10 Bushcraft Camp Hacks from Dan Wowak

what is up guys girls kids everybody in between what is up my name is dan moak yuko ambassador also owner of coal cracker bushcraft and appalachian bushman school where i train individuals in the outdoors survival bushcraft long-term wilderness living and today i'm going to share some of them skills with you now today's video is going to be about how camp life can be that much more comfortable for you with these simple little tips tricks skills uh it's going to be great and you are absolutely going to love it and it all starts with this yeah stick yeah i get it a stick but a y branch beautiful i mean these are so important to us and you're going to see why because i'm going to share with you 10 ways this y branch is going to make camp life better for you so you get into camp and you realize that you've nowhere to hang your gear maybe the ground is all full of snow maybe it was raining maybe you just want to hang your coat up and you don't want to throw it down in the dirt have no fear why branch is here okay i'm not going to keep making them jokes i'm sorry about it um why am i sorry i'm kidding kidding okay um y branch right here so you can see what we did we just split the back section of it off really easy real simple now we made ourselves a little hanger so all that i did was i went ahead in this i put a small notch here and a small notch here i'm gonna tie this to a tree and then that quickly i have somewhere that i can hang off my gear coat hanger backpack hanger food hanger whatever you need that quick that easy [Music] all right so you are now in camp your backpack's hanging up and you're setting up your shelter and you realize i forgot my tent pegs what am i gonna do y branch okay so tree is growing in this direction okay down tree whatever you can find we got that y branch we're gonna take the main part of that branch we're going to cut that around 8 to 12 inches you can either use your knife or feel free to use your saw whatever you got along with it or break it with your bare hands [Music] all right that's cut and spiked now this side right here we're going to cut this about an inch so i mean really easy stuff here i'm just going to take my saw cut that free now you might be thinking what's happening turn that over and we just created 10 peg in one two three super easy this is gonna hook on drive that down in and you have yourself a perfect 10 peg so now your shelter's all set up and what you realize is that you need to collect some firewood but some of the really good firewood that you want to use to burn that fire all night long and stay nice and warm in these cold temperatures is still up in the tree so in this case again i took a y branch i cut it the same as a 10 peg but i left the peg part really really really long this is going to give me a nice hook in order to reach out and pull some firewood so great example i have a nice big branch there dry dead it's just hung up but i can't reach it so really easily now i can take my y branch i can hook it give it a pull and down it comes simple easy dry firewood when you need it how you need it [Music] so the next thing that we're going gonna do is start our campfire but if you start your fire with any type of fire starter or natural material and you just throw stuff on top of it you really quickly smother it out so the y branch can help us with that [Music] so when you're going to start your campfire you're normally going to use some type of fire starting device or natural material and just like i showed you previously if you just throw the material on top of that you can very easily smother it but utilizing a y branch as a backstop allows that fire starter to stay protected so as i lay my material across this it's still allowing air underneath okay this y branch is allowing air to still get to our fire starter it's still allowing it to burn it's not allowing me to crush it at this point then i could pile on my wood and begin my campfire now it feels at any point while this is going that it is starting to smother we can simply take the back end of this and lift it up you can see immediately that flame enlarged that's because more oxygen got to that fire starting device underneath and you're going to be good to go [Music] now your campfire is burning for a while and you threw a water bottle in there to boil some water to make some hot chocolate or a cup of coffee and then you quickly realize you don't have any way to get out you don't have a big heavy glove maybe you don't have a pair of pliers with you what are you going to do why branch to the rescue yet again so we just took that y branch you want to make sure this one is green because we want the bottom of this branch to be flexi-flexy okay that's very important and then all that i need to do is take this and stick it down inside my bottle so we're just gonna place this in like this give it a little push down and when i pull up it removes my bottle and just like that you can pull your hot water bottle out with a very simple y branch now the only downfall i can say with this is it's difficult to get this out without breaking the y branch so it's almost like a one and done type thing but it's still super viable super important to understand an easy way to get your bottle out of fire [Music] now very similar to the last tip and that is getting pots and bottles out of the fire pot in the fire sometimes if it's totally emerged hard to grab on that thing can be hot so people usually try to get a stick and balance it y branch hooks really easily off you go i mean it's almost like you want to carry this through the woods that way you get my point though very easy way to scoop your bail and move it around now one of my most favorite apparatus to cook over is a woodland cook system again utilizing y branches what i have here is a simple y branch and what i have here is another y branch i push them both down into the ground i then take a straight stick and i can either put it over my pot and hang my pot over the fire this works really well with dutch ovens and cast iron it also works great for making coffee you don't have to worry about putting your pot directly into the flame you can then move it out of the way really simple and real easily if needed and it works absolutely great there's a ton of different ways you can hang your pot off of here but to be most simplistic two wide branches sticking up and across member always gets the job done [Music] now there's always accidents that can happen at camp and one of those accidents might be you are around a wet area and you take a step and you realize that your boot was a lot shorter than the depth of the water so next thing you know your boot is flooded with water you're just pouring gallons out and you got to dry your boots out so how do you do that you can just let them sit like this but in my case with these boots a lot of times they fall over and you just can't get the dampness out it just becomes an absolute nightmare but not if there's a y branch around really simply we can stick this down into the ground and then what we can do is we can make a boot dryer so we take the piece in the back and we just put our boot over it and we let the boot fall forward onto the front stick now what that's going to do is that's going to force the boot open on the bottom it's going to allow the water to run out and dry it's going to allow air up into the inside of your boot you can also make a taller boot hanger and put a small fire underneath it that's going to get a lot of that heat up in your boot and help dry it out a lot quicker so a boot dryer definitely something to think about easy breezy wide branchy now the next thing that we're going to take a look at is tent pegs yeah i just showed you how to make hemp pegs i know but those tent pegs and even something like this plastic tent peg or a metal tent peg that you might be using can cause problems and it can cause problems depending on the weather let's use pennsylvania where i'm at right now for example during the day we're above 30 degrees but then throughout the evening it drops well below freezing so if you wake up really early to get out on the trail there's a good probability of those tent pegs that were earlier in soft ground are now frozen solid down in the ground and pulling them out with your finger sometimes becomes extremely difficult not when you have a y branch not when you have a y branch and that's it we're going to use the mechanical advantage of this to be able to get more grip on our branch and give it a pull that's going to give a good strong tug and pull the tent peg out now of course that was easy for me here because it's not freezing but i guarantee if we were shooting this video first thing in the morning that would have been a little bit of a struggle and this would have made it a lot easier and then last but not least probably one of my most favorite ways to use a y branch is to cook two marshmallows at one time i mean who doesn't love to eat two time i think marshmallows great it's wonderful and this is your future kind of what i'm saying [Music] and there you go smoking guns 10 ways that you can utilize a wide branch of camp to make life just that much better for yourself and your other campmates i mean who would ever thought easy stuff you just had to learn it and i taught it to you so i hope you enjoyed it listen if you haven't checked out all our other blogs go check them out yukogear.com all kind of fire starting stuff and awesomeness just check it out all kind of good fire starting things cook kits all that stuff definitely check all that out and thank you today for joining me um again dan volakuko brand ambassador hope you enjoyed this video and like i like to say stay in the woods with your y branches

Channel: UCO

Views: 139,581

Rating: 4.9220309 out of 5

Keywords: bushcraft, hacks, camping, y branch

Id: 2hrCfe6SS8k

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020