Bushcraft Shelter & Camp Construction

[Applause] hi there guys I thought today we do a video on constructing a camp and go through the process of building one together there are many different aspects that can influence camp construction and some of them may be how long do you intend to spend in that location what sort of scenario you in and what sort of weather conditions or environmental aspects you're having to endure at the time or in the future depending on the time you're spending there what sort of tools do you carry on you to utilize the natural resources that are around you and ultimately what kind of knowledge do you have about that environment araignee these are all things that are going to directly influence that camp and how it takes shape some of the primary items that I carry on me are just in front of me here I have an axe a small knife a large bladed knife and on the sheath I have a ferrocerium rod and torch and you can see just behind that we have a tarpaulin a tarpaulin is a fairly common piece of equipment a lot of people carry these days when exploring the outdoors were practicing self reliance and bushcraft and they come in many shapes and sizes and many different materials this one's polyurethane and it's three by three meters and it comes with its own set of pros and cons that we'll discuss later when we start setting these things up and we'll talk about some of the alternatives but just by carrying that primary cover there it can be strung up in a couple of minutes and keep your out of the weather and also be modified for prolonged living using these tools here which will allow you to construct certain things like off the ground beds and thermal walls to manipulate temperature and keep you dry and keep you comfortable give you a good night's sleep along with many other aspects so in this video we're going to cover a whole range of elements that are encompassed under shelter building and ultimately it's the give us a good night's sleep and allow us to live comfortably out here forever long we choose to do so but first of all we need to identify a good area with the right resources where we can spend time I've been walking around this wood and looking for a suitable place where I'd like to my camp and whilst doing so I've been taking into account all of the natural resources that are available to me in the area and building up almost like a database in my mind of where all these things are and where things will occur but I may not have seen all these natural resources will give me a very high degree of sustainability no matter how long I want to spend outdoors so lots of different things are going to affect you and your environment around you and if it was pouring it down with rain now there are things that are gonna affect me like these large oak trees that around me and ash trees that produce a lot of dead full or beech trees you know things that are going to be dropping down on my head or if this really heavy winds some of these trees are really pitted and rotted at the base and they might come over like they have done back in January when we had storms here so all these different things are worth bearing in mind and you just want to keep an open sort of perspective really on your environment while you're moving through it and just have a look at those signs because they're all there in front of you but let's have a look at some of the natural resources that we've picked out in this will in here probably one of the most important things that I always consider and one of the things I'm always looking out for and I might setting up the camp is a water source what kind of water source do I have available to me it's a very large flowing river is it the ocean is it a small hollow in the side of a tree where a codominant trunk is sheared off or is it a nice little River I have a river about 50 yards down that way there and it's not the fastest flowing river in the world but it gives me a great deal of versatility when operating a camp I have drinking water now and I can collect that water bring it back take the debris out and sterilize it using my containers I'm able to take clothes over there or pots and pans and wash them and it greatly increases hygiene and it's also useful for cooking when certain foods or wild edibles can be enhanced with water or utilized with water so you can drink and eat them the woodland I'm in is very boggy that's reflected by the vast amounts of moss and spanking loss that are growing all across the grains and all on the damp rotting logs in this area but with that comes as advantages and disadvantages I try not to camp too close to a water source that may be quite stagnant or doesn't flow very quickly simply because the ground of surrounding generally very very damp to lots of different species of fly including midges which are really irritating will lay their eggs all over the ground the trees have a massive influence on how I set up my camp and where I set up my camp and they also have a huge influence on my ability to make fire later because they provided my primary source of fuel there's a lot of ash around here and ash is notorious for producing deadfall I don't ever camp under an ash tree especially in windy wet weather or stormy conditions even on beautiful days like this you won't find me camping under ash unless it's very small and young but it does provide you with a lot of fuel available fuel on the ground to make fire with and also on that deadfall grows a fungus Dale DiLeo concentric ax or cramp bull fungus as you can go up to this fungi if you find it in the right place pick it off of a tree put a spark in it using a Ferro rod or even a flint and steel if you're skilled enough and get an ember very quickly and the surroundings spank the moss on dry conditions or honeysuckle which grows quite commonly on the hazel around here can be utilized into tinder bundles and you can