Trappers Cabin Season 2 Part 10 Mapping the Creek Bed

Description

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The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school well I like you this morning in the cabinet series is discuss a little bit more with you about self mapping I think that navigation and in particularly mapping making maps yourself it's probably one of the most underrated skills in bushcraft today your ability to go into an area that's unknown to you explore that area and look at that area for resources and then be able to map that area not only to get back where you came from quickly instead of having to backtrack but also for future ruffer's in case you are traveling with a party and you want to show them on a map or something Zack in case you want to know the straight-line distance to something from your current location without having to go to several different weight points on the way there all of these things are reasons to make maps the other thing to understand is that when you buy a map a paper map of an area it's going to be what I would consider a very large-scale map even if you buy something that is a small scale I would say as one to ten thousand which means one inch on the map equals ten thousand inches on the ground even that is not going to be a very good map for you for things like trapping and hunting other than an overview of the area to tell you what the terrain looks like and tell you where some possible main terrain features are but as far as boots on the ground they're telling you where that Den is that or where that turning the creeks at it's got a good steep back that you know you want to set for Coon or something's got deep undercut for a long distance you want to put three or four big traps in along that way you're not gonna find that stuff but you're not going to be able to go back to that stuff on it large scale map to be able to make a small map you can put all the detail you want in it because you are the one making that map and I did a video a while ago on a self mapping usually a method called the Paul method it's a very broad overview video of how to find your way back to your starting location without having to backtrack all the way it also goes into a little bit of being able to add things into that map you are in an area longer what I want to do today is I want to expand on that a little bit and I want to show you how to do things like what we're gonna do in this video which is let's say that we have mapped an area out it will start with a very small scale map from the cabinet and we found a creek that we want to trap just like the creek we're chopping now and what we want to do is we want to map that Creek so that we can actually see it after the fact on a piece of paper and understand how to tell someone where to go back to each of our individual traps now that could be as easy as just being able to give them the asmath from the cabin to the trap and a known distance that would give them a dead reckoning way to find your trap but they probably have to bust a lot of brush to do that if you can give them a map that possibly has some type of a handrail on it like the pipeline that we're trapping off of you can't give them a much easier way to get to those traps and if you can accurately map that Creek then you can show them where every turn and Bend is in that Creek along the way and anywhere that that Creek crosses their path as they're walking so that they know they may have to avoid those areas or how to avoid those areas or where to cross those areas so you can just draw smoothly lines on a map and say that's a creek or you can't actually understand exactly what every Bend and turning that Creek does and you can map that and I'm going to show you how to do that today stay with okay I'm gonna try to kind of shoot this over the shoulder and do the best I can to show you what I'm doing as I do it what I've done is I started with my log journal here very simple we talked about this log in the first video I did on self mapping and so we've got four points on here where we have taken points from our camp out to the creek area that we're trapping now and this is where it becomes important if we're going to try to actually map that Creek we can't actually go down the creek and we can go from one trap to the next route to the next trap and we can mark those different distances and Asmus that will tell us where the traps are at but it's not going to show us what the creek looks like or where the bends in terms of crosses are if we're going back out so that's kind of what we want to look at today so what I've done on this map is I've transferred these markings onto this piece of paper to make a map which is just a gridded piece of paper and I have started off by orientating the top of the map to North I've put my scale on here at 1 square equals 25 meters and I've marked a starting point of the cabin here and then 1 2 3 4 points and right here is the first point that's really interesting to us because this is really we're going to start our mapping and this was an area where a creek that comes from back here comes up and turns and it crosses this pipeline the pipeline really begins right here goes up to a creek crossing and then extends straight out so what we want to do right now is for this demonstration forget about where our traps are at right now we can add that information later what we want to do is map the creek itself and I want to show you how to do that so a known point that we can always go back to is going to be where that creek crosses the pipeline that's our last known point of origin per se so what we've done is we've marked down as a location and then because we have a pipeline we have a very good handrail but we still need to use an azimuth reading so we've taken an azimuth standing on that crossing or on the other side of it straight down the pipeline so we've correlated that here in our notes we're at the creek crossing we took a 355 degrees azimuth for 200 meters and that is marker 1 now because we're using a straight line which is what we have to create we really want to create some type of straight line that base the rest of our equation off of so we've made a 200-meter straight line here we have a marker that we've put in place on the pipeline that can be a stick with an orange bandana tied around it for sake of purpose something like that it can be stick out there that has one of these yellow orange strap ties tied around I use these a lot what I'm doing mapping because they're very convenient you can just tie them on a stick and you can see them from a long distance a couple of things that you're going to want while you're doing this or an orange bandanna like we talked about in the first series of videos and again I would say that these strap ties are a good investment - you can buy a package of them like this and like for like a buck at the dollar store places like that just get some time visibility color that you're gonna see at a distance so that you know where it's at all right the next thing that I like to use is just this circular protractor and I've just put a piece of bright colored string through that protractor that I can see just spin it around underneath the protractor what this is gonna do for me is it's gonna keep me from coming back to the cabin and laying my compass on the map and trying to turn my compass to figure out all these different house must have written down in my log I'll use the compass out of the line to do all of my stuff to do my Lonnie and then when I come back I can use this to go for my journal some type of a straightedge is always a good idea if you know that you're not going to be making straight lines on a piece of grid paper but each one of these squares equals 25 meters you want another piece of paper and I just happen to have these two pieces of paper match up this right in the rain notebook and this gritty paper match up so I can use this straightedge to tell me that each one of these increments is 25 meters so the case I'm not at a full square or in the middle of a square I'm taking out the corner of a square there's no guesswork there I can lay this down the paper and go 25 50 75 100 and know exactly how far everything is and that my lines are long enough the way they need to be alright so okay so how does this relate and what does this make things easy the way that relates is when I go back to draw this out I look at my log and I said okay from camp I took a 75 degree bearing and I went 75 metres to a hilltop with a large pine so I took my compass out I took my bearing off in the distance - Naja I wasn't gonna lose sign up walked 75 meters to the hilltop with the large pine now I can take this and lay it on my map just like this with the north pointed up and the crosshairs on the police I started I can take a 70 degree bearing just like this 75 degree bearing excuse me just like this dial that string in 275 I can make a mark out here on the edge of the string somewhere and then I can come back with my straightedge and figure out how far I need to make that dot 1 2 3 put it down on the paper come back in with a hard straight edge of some kind and add that line that's my first leg so this allowed me to do all of that very quickly without having to mess around with the compass and I think that's important these things are very very cheap I'm not sure if we've got these on our website right now or not this is a West Scott I know you can buy these on Amazon for a fact and they're very cheap a couple bucks and then we'll make a lot of difference than what you're doing and your accuracy level ok so now let's go back to where we stand we just drew a faint line on here a phantom line so that we knew when we came back that there was a creek crossing there all right

