Best Mattress in the Woods! Green Beret Bushcraft Camp Build Part Two

everybody this is Josh here the great breeder green beret and welcome to my new bushcraft camp now it goes without saying you know we're not always practicing survival skills or bushcraft of preparedness sometimes we just want to go out in the woods and enjoy ourself and that's what I'm going to do in this series is just take some traditional gear take a raw spot like this I'm going to turn it into more of a long-term kind of semi-permanent bushcraft camp so it's pretty windy so I'll try to speak loud enough for the for the most part I'm just going to be doing just gonna be setting things up and I'll talk about a few things here and there but it's not designed to be a color by number you know teach you isolated skills this is more of a skills in context kind of format which i think is a lot more enjoyable for YouTube Suns going down probably probably have about three hours of sunlight left so the first thing that I'm going to do because I want to get a shelter set up get my bedding ready before that goes down but I also want to take have some time some daylight to actually cook myself some dinner gonna make some steaks gonna make some vegetable kabobs on a campfire so I want to put a keyhole fire together a lot of stuff that I want to get done before that goes down and hopefully capture it for you guys before it's time for me to lay down and get some shut-eye so I'm gonna get started on that as far as site selection you know it's no different the five W's of site selection I want to be pretty close to wood so I have construction material and also material to burn in my fire I want to be close to a water source and just so happens there probably I don't know 50 meters behind me there's a stream running through and that springfed there's actually a spring probably 145 meters from here that I'll be able to get my water from so pretty excited about that there's a field full of wild edibles behind me here one on that side so a lot of resources around but anyway five W's wise I'm close to a water source I've got plenty of wood that I could use I'm also away from widow-makers I'm away from the wind I've got kind of a natural windbreak with all these trees and the way this slopes down the wind kind of goes right down through the valley and I'm up a little bit higher so that night time all that cold air is gonna sink down there on the creek and I'm up above that so widow-makers wind wigglers as far as up here I'm in upstate New York and the Adirondacks this particular area there could be timber rattlesnakes but I've never seen one in the wild here so I'm not too worried about that about what we've got for wigglers around here might be a centipede or something like that but it's nothing that I'm worried about but otherwise pretty good spot somebody get started putting that shelter together first things first you got to get my gear up off the ground I've got the back that goes with this green beer so I'm gonna take this white pine I'm gonna use that and love white pine what I especially like about this couldn't be dual-purpose is listen to this all that there's dry kindling right there so I'm gonna get it out of my way but I'm also going to use that for my fire a little bit later I won't use it for my sustaining fuel because I'm gonna actually cook over those coals but the get it started nothing wrong with using this especially with the white pines the white pines have a lot less terpenes in them than the Reds and the yellows so it's why they're not particularly good for making fat wood and all that that's pretty a lot of life left in that one but uh the the Reds have a lot more terpenes and the yellows as well so you'll typically find that wood on those more often the Willing on a white pine on a white pine maybe the small center heartwood you'll find some fat wood on but anyway the idea behind using a softwood like a pine for a kindling is that it burns quickly it just doesn't burn for very long so but it'll burn long enough to transfer to something more sustainable like a hardwood in this case I've got a lot of maple and Hickory some oak and that's what I'll use to make some sustaining Cole's gonna get these out of my way a little bit hang on to those that's got some flex in it might have some fat wood in there let's take a look now these didn't readily snap off and they had some flex to them which is typical when there's some fat wood going on in the white pine so that flex tells me that this dead branch is not completely dead or it's not dry inside so that leads me to believe there could possibly be in fat would you take a look I would say not much in that one try these two a little bit yeah a little bit let me show you that so looking at this I've got those little darker spots right there that nice dark orange rich spot right there those are that's resin so I mean I wouldn't really call this fat wood but it's at least it's at least thick wood we'll call it thick wood it's got a little bit in there a little bit thick not quite fat though one of the other cool things about getting it just come out and just do my thing and enjoy myself in the woods and for you too is to test out new gear and I actually have a hand Forge Marlinspike now to add to my tool roll but this was something I really wanted drew it out on a piece of paper I sent it over to a young blacksmith named Jamison that's over in Pathfinder knife and tool and Jamison hammered this out I believe he said from an old tractor spring or something like that but a really really hard spring steel so he gave himself a good gave himself a good beat down making this for me and really appreciate it so this is a one-of-a-kind Marlinspike and I'm gonna use it as a Marlinspike this is just some some Cecil rope that I actually created I actually used this I made I had some Cecil twine and a rope spinner and if we get enough time you know someday I'll show you how to actually