MUST KNOW Survival Skill -- Hot Rock Primitive Technology

Description

If you saw my "Extreme Almost-Naked Winter Survival" challenge, you know that I made it through the night using hot rocks. This is one of my most-used primitive skills, but I find that most people don't know how to do it. Here I give a step-by-step guide to using hot rocks to warm your body if you don't have proper clothing or shelter in your environment.

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Music is "Runaways" by Silent Partner.

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

Video Transcription

[Music]

hello my friends today I would like to share hot rock technology to me this is one of the most essential of bushcraft or wilderness or survival skills if you watched my overnight naked almost naked winter thing that's how I got through the night and it's got me through a lot of other nights when I did not have enough enough clothing or no shelter or good sleeping bag this will get you through the night and keep you warm but learning how to use these rocks is not quite as simple as it seems on the surface I've been doing this for years I'm pretty good at it by now so I want to share what I've learned so that you can have this skill for yourself I'm the surface it seems simple here's my fire I'm gonna have rocks around the fire they're gonna be heating up Wow I've got my hot rocks but what we want when we have a hot rock that we're gonna put on our skin is we want a rock that is hot warm I should say all the way through when it's like that I'm gonna be able to put it on my skin it's going to keep me warm for an extended amount of time if you have a sleeping bag that is not warm enough for your conditions you put one or two of those hot rocks in the sleeping bag with you Wow you're gonna have a toasty toasty night if you don't have a sleeping bag or other means to keep yourself warm these can be put directly onto your body which I'll explain exactly how to do that so make this work I have to learn to bake these rocks now one quick safety point you've probably heard that rocks can explode and there's some truth to that I've never had one blow up I have had them crack apart I mean but I have had people tell me that as conventional wisdom goes especially rocks down by a river or waterway can have more mooster in them you put them around the fire that moisture expands and you can get an explosion now remembering that we're not heating these rocks up that hot so your likelihood of having an explosion like that

is not really great no probably the easiest way and the way I use most often is if you have a lot of rocks is just to set your rocks close to your fire that's my fire that way and just set it on top of other rocks you can rotisserie and it works pretty well if you're low on rocks you can use sticks here I'm gonna set the rock close to the fire again my fires right over here and I can set it close up to the flames with these sticks keeping it of course off the snow here's another one if your fire is burnt down to coals you can set two sticks and you can set your racks up above those coals so that they're gonna get all that radiant heat now I like to do my hot rocks with a with bare hands instead of gloves or mittens that way I can be pretty intimate with the rock I can feel how it's warming now you can see I've taken the larger flatter side instead of trying to heat the edge and I'm going to take that flatter side and I'm going to point that towards the fire when I get it set up I'm gonna be reaching in with my hand and feeling is it close enough that I'm getting some heat now the exact heat that you want is a little bit hard to explain but in general I want to be able to put my fingers between the rock and the fire and within a few seconds it should be too hot and I should have to pull my hand away it's too far out those rocks are just not going to heat up very quickly if it's too close then I'm gonna get the effect that happens when I just have rocks in a fire which is that the surface is gonna get scalding hot it's just gonna be burning my skin on contact while the inside is not gonna have much heat in it that means that I'm gonna have a rock that's too hot to touch or put on my skin and it's gonna run out of heat relatively quickly we want the opposite we want a rock that is heated all the way through it has a really good warmth to it and then I'm gonna be able to put it on my body and it's going to have a long long heat duration here I've got my rock set up it's baking and I'm gonna let this side heat for quite a while I'm gonna flip it around like quite a while I don't mean until I can't touch it anymore I want to be able to touch it but I'm just gonna keep reassuring it I'm gonna keep turning it around allowing the other side and if the rounder Rock you could imagine the other side's heating up and just keep it moving I'm not going to give a duration of a minute or two minutes before you turn it but it's more a feeling of the sensation of heat that you're getting off of the rock the reason I'm not giving exact times is that this all depends on a lot of factors depends on the heat being thrown off by your fire it depends on the ambient temperature it depends on so this is sitting on other rocks which are cooling it off at that contact point through conduction and it depends on the type of rock that you're using so there's a lot of factors here and that's why this is really more of an art than a science we've got to learn to be able to feel these rocks and understand how the heat is moving through them this only comes through experience I'm sorry everybody this is one of those skills that we just we need to get out and do it and practice it in real-life conditions we'll never get good at it I'm gonna give you a few of the common mistakes that I see people make number one they don't start making their hot rocks right away I'm cold I'll get a fire going and the temptation is to just wire my hands over the fire that feels so good sitting here with hot rocks it doesn't feel like it's warming me up so I end up putting off doing the hot rocks while I warm my hands I'm actually getting colder and colder even though I maybe feel a little bit warmer from my hands and then by the time I finally get to working with my hot rocks I've lost so much core temperature that it's not going to do me a lot of good so if I'm too cold I start a fire I have rocks available those hot rocks are my first really the first thing that I'm paying attention to another common mistake is being impatient and just letting these be in too close I get my rock too close into the fire and a couple things happen first of all oh it's too hot to touch and now it's it's not usable for me second of all it starts to get charred and that's just a cosmetic thing but if I'm putting it on my my clothes I end up getting really black there should not be any char on your rock you should not have any black on your skin at all if you're doing this right another one is not turning the rock often or not these are almost like little babies little friends that you're gonna here's this gonna keep moving them paying attention to them now when you're doing that you're around the fire so you're still absorbing lots of good heat radiantly as you would if you were just sitting around the fire so in a way it doesn't cost you anything energetically to be giving this attention to the rocks but if I turn them and I turn them then I really make sure that I'm heating them from all sides again that long duration of heat is really nice you're putting a lot of work into one of these rocks and you want it to last another mistake I often see people make is just doing one rock like I'm doing here it's pretty easy just to pay attention to one rock but if I have two three four five baking then I can be cycling them so I can have one two three out of my body and have two others that are cooking if you have companions with you they probably don't know how to do this you can bake rocks for them it's really just as easy to take care of five as it is to take care of one big thing to you coming out of the racks are we making well for this video we're really just concentrating on this one on this one yeah but if we're gonna stay out longer we definitely want a bunch of room going what do you do with these rocks well lots of good uses if I am getting into a sleeping bag and it's not warm enough for the conditions I can toss two or three rocks down in there there's been times when I've spent the night right next to a fire kind of baking rocks through the night and putting them down into my sleeping bag or a blanket bag when you do so it's pretty toasty warm in there your core is a good place to put these so it can go right into my belly especially if I have nice insulated clothes this is gonna warm my whole core in a very nice way by creating a pocket of heat inside this is the temptation off warm those hands warm those hands it's not really doing us a lot of good thinking of warming your core it's another one of the basic truths about staying warm in these cold conditions from just thinking about warming my extremities I'm gonna slowly get colder and colder and colder before I warm my core my extremities will eventually get warm I'm concentrating on my car sometimes I put these we're thinking of where our major blood flow is going so sometimes they keep them up on my neck like this that's a great place you can position one on the back of your neck especially if you have a scarf or a hood and that can sit there and you can have your hands-free so that can work well down your pants right so right here along these major arteries that are running is another great place to put these rocks imagine if I have three I might have one here one here