so what we want to do for right now is we want to go back out to this area and then we want to start about 25 meters up or 1 square or we can go 100 meters whatever we decide how accurate we make this Creek is going to be depicted really by how many readings we take along this straight linear line because those readings are going to go directly to the creek this direction and each one of those distances then is going to correlate to a dot that's going to become a connected line and become the creek and we can do that just where our traps are out or we can do it in between depending on how far our traps are apart and depending what we want to do so now we would take a separate launch we would go out and we would say okay we're gonna go up it's let's say 50 meters so we're going to start right here I'll just put an X right there for now on the paper so you can see we're starting pencil will work for me we're going to start right there all right and hopefully you guys can see this I'm gonna try to scoop this camera up just a little bit for you kind of got it hanging out with door to Cavan ears kind of a pain okay so now we're gonna go up like I said about fifty meters from our beginning point and we're going to shoot an azmuth to the creek so what we want to do is we want to first mark this spot just like we do any other time when we're self mapping so let's take a stick and shove it in the ground we're an entire orange bandana on that stick because then we can go anywhere we want to and go back to a known point of origin so once we do that we can walk our way in here until we find the creek once we do that we're going to tie something on there on a limb hanging over the creek whatever the case may be a stick right beside the creek something on the edge if we have to put a pole in the ground we can do that and then we will either tie another orange bandana which are nothing wrong with that

carry two of those or something like a zip tie for future reference we're going to zip tie it right to one of the limbs then we're going to go back and we're going to figure out what the distance and direction is from here to here all right okay

so once we've done all this tagging and remember at Pace County we're not carrying this with us we're carrying our long sheet with us so we're going to write on our log sheet that we went up 50 meters and that's where our first tag is gonna be from there we took an azimuth that you're gonna write we're going to take after the fact okay we're gonna figure out what this asn't is after the fact the first thing we're to do is locate the creek leave a mark at our original spot leave a marker on the creek go back get a visual on that marker so

to make sure that we can see these two marketers from each other get a visual on this marker and take a bearing with our compass all right so for sake of this discussion we're going to say it that bearing was almost directly west so 270 degrees at 65 meters and if you look at what I wrote on here this is about 25 50 and a half again so writing this right into 65 meter mark okay and that's our first point and we're going to go through we're going to do that with each one of these in our next point you know maybe we may go up 50 meters again we may walk up another 50 meters and put a mark and this time the creek might only be this far away and the next time it might be this far away the next time it might be right here and the next time it might be right here and what that's going to allow you to do is when you come back in here you're going to connect the dots like this and it's going to give you actually what that Creek looks like as it flows through the area all right and that's important because that's going to give you a lot more accurate picture of what you're looking at because you may want to know what's going on right in this area where there's a deep bend in the creek why is that deep Bend there is just something natural or is there an obstruction there like some kind of an old beaver dam or a muskrat a den of muskrat den or something like that there could be a lot of reasons for that it could be a large tree right there that the creek is meandering around over time or large rock but all of these things and doing things like this will allow you to get a very good picture in the end of the area that you're operating in