make rope with that but this is just a you know 10 or 12 foot utility rope that I made 3 ply and then I whipped with the ends with some number 12 I think bank line and dip that to further protect the end from praying in some beeswax so just a 10 or 12 foot utility rope I find it's useful for a lot of different things not the least of which is hanging your gear so I'm just gonna tie up on one end I'm gonna tie a bowline knot plenty of videos out there on my channel of how to tie the bowline there we go not putting a lot of weight on this so I'm not gonna put an overhand security knot in there but I'm take that bolt into the line bola to make a running bowline by pulling that in through we'll put it up kind of high cinch that tight now I'm gonna do my Marlin spike hitch appropriately named because it's a hitch which is another name for an anchor knot that incorporates a Marlin spike or a toggle if you don't have one of these but it's the same thing so creating like I'm doing an overhand slip take my Marlin spike place it through the Marlin spike hitch and tighten her down there you go like it was made for it a couple of these small maple saplings that's actually a Hickory believe that one's actually dead and that's a maple anyway so these there's a lot of these small maple saplings so they're kind of in the way but you know that's where my nature decided they needed to go but I need to go right here so in order for me to establish my shelter I also need some green poles to establish a tripod I'm going to build a foresters tent to start off with here and kind of base out of that but so I need the green poles so I'll go ahead and take these out of the way from here because I need to clear this area for my shelter I'm gonna come down as low as I can so I don't leave any stumps sticking up take my silky and I'll just take these down one [Applause] that one's a little small for construction purposes so I'll probably take this one as well and I'll call that thing so this is a new mushroom for me you can see growing right here there's one coming up right there it's with one back there they're all over the place springing up right now so that tells me conditions are right for this particular species trying to stay out of my own light here but this is quartz and Arius violaceous it is edible which is cool but it's also known as the violet Webb cap or violet quart and I'm not sure if you can tell you know in the camera I'll try to get it in the light here but just how dark purple that is it is a guild mushroom and it's got kind of an orange rusty color to it and what's interesting about these is they're supposed to smell like cedar you know like cedar wood me honestly I think they smell like they smell kind of like a black licorice candy so that's another key thing about edibles and medicinal plants is is don't just look at it and try to try to identify something by look you know don't be afraid to feel it depending on what it is but you know feel it smell it kind of use all your senses to engage and a lot of times that you know just the sense of smell alone will help you distinguish something that that maybe maybe not 100% you're on but with anything if you're not 100% sure don't consume it this is a new mushroom for me so I'm gonna do a little more research on it okay so I want to introduce you to a piece of gear you probably haven't seen from me before this is the john pack bed sleeve and essentially you know what it is is a canvas sleeve that's open on both ends and it has grommets on both ends as well reinforce grommets but it's an untreated canvas you know so that you can breathe when you lay on it but one of the reasons I like this particular product and why I'm excited about trying it out and trying it out in the different durations it was designed for us because John pack Jonathan was actually going through one of our courses at the Pathfinder school and Dave Kenner but Dave Canterbury and I sat with him and we're talking about product design and development and one of the things that Dave wanted was a bed sleeve which we use for our tripod shelters a lot of times to get up off the ground and as well as the tripod shelter we also use it for making an improvised hammock so something as simple as a canvas sleeve can assist you in doing all that and you know kind of I got to thinking about it and to make it more versatile you know my input into the design of this product was to add grommets along the bottom so that not only could use it as a hammock or as a raised bed but you could also lace the bottom together and fill it with brows to make an old school kind of browse mattress where you fill it with debris leaf litter things like that to make your insulate so making a mattress a browse mattress with this so that was my input into this particular product and I think that he did an outstanding job with it so I'm gonna show you several different ways to use this but for this particular instance I'm going to be starting off with the Foresters tent so I'm gonna be sleeping on the ground so I'm just going to make a browse mattress alright so in that particular rope that I made was too thick so I'll make a custom one for this later I'll just use a piece of Cecil twine to go through and lace it up and that'll work for our purposes right now don't really matter how you lace it up so long as when you pull it tight it actually closes it up and holds it together so that your debris doesn't spill out at the bottom release that together at the bottom tie this off and that'll cut down on how much debris actually comes out of here now that's tie it off you know I'm just gonna fill it up with leaf litter I'm not gonna take leaf litter from this immediate area because that's already insulation on the ground I want to fill this with insulation from another area close by and then bring it back up here no way I'm not taking away from insulation and the Duff layer that's already occurring so this picked a