producing water by melting snow is still relatively easy.

In this video I share two key winter water-producing techniques which do not require any metal utensils. Both of these techniques should form part of your winter bushcraft and survival skill set.

For more FREE bushcraft and survival information and resources, please visit my website: http://paulkirtley.co.uk

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Video Transcription

hi I'm Paul currently from frontier bushcraft in this video I'm going to show you how to obtain water in the frozen north because it's frozen this environment is effectively a desert I'm standing on a lake that's part of a small river system and in some of this is a source of really good clean drinking water you don't even need to boil it but in winter conditions as it is now it's sealed by ice you can't get at the water and that ice is three feet thick

that's a meter thick and unless you've got a specialist tool such as an ice auger or an ice chisel getting at that water underneath the ice is impossible there is plenty of water here though in the form of snow and the key to accessing this the key to accessing the water in here is wire of course if you've got a metal pot on metal mug it's very easy to put snow in them put them near the fire or over the fire and obtain water but what if you don't have anything like this well if you don't have any metal containers at all I'm going to show you two key methods that you can use to obtain water from snow without any metal pots at all what you need for both of these techniques is some sort of receptacle to catch drips that you generate with the with a fire if you don't have anything then even a polythene bag a rubber boot or a plastic boost anything like that that you can gather water in for a drink and emergency could be used so think laterally think about what you've got the first method I'm going to share with you is known as the Finnish marshmallow for this technique you need a stout pole and this spruce here even though it seems quite destructive it's gray underneath two are the larger trees and it's unlikely to survive so I'm going to take this one this is a sort of pole that we need here you can see all the way up and down it I'm just going to take that with my saw hit fire and build that up a little bit more to get a bit more heat out of it for this technique you need compacted snow you might find that on an existing trail through the woods a snow machine trail or a dog sled trail or a trailer created yourself maybe with your snowshoes you've been backwards and forwards a few times you've compacted it it's frozen that will be good dig it up get a lump of snow and you're good to go with that piece of snow the tricky bit here is getting this on the stick without breaking snow come around here at the smoke hopefully here Wow well nice heat there from this fire that's gonna start melting this it's gonna drip once it starts dripping and pop I receptacle under there you can see it's important not to have the snow over the fire for two reasons one is that that will drip on the fire and it would dampen the fire and that's fairly obvious but also you don't want to close because you've got to put something down there and if we're not using something metal it's going to be either wood or plastic if it's too close to fire it'll damage it so yeah you've got to strike that happy medium you've got to get a good radiant heat you can feel with your hand and I can feel that it's nice and wall on my hand that's going to start melting that snow it won't start dripping immediately because the outside will melt and that will soak up into the snow and then you need to wait for it to get kind of saturated and then it will start dripping so that may take a few minutes maybe even five or ten minutes and but once it starts dripping it will see it will start dripping well so you can see here it's not quite started dripping yet but you can see it's becoming saturated with water at the bottom of this hope you can see that on the video and you see a different color so here you can see it started dripping here and I'm going to pop a container down there

you see that's not now you might be concerned about scorching or if it was plastic melting the container so most of the heat that's going to do that's going to come horizontally between the base of the fire and the container so here's a bit of Greenwood that we chopped off the bottom of our pole I'm just going to pop that in between there and that'll help prevent that will help prevent any much heat getting to it sideways and you can see now that it started dripping it's dripping out quite a rate but it takes quite a while thinking this instance it took up nearly ten minutes to to start doing that and the water basically it starts melting and it soaks up into the snow and then once it's saturated once the snow at the base is saturated it's got nowhere to go gravity pulls it down into your container quite soon I don't have a good drink out of that so this is going to a really good right now drip drip drip drip drip drip drip try some of that this cold is fresh it's a little bit smoky look at it go now I wanted to I could even even hold that there the beauty of this though is while that's working I can go off and do other things build a shelter set up a tent what whatever I need to do I've got this water generator going Finnish marshmallow you can see looks like a marshmallow over the fire I've got this going and it's producing water for me while I can do other things the second method I'm going to share with you is called either a water generator or a water generator bag this technique requires some sort of cloth or piece of material so that you can gather snow into it gather loose snow now in an emergency you could use a scarf or other piece of clothing what I carry for this purpose whether it's an emergency or whether I want to just generate some water maybe a lunch stop is a mosquito head net make sure you carry one that isn't treated with insecticides or make sure you've washed it well this is the method of choice when you have only powdery snow here in the forest that's pretty much all you're gonna have you only get wind slab wind compacted slabby snow up in the mountains here in the forest it's all powder snow that's what we want now I'm filling this with a shovel but obviously they never show up just put it with my hands there we go nice bag of snow something like that and again that's going to take a little while just to start melting the snow particularly because it's powdery snow it's going to soak up the water quite a lot maybe even more than the compacted snow so that's going to take a while there's quite a lot of snow in there and unlike the Finnish marshmallow there's no danger of it falling off the stick and unlike the Finnish marshmallow this type of snow is more readily available so this is something you can do pretty much anywhere even if there aren't any trails with compacted snow you can just get on and do this here we've got the water generator bag working really nicely nice fire set up like a like a grill nice heat from that taking my glove off and wow I can feel that really nice and warm the bag here with snow and that's nice and saturated at the bottom and it's dripping nicely into my cup there that's suspended on a stick here this is a useful little tip here for you if you find the stick cutting down into the snow pop another one across and that spreads the load and stops the stick cutting through not tied off with anything special here just an overhand knot at the top there to get it at the right height and that's it let's have a taste and that's really good really refreshing cool still a little bit smoky but not as smoky to finish marshmallow that's a really refreshing drink so there you have it two simple straightforward methods for generating water in a frozen environment you don't need any metal utensils you need very little equipment and all you need is the ability to light fire hope you found that interesting and useful

i'm paul Kirtley from frontier bushcraft thanks for watching I'll see you on the next video