make a fire very easily one thing I do like about ash is when it's young it's flat bark harbors magma moss on nice flat dry sheets and that's perfect as toilet roll and tinder because it generally remains dry and soilless because it's off the ground another fungus I've noticed growing on fallen trees Ganoderma rattlin artim and just from inspecting this area there's an awful lot of it around here growing on some of the deciduous hardwoods that have died and fallen and the fungus can be picked and dried out and used for a whole manner of different things but one of the most useful things that you can use it for is it will smolder for a very very long time and a fungus of about this size can burn and smolder for a whole day provided the winds aren't too heavy another mushroom that I commonly eat polypore is Moses unfortunately this season is past for it it's a spring and summer mushroom and although we are in summer it's drawing to an end almost and this mushroom is on its way out but I would have eaten it otherwise I also have an abundance of hazel around me and hazel is an incredibly useful tree to eat it's probably one of the most common ones that I use in almost all bushcraft tasks it can be used for any manner of things because it grows out the ground in these long shoots and they can be copper stained and it grows back very quickly and you can use those to construct any manner of different things and it's predominantly what you'll be using today but it also is notorious for having dead standing wood growing amongst it which is brilliant in wet weather because you can approach the hazel tree and they grow so close together that you can just keep snapping and building bundles of dry wood so it's usually my first port of call and I'm out in wet weather and I need to get a fire going you'll also find glue fungus growing very commonly on hazel and glue fungus holds dead branches up in the air sometimes against live ones or dead ones and again that can be a great source of high and dry wood when you need to make a fire in wet weather the seasons and weather coming into play again as they are one of the ruling factors here and the season this time of year means that hazelnuts are coming in to ripen although they're not ripe yet and this is one of the issues with gray squirrels they eat all the hazelnuts before they're ripe and they just basically bite them out the trees and drop them down some of them they leave some of them they don't and they usually come and collect them later and then bury them but it just means you have an opportunity to take a game if you have a means to hunt something I carry on me all the time is a slingshot it gives me the opportunity to get out very early or late at night when this high contrast between the canopy and the ground below and take squirrels and creep up very close where a pulse coming into play although unfortunately they're very bitter and not particularly ripe and the squirrels are dislodging these out of the trees also especially the small ones but it means we can take them and we can season them up a bit and try and do something with them they are available there for us and we could mash them up with other edibles and make a stew and benefit from their nutrition there's a whole abundance of wild edibles out there wild edibles that are growing in the canopy here where there's not too much light like wood avens and wood sorrel there's a whole abundance of wild edibles that are growing out there just where the canopy ends and this is another reason why I like this spot because I have a water source that I can walk also have wild edibles that I can gather along the way that are growing out there where the canopy breaks antiseptics medicinals things that I can eat and makes use out of them teas it really is an infinite amount of resources out there at your disposal and there are also fungi that you can use as field dressing and plasters you can dry out or use off the tree and even strop your knife on if there aren't appropriate stains around that you can use but I'm really just trying to communicate to you a mindset that you can adjust yourself into being when you come out here just while you're looking for a camp take all these things into consideration I have a lot of materials here for me to work with thanks to this fallen poplar tree just here it's come down and taking out this young field maple it's also taken out some hazel as well along with some other bushes I've checked above me as well and there's no deadfall which is always a plus it's the first thing I check when I get to a location so it's not just about what's above you it's about things that can actually reach you from a distance as well so I've done a little perimeter check and check the trees around me because some of them can look perfectly healthy but you go on the other side and you're pulling out rotten wood from the base and you know it's a culprit that could come down and possibly get you in bad weather the ground is fairly solid and flats on the foot as well and there doesn't appear to be anything in the area that gives me any concerns especially it's quite flat here if it was steep and I was looking around I'd be looking for parts in the leaves my natural runs of water would be collecting and forming in areas but none of that gives me any concern in this area arrived pictures here prior to me setting up camp just be mindful of wind direction there are lots and lots of easy ways to judge wind direction a really good way of judging wind direction if you don't have like a Ferro rod or something you can just take the Ferro rod out and strike it and watch which way the smoke goes if you don't have a fire game which are unlikely to have if you haven't built your camp yet one thing I usually do is use my eyes and you can open your eyes quite wide and does look a bit strange but you know you can look around and you can generally judge