particular area right up on top of the hill there is where I'm putting my camp and I'm down on the low ground next to the creek there's another big white pine here and what's great about the white pine is it has a lot of soft needles so I'm gonna get a lot of Duff here and I'm just going to keep moving around until this browse bed mattress is full [Applause] of course it goes without saying that you know obviously a therm arrest is easier so if anything you know going to these traditional ways is not so much a matter of efficiency or light weight or anything like that there's a lot of modern ways that you can do things that you know are definitely a lot more convenient but you know I think that you know using traditional gear and kind of taking a look at where we came from as woodsmen kind of a I think at least advances you know our ability to be kind of that modern woodsman we can we know how it used to be we know how it is now we can kind of pick and choose which ones we prefer and I think sometimes it's nice to go back and kind of revisit some of these older techniques like the Browse bag you know so yeah it's a little bit of extra work but you know my point is to be out here enjoying the wilderness and kind of using traditional gear and kind of getting back in touch with that traditional woodsman style you know so I don't mind a little extra work I don't want to go out and have those modern conveniences where I run out I set up camp everything's good and I just sit there and watch the fire the rest of the time I want to experience the outdoors I want to enjoy being out here and I want to get back in touch with kind of the woodsman of old you know the the nest muxo Horace Kephart speaking of nest muck a lot of mosquitoes around here so after I finished filling this up and dragging it to camp I'm gonna get some of my punky dope out and give myself a liberal application of that keep these mosquitoes at bay but it looks like it's gonna rain at least threaten into so want to get my shelter set up for the night for sure and then maybe think about getting a fire set up so I can cook some steaks before those go bad not really have any refrigeration out here but I do have steaks but yeah so yes definitely more convenient ways to do this and if that's your goal is convenience and ease and just going out and you know say if I'm going out you know to go for a hike and that's my primary purpose and I just want to set up a quick camp that's one thing it just needs to be adequate needs to be fast because that's not my focus but that is my focus right now so anyway I think that's about full pretty big old mattress right there drag that off camp [Applause] so that is a fat mattress I want four inches of insulation compressed I'll have four to six inches on this one we do is lace up the front real quick spread this out nice and even test it out and then I'll base my Foresters tent around this mattress I've got my bed set up and you know like we were talking about before you know therm-a-rest is a lot quicker but therm-a-rest is not this big and comfortable I will say so you do a little work but it pays dividends in comfort and there are some probably some sticks in here that I'll feel but they're small just from shoving Duff in here and this isn't the best time to show you this one because right now you know the ground the leaf litter on the ground is is quite damp so there is some moisture in here but this isn't a wax canvas so it's breathable and either way wet insulation or insulation it will protect you from conduction on the ground but it's not the most ideal time to show you this just what I happened to have a little bit later in the fall when there's a lot more leaf debris on a dry day that's when you would want to fill this and it wouldn't take quite so long to be quite as heavy pretty easy thing to do so this is a john packed bed sleep used as a browse bed and what I would do typically is I don't want to have I'm not gonna carry a pillow or anything but you could carry a small browse pillow like a small sleeve fill that with browse and use that as a pillow but I typically have my weather wool with me no matter what and so I just kind of fold that up into a pillow and I do that whether I'm sleeping on the ground or in a hammock I don't sleep in this because I want to put it on immediately once I get up so I've got my weather will pillow typically if I'm using something besides a mummy sleeping bag that comes up over the head you know you lose most of your heat through your head so I'll put on a stocking cap instead of a ball cap and then I've got my wool blanket to cover up with so all in all you know this is a fairly comfortable mattress and it protects me completely from the ground but for me I'm also a side sleeper I'm kind of swallowed me out a spot in here that's actually extremely comfortable a lot more comfortable than I would be laying on a thin piece of foam so just an option to think about I really like this and there's a couple different other configurations you can use it in and then I'll show you probably in in the future as this bushcraft camp develops kit take a nap right now and wind whipping through the pines and the maple you can tell us Wendy as it is how much of a wind break I have down here there's almost no wind right here so pretty effective shelter location I would say it's whipping up the side of the hill the pines are bent over the maples up higher than me or bent over but but I'm fine good spot now to get some overhead cover

Channel: The Gray Bearded Green Beret

Views: 67,267

Keywords: traditional bushcraft, bushcraft camp building, bushcraft camp, solo overnight bushcraft camp, bushcraft camp setup, solo overnight camping, traditional bushcraft gear, 10 cs, bushcraft skills, bushcraft camping, wild camping, vintage camping gear, bushcraft build, bushcraft camper

Id: ZmLErKOinpg

Length: 21min 30sec (1290 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019