Cottonwood Camp Shanty Shelter

Description

Sometimes what you start out with at camp is not what ends up.

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Tags: campfire,shelter,survival,leanto,canopy,tarp,survival blanket,snow shelter,survival training

Video Transcription

hey perry peacock here with wilderness innovation up camping again just like every week but you know we're in the towards the end of march here and even at this low altitude here in the mountains near near my home they're still as you can see behind me there's still a good bit of snow in certain places here nevertheless only one of the things run into this kind of weather people are getting out starting to camp for the spring and that sort of thing if they haven't been doing it all year like me but so they get out here and then the Sun Goes Down and all of a sudden the temperature just falls like crazy because there's all this land up here all the surface area in the mountains that's covered with snow still so once that Sun Goes Down that era starts flowing and you get some some nice chilly air coming off from up above so you know if you ever get stranded in a spot or whatever I'm going to show you a little something that you can do that will help you to to weather some some some cold conditions even if you don't have everything that you need to have with you well I've found this so cottonwood tree here that's been laying for I don't know a number of years it looks like and saying about three feet in diameter so pretty good sized pretty good-sized tree we can utilize this tree to to help keep a person warm in the night or whatever whenever they need to keep warm so this tree right here because it's it's big it's bulky it's got a lot of mass that's this piece right here probably weighs probably weighs a ton or more I don't know it's quite a quite a bit pretty a lot of wood in there what i can do is i can come off here about a good three three or four feet out or so probably four feet out because not