which way the winds coming from because your eyes are incredibly sensitive I'm putting my tarp in between two hazel trees and you can see that they're not overly thick but they're not too thin either Hazel's quite flexible and something about this then especially if you're in a hammock would be no good because as soon as you've got in that hammock everything would bow in towards you and it would compromise your shelter at the top in wet weather so you want to make sure you're not stringing up to something overly thick cuz you'll use up a lot of cord but then it doesn't need to be too thin either something like this is absolutely fine and it has a lot of lean in it it has a tendency to be bendy as well so the straighter the batter in most cases the weather's really nice at the moment so I'm not too worried about getting the tarp up the weather was torrential or very heavy rain I would have my tarp up straightaway and I'd be working under it and only venturing out to get things to build my construction with and make the camp but because the weather's so nice all I'm gonna worry about right now is making a flat bed to get me off the ground [Music] so I've been out and I've been gathering quite a variety of different materials I've got some large logs here which came off that huge trunk of hazel had been taken out by this poplar tree it had been kept off the grained and seasoned really nicely since it was dead I decided to take it it gives me great versatility really and it kind of speeds up the process a bit for me but it lifts myself off the ground too much when I'm making flatbed so I'm sleeping out on them I generally just get off the ground a little bit these structures you can stack them and go up very very high when you're making a natural shelter you can incorporate them within the natural shelter and give yourself extra elevation and the construction really does come together then but when using a tarp its kind of on its own in some respects but if you can't find big logs like this and you want to use that method to elevate you off the grounds it'll all become clear when we start building the structure you can just find logs like this and strap them together with court and lay them on the ground and that kind of makes a sort of substitute log in some respects but I've been out and cut my saw some long quarts of hazel and you can see I've measured these out by standing up and just making sure they were taller than me but if I stand up here like this you can see these calls of hazel are a little bit taller than I am and that's just fine really because I don't want them to be too short so my legs will had a hanging off the end of the flatbed so looking at the frame here we've got the tea logs laid out we put this main bar across and they're just sitting on top at the moment no notches have been made quite yet it's a sort of level attacked which is what we can do because you see to one sides higher than the other so we can turn this and find the optimum kind of angle and make notches to kind of seat them in and it's not I'm slipping around we can do all that later really we just want to get the main frame laid out and see whether we find it comfortable and whether we're happy with it I've no doubt that these are longer than I am that's why now I'm gonna fit on this structure fairly well but in terms of the way the structure responds when I sit on it is a different matter or lie on it I move these all the way out there I get more flexibility here if I bring them in it's more rigid the same with these if I bring them away from each other I'll have more flexibility in the middle if I bring them closer to my core he'll be more rigid I could also build a tripod on each corner to get myself off the ground with a great degree of elevation but I'm quite happy just being a little way off the ground because it doesn't make a hell of a difference and you have a good night's sleep I've cut these structures to sit - Chris trait across like that and I'll probably move these out a bit just to give it a little bit more support but we can't actually organize them in this fashion here so we have struts going up left and right diagonally across the bar and we could seat those bars in place and peg them so they don't slip out and that way we're kind of creating like almost like a divot that we can sleep in but without the you know a comfortable mat or sort of bedding to go beneath it all the right kind of materials out there it's going to be a bit uncomfortable on your shoulders so sometimes just having a flat bed is a better way to go but there is another direction we can take with this you see these go across horizontally it could take a very long piece of wood like this and lay them across like that and it has its advantages because it's a bit more flexible but it just means you've got to go out and find very long pieces of wood that are effectively very similar and it can be a bit fiddly getting them in place so that might be a route you want to go down as well if you go out and make one of these personally I prefer just lying the logs across like this and elevating the whole structure if need be because I find it a lot more solid you can see that this structure gets off the ground about six inches and while you're building it and you suddenly pull this effort into getting these components together and you think actually I want to be off the ground just a little bit more you can find some logs a tiny bit of thicker than this and just seat them above the main struts each end if you get two more long pieces like this you can then take yourself up another level just like this but sometimes it's nice to build a structure like this because what it allows you to do is fill the core with insulation on colder days and colder times of the year and actually retain a lot of heat so that should be enough struts to build this bet and have a few more left over for