one in my underneath my clothing in my core and I've got some good stuff going I can warm my hands over the fire as they're working the rocks so that I feel warmer but I'm really regaining my heat by having these hot rocks at work on my core another place is up underneath your clothes and your armpits one each this really warms things up and you can squeeze them in while you're still working on the fire alarming other rocks here's a quick tip I was out with some of the forest monks and Dustin the other night and Dustin's feet were getting cold around the fire ship we're squatting which I really advocate it does cut off some blood flow your toes will start to get cold so if you get something to sit on it's gonna insulate you from the ground you can sit down so your pot is not on the ground really important or you're gonna be losing major heat through conduction get those shoes off and you can warm your feet over the fire hold your shoes upside down warm them up and when everything's nice and toasty put those shoes or boots back on you're gonna be have warm feet again remember though that they're warm and the snow isn't packed down here it's packed down so it's not a concern but if you get snow onto those warm boots it's gonna melt and they could get wet and that makes your situation worse remember the keys here the rock has to be closed into the fire but not sitting right inside of it it's getting black you're too close flames are getting on to it you're just going to be heating the outside bake it slowly all sides so it feels really really nice and warm now there's this little secret to this too and that's that if the rock is really really warm I can only have my hands on it so long then if I'm starting to spend a whole night warming myself I'm actually gonna burn myself a little bit like sunburn over time from just slow heat application so in a way you want these a little bit cooler than you think but they should feel really toasty warm the only way to get good at this is through experience this really goes for all of our skills we can get good at them in the garage or the backyard but to take them outside somewhere to try to practice your fire making when it's raining or just crappy conditions getting out doing these rocks whenever you're around a campfire eat up a rock yeah sure

because you cannot get good at hot rocks unless you've got lots of practice if you get good at this it makes you really valuable around camp because you can be baking rocks for people when somebody's cold you just grab a rock toss it to them perfectly warm feels pretty good when you have a hot rock does no no no now there's one exception to the idea of just making your rock warm enough that you can put it onto your skin and that is if you're wearing leather you've already heard me extol the virtues of leather there are so many deer hides that go to waste every year from hunters that don't use them to roadkill if you learn to make buckskin this stuff is incredible because you can take a really really hot rock and for instance between my thighs here I can set that down and that heat this has a lot of heat resistance

it's also

kind of collects heat so even after a remove this I'm gonna have heat lingering in that leather it's really gonna warm me finally if you want to try some real hot rock luxury you get a bunch of rocks going some bigger ones and here's what you do you engineer it so that you get one big one I don't know if I have any rocks that are big enough here I'd have to under it this one down here that is going to be your sitting Rock like two of these and you'd put it on something it's gonna be insulated from the ground so it doesn't melt down through the snow you sit on that you get another nice big one or two-letter sitting there for your bare feet to go on while you warm your shoes around the fire or your boots you get one in your core one in the backyard ech if you're going to be working the fire or just one on each side get some down here you will be so so toasty warm it's really really luxurious be pretty nice well this is this was used in bed warmers we're at a thrift store the other day there's an old-fashioned copper bed warmer that you so the equivalent of today's electric blankets and so this is old technology it works so so well give it a try I'm not even getting into some of the other ways that you can use the hot rocks you've probably heard of hot rock cooking a real simple one is if you have some gloves or boots that have gotten wet and are cold then your hot rock can go into that piece of clothing and it's gonna heat it up and dry it at the same time let me know what you think of it if you have any questions about hot rocks ask me and tell me in the comments if you go out and try it or if you've tried it before what's worked for you thank you my friends for watching and we'll talk with you soon [Music]

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