it's not that cold up here you know it's it's going to be in the 20s tonight but but I come out like that I'll bill I can build me a fire out here a parallel log fire like you might have seen me do when I did the the thermal mass log lean-to and we do the same thing out here and what we're trying to what we're going to do is we're going to let that fire heat this log so we want to we want to put as much thermal energy into this log as we can and then then what I do here is I'd probably chink it a little bit with some of the gravel and soil and bark that's around here on this side on the other side so you don't get a draft coming under there and what's this thing gets nice and warm i might even build the fire closer to the log initially and then move it out when i go down to to lay down and take a take a rest and so what's going to happen there is the log will be hot it takes several hours of burning a fire in front of here to really warm that thing up good but forget it warmed up good get our fire out here then the log will be warm on the back side and the fire will be hot on the front side we will have screened off any air flow here so now you can get in here you have a little mini environment they'll be considerably warmer than trying to sleep out in the open somewhere or even out somewhere on the fire this would be much warmer to sleep like this then try to sleep by an open fire because we're going to have we're going to have it much warmer in this area here than it would be alright well I've started my I got this kind of cleared up smoothed out a little bit some of the debris out of there where I'll be laying i started my parallel log fire i'm about to about five feet long with it right now so not doing not doing too badly with that and I could already feel over here on the log I can already feel the the outer bark they're starting to starting to warm up pretty good so anyway at the bar cardi warming up that's a good sign now technically if I wanted to be more efficient at this I would probably work at trying to knock that bark off of there so I get down to the bare wood because then i would i would get into that more dense thermal mass of the log itself a little bit better but i'm not really going to worry about that right now because i'm going to be plenty warm i got probably a little bit of snow going to follow the night maybe an inch or something but but i'll be i'll be pretty good right here I couldn't possibly sleep back in here it's way too hot so I'm going to have to come after I don't have to move the fire back a bit before I really do anything before I go to bed I like to stack up a lot of wood all ready to go near usually near where my head is get a big stack so as the fire goes down in the night if I feel a little that's cooling down a little bit I just reach above my head throw down some wood sometimes I'll stack it up above me like that or whatever and I just kind of feed as i need to during the night so anyway this is going to make a very very nice situation here well I've been away from the fire for a little while here shooting some video and some other stuff and one thing nice about this fire it doesn't need a lot of attention you'll have to baby it a lot anything like that it will burn pretty good just by itself it's going to keep her going reposition a few logs here and throw some stuff in there this is this logs warming up pretty nice it's getting pretty warm it's not too hot to touch it but time I go to bed I'd like it to be where it's almost too hot to touch and that way it should last pretty good for me through the night well here I am this morning I had a little bit different a little different night that I planned and I figured last night I laid this thing out I was going to I had planned to sleep between the fire and the log you know last night and I did but during the night it started snowing that snow to snow it about an inch and then it then it turned off started raining a little bit and then it turned back into snow and and snow pellets and then rain and then snow and whatever and ended up with snow I made me a quick little shelter here and I I could have used some wood or something but it was about two o'clock in the morning and so I so what I did if I put my to camp chairs up with the seatbacks faced in got some sticks and put across this way and I put a bunch of stuff this other way through my PST all my large multicam tarp over the top of that through some branches and some bark on top of that to hold it down in the breeze and I got in here at all my gosh that that really made the night that's much much better doing this right here that was so cozy and comfortable and I piled up wood at the head of my head and a dad at my foot pile it all the way up to the top and that helped even block some win from the sides and then whenever I needed add what I had to do is just grab some right there and throw it on the fire it didn't take that much to keep me warm in here because that's reflecting right into here and the heat can't escape up out of here quite as easy so it helps kind of hold that in really makes it very comfortable and this thing just turned out beautifully for me last night and you know just an improvised shelter you know you just do what you can i got my pillow right here i'm drying out but my blanket back here in places had snow on it this deep my survival blanket and letting me is still warm my blanket I mean during all that before I put this up my blanket got wet my pillow was wet I mean everything was wet but I was still warm even I felt wet because you know all that stuff going on but but once I put the canopy up over here with that with that point with that tarp and had the fire go on everything because everything is easily easily dries everything is just pretty much dried out already so you know I'm in good shape I'm by right here to get me some breakfast but kind of redid my shelter just the tad I took the chairs and I is using last night out and put these up rights in and these are just some forked maple dead piece of maple and so that just goes right up there and the pieces going across here just wedge right down into that fork so the nice thing is it's nice thing is pretty sturdy without any cordage at all just everything's kind of wedge together and and the weight of everything is kind of holding it in place the roof structure here is just you know these pieces this way and then and then some going this way and after that I just threw some branches on their kind of every which way then I threw the tarp on top of that the little branches and all that or to help keep from rain and stuff from keeping it to sag because we're about horizontal on our roof so I just put a bunch of that stuff in there so it supports the tarp through the tarp over then I threw some more branches and stuff on top to hold the tarp down in the in the wind we're good to go now that i got that chair out of here i can get in and out of here a little bit easy i get a little more room so anyway time for breakfast now not my seven grain hot granola cereal and I guess I should have showed you I like to i put in a little Ziploc baggie and I put my salt and sugar everything that I normally like in it I've measured it out I put it all in there with the mix then I just heat some water on the fire dump it in there and I got I got everything I need and I'm using one of the sprung I'm using the spoon side of it Gavin see knows that's sir we got those on the website it's a fork a spoon and you clip them together right here at the top and turn in and tongs it's kind of nice i like the multifunction gear so does it for me it's a nice morning out here got about a inch and a half or so of snow left from last night especially now that I raised this the front of this up just a little bit I raise it up about a foot now I'm getting that morning sun coming in here and just with that and just a little trace of a fire i'm about to warm nice little deal i should have just done this from the beginning last night i would have had a little better sleep at one o'clock in the morning so let me show you my setup here so this is my this is my personal survival blanket right here I've just stone that straight straight out down on the ground nothing underneath it and this is the tall so I just fold it in half strung it out here good to go so I used I used that initially as just something to lay on and then it started raining the stone a little bit that I got inside of it and I stayed like that until I put the canopy on also using the campfire cooking sticks which I'll show you in a second that's my survival pillow it's a multi-function pillow that I've been playing with for about a year so that's my campfire cooking sticks right here and nice thing about him i had my my warming fire hear that that's right there i just threw up a couple of rocks right there fan the sticks out on a v-shape throw them on the throw them on there i can show you that works really nice here's a nice platform to cook on that sort of thing without any trouble alright so we show you the rest of the shelter here so i just got my upright pole here but the v's got a fork in it and I just put my cross support late in into that and it actually just kind of wedges that in there so it's those pretty it's pretty sturdy without any cordage at all and on the other side I got same thing going on right here get my hat drain but then you can see underneath there all they do it all I've got is I have got quite a just crisscrossing of a bunch of branches and sticks nothing that's what supports the roof and then and i just threw more branches on top to hold it down the wind choose some barked out on the through some Cottonwood bark down on the back there to hold all that in and so it works really nice hell did it held everything together even in the gusty wind so anyway so this is perry peacock with wilderness innovation had a great a great night last night a little bit of time yesterday afternoon up here and even got snowed on kind of unexpectedly but but hey it was alright everything turned out good and then here's a so now I showed you a little shelter another thing you can do with a tarp either any of the sizes but I use the PST L on this one 10 by 10 now look just perfect very nice kept everything out did a really nice job for me so I hope you enjoy your time out take care get out as often as you can enjoy it out here it's beautiful have a great day