other projects so now I'm happy with where the struts going it's time to just crudely knotch this log below just to allow it to seat it a bit better I will further peg it a bit later on as you'll see but this just allows it not to slip around too much if I move in the night so I've put some crude notches in the structure here this man should hold everything together very firmly it doesn't need to be too much remember your body weights going to be on it you'll be lying a lot of logs on it I'm going to put some structural pegs in a little bit later we're just gonna keep things from slipping out keep the whole structure together and it's a relatively quick structure once you have the materials it's gathering the materials that takes a long time but often you can be a bit too picky when you're axel with these little projects it really is about just improvising so if we don't have a large log just bundle some together and you can make a structure very very quickly and the nice thing about bundling logs together is you're not working them with a specific diameter you can sort of make it narrower or wider you know to your heart's content really just by adding more sticks to it more small logs to it and just building up and you can just come off the ground very very quickly it's just the notching side of it you might want to watch but then you can lash things together with pieces of cord but I'm just going to take this bed up another level and I've just knocked some other pieces as well [Applause] one thing I generally do with things that I'm gonna be hammering into the ground it's just bevel the tops like this you just literally take the grain away off the edge and you can just roam the tops very slightly when you're having them in the grains they won't mushroom out and they'll just stop that grain from splitting you find that your structure shifted slightly because these runs here can move you can see how sturdy the whole thing is you know it's got a degree of movement to it which is great but he doesn't need to move too much if you put your peg in here for example and what that will do is it won't stop these bars moving outward so ideally what you need to do is put your peg in the V just there but you want to be able to kick these bits of wood just level everything up you know say things are just sort of squared up really that's when you hammer that in it's keeping this nice and taut so there we go it's a fairly functional flatbed it's got a bit of spring in it a bit more on this side than that side because that'd been a bit of hazel but that really wouldn't bother me too much you see nice and nice and sturdy they sort of moves a bit obviously when you start to give it some welly but yeah it's not too bad you can you know walk on it it's pretty strong you can even store things underneath it if you really wanted to see you could lift these up and put your equipment and stuff under there even tinder wood or if it's really cold you want to deck the site with lots and lots of sort of foliage and things just to keep that warmth in for you so you don't have that air underneath you so quite a functional way of getting off the ground we still have a bit more to do to the camp yet one thing I will build now is a thermal wall because they can be very useful they can increase the temperature under your top and around your camp drastically and you will notice it if you ever build one you get a very hot fire going a large fire to reflect all that heat back in there very good for blocking wind as well and you can also put improvised shelving in them so you can drive various items like fungus and wild edibles for later use as well as clothes [Applause] just bubbling off these steaks again so they don't mushroom when they go in the ground or split which is even worse especially with hazel splits very easily so I'm gonna put up a thermal wall I'm gonna put it just here so it reflects the heat back from the fire into my turf and around me and keeps me nice and warm at night when things cool down I've also got that fall and popular tree over there so I could stack things up against that and make a crude thermal wall as well as I can do with this hazel here and stack things across and cut the wind out from that direction over there if I want to but so don't want the fire too close to my bed here for obvious reasons if I'm in a wool blanket it may be fire retardant but still I have a polyurethane tart the sort of equipment you use kind of has a bit of control over where your fire goes to a degree but if I take a step out here I'd say my thermal walking go about there my fire can reside just here and that should be absolutely fine at this moment I'm not really worrying about how stable these supports are these beams I'm putting you know or even really how flexible they are his hazel is very springy if you don't get it nice and thick it's just gonna be useless in some respects if you want it to be rigid because what I'll do is I'll stack it up and then I'll tie it part the way up with some cord and continue stacking it again you know just make it nice and solid so now these poles are up I don't really need to worry about going and cutting fresh green wood or getting decent logs and stacking them all in I can just find the deadfall on the ground and just start slotting them down to Everlong I want this wall to be so I can just tie this off slide the cord and really really just strengthens it then we can keep on stacking this thermal walls almost finished but it's fairly basic in rickety and there's lots of gaps in it so I would do even at this time of year to benefit from its reflection it's packed the back with moss soil side facing the wall so I could almost bind it to the back of the wall and fill in all those gaps and that way I get much better reflection in the winter you might want to make this wall a lot larger and have it coming around you and be a bit more mindful of wind direction and wind chill at this time of year it's not so bad and a bit of a breeze is welcomed but at night when it's very very cold or in the winter you might want to think a bit more about that and actually have this wall extending range you can also double line it as well and pack the core with moss it's almost make like an insulated cavity wall and on those cold conditions you really would feel the benefit it's all I've done there's just taking this big log flatten the surface off and I've actually got quite a flat solid surface though just to do some feathering on use my tools on chop wood on with my axe it doesn't take much but things like that really help your efficiency around the camp I've just been out collecting some wild edibles some for eating and teas and some of the medicinal uses so we'll take them back to camp and have a look at what they can do so let's have a look at what we've got the first wild plant that I've got here is a member of the lemon ACI family which is the mint family and it's called Appleman it's not native to the British Isles but it's kind of escaped cultivation and we typically find it by water sources and damp soils it's got a very broad and fluffy leaf and the stem is incredibly strong can actually be banged together and used as bedding if you can actually withstand the smell and at this time of year you've got these pink flower clusters there at the top of the stem which does make it easy to pick out in this typical of a lot of mints it's got a whole range of uses from a topical medicinal to one that's internal even as an edible in teas but one thing it's fantastic for is putting under an improvised raised bed like this to drive away fleas and ticks because if it's potent smell they're not half as effective as tansy which is another one you'll find near water sources and that is particularly strong the next one I have is called hedge wound wort and it's a member of the same family the mint family but it has different uses and this is probably the most common edible that I use when it's around and it has a broad season as well which is useful and can be dried and used later like much of these edibles can be but this one is a very powerful antiseptic and anti-inflammatory and I often use it when I'm dressing game to clean my hands and sometimes equipment though I find boiling water better for that but again very useful if you want to maintain hygiene around the camp the rest of this wild mint is gonna go under my raised bed here and if I was act for a very long period of time I'd have three four five times as much as this a massive bunch that sag underneath to drive away ticks and fleas and things you can bind thick hollow stems plants like this together and use them as an improvised sleeping mat or they mints probably a bit strong and better used in moderation something like horse tail mixed in with a bit of mint would be absolutely fantastic the crane is sleeping mat for you if you're right I've got some offcuts of hazel here on another throw off cuts away I generally pile them up and come back to them later because you never know what you might change or construct in the future and it's great to have wood like this that's a fresh and easy to work with I'm just going to construct a simple pot hanger to allow me to cook with and minimize the risks of burning myself [Applause] [Applause] that should help me do some cooking just something very very simple there at the finishing touch just leave them make a small depression scoop out some wood okay so that will allow me to do a bit of cooking there and you know it can wobble around a bit as well it can generally be quite stable these pot hangers and you can adjust them as well so it can be right down in the fire or it can be right up here just keeping warm but obviously when this pot has weight in it much like this one here which is actually got water in it you can see there they're actually very very stable it's just when the pots are light and empty like this titanium ones they tend to wobble around and go off balance depending on how you've constructed the pot hanger that's looking pretty good so our camps really coming together we've got a lot of items here that'll benefit us in the long run and make us stay very very comfortable and it only developed further from there as the seasons changed or the amount of time we spent here increased but if you think about the order in which I've done things have done things in a pretty leisurely way if it was raining and was incredibly cold and windy the tarp and the fire would have been my first port of call but as of now I'm gonna get my fire going and the tarp will probably be the last thing I do today you can see that there's an abundance of dry fuel on the ground so it shouldn't be too difficult for me to collect all of this and make a fire but obviously if it was raining we touched on dry standing wood earlier with the hazel and obviously bits of ash that are hanging in the trees so again that's something to bear in mind because obviously the weather conditions will have a huge influence there but I've got cramp all fungus and dry moss as tinder its hopefully with these small sticks I should be able to get a fire going fairly quickly so you can see there's no shortage of wood out there I've got some various sizes here and some very nice pieces of ash it'll burn for a long time and be very hot there's loads of dry ash out there of this kind of thickness which is perfect for me you can see a she's got quite a lot of sort of spring in it even when dead so it makes it pretty useful for various other things once you've collected your fuel wood you can organize this into piles like a small pile just here which is gonna go on straight away a slightly larger file just here and all the bigger stuff is back over on my main stack and that can go on a little later so once you've got this smaller stuff out of the way you don't really need to go back to that I've also created a raft of ash on the ground with a little bit of hazel there and that'll just keep it off the damp ground and allow oxygen to get to it it'll also turn into a nice bed of embers a bit later on my ignition source is obviously a fire steel but as tinder goes I've got some cramp oars that I've picked a left split just drying in the Sun and I've also got some sphagnum Moss which is going to be my tinder bundle I can deal with this one now it's lit because any small pieces transfer it to another what I can do also is transfer the heat from one of these crumples across the DeSantis bracket here which is nice and dry now on the outside anyway and that can burn for almost the whole day so that's going quite nicely now and it burns very slowly and very dense and as long as I keep it in a breeze it will go all day and they won't burn too quickly if it's in strong winds it will just deteriorate rapidly with moss the key is not to try and make it burst into flames almost turn it into an ember itself and get a lot of heat generated in there and when you put the small twigs on they'll catch fire and the whole thing will go up it takes a huge amount of work though really when it stamped like this it's getting that night now it's going we can put it down on the pile now there's a lot of heat in there and get our small twigs on and continue blowing this is so done it's really taking me some time get fire going today these materials incredibly damp say you've got to spend a lot of time working with them and drying them out but we're sort of getting there now and there's a lot of heat in the core which is what I'm looking for and the moss has actually started to dry to a degree where it's glowing like a number and this flame some of the smaller sticks are piled underneath or am actually beginning to burn as you can see this exactly what we want really feel the heat coming back off that barrier makes a huge difference [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] I just made myself a mint tea just because it's quite refreshing bit of a pick-me-up when you've been working hard all day and it's quite nice it's got a good flavor and smell to it as well so if you have hay fever or block nose it'd be able to help you out there as well and he's a bit of a suffering but camps really come together and I think I could easily spend some time here which I will in the near future but this water I took from a river just over there and it was on my way and actually a little river that you know I'm fairly familiar with and there are things in the water that our ancestors never really had to deal with like pesticides so it may be best to construct a three-tier water filter which is very easy to do if you were staying out for a prolonged periods of time you can do that using charcoal and sand and gravel and moss you know with a bit of birch bark for example or any other kind of tubing like a plastic bottle you may find or a can but you can also purchase water filters as well so if you're gonna spend a lot of time outdoors it may be worth doing that just a safety building one it's always good to have those skills while my tea is cooling down I thought I'd introduce you to this here this is sedge grass a three-sided angular piece of grass and a very easy thing to identify due to its triangular stem quite iconic really as our ancestors used to grind the seeds into flour to bake with well it's like this can come in handy for other things but sedge isn't the best for what I'm about to explain obviously our raised bed off the grain there doesn't have a sleep mat and let's say I don't have a sleep man what would I do I could pile a lot of Spagna moss on top if there was spruce boughs in the area which are on this isn't a coniferous woodlands deciduous woodland so there's no spruce in there so where I can't really just lie spruce all over the top of it because it's not available to me so I have to make a sleep mask out of something now things like fern they're a bit too thin and you'd need a huge amount of it you know to actually make something that's gonna be comfortable you need about 2 foot of material you know on top of the mat really before you get on it because that law can press and over time it'll just keep compressing so it's something you need to maintain really depending on the type of material you have but plants with like a hollow stem are very useful things like thistle and horse tail that we discussed earlier and also that Apple in a very useful you can get big big bunches of that and strap it together and that would be something you could do if you're staying out for prolonged periods of time so our camps looking really good and we've got a number of items here to help us out and further develop depending on how long we intend to stay here but I still don't have a roof over my head so now I'm going to put a tarp up so the tarp I'm using is the DD 3x3 coyote brown tarp and polyurethane and it's pretty strung meaning I've tied all the lines to it and got the main ridge line pre connected so it could just be strung up like a curtain and I've deliberately done that for speed because of sudden weather changes well I'm stringing up the tarp I'll try not to string it too low but again that really depends on weather conditions again you may want to have it up quite low down because you're enjoying some serious winds and weather conditions and it's cold and you want to stay warm you want to keep things in close but in weather like this I want a very comfortable camp so I'm going to string my talk about quite high so I can walk around under it and all the things I need to do and it's obviously very warm at this time of year so when I string it up in that case I reach up and do it arm's length don't do it to locust what will happen is it will just fire down with the weight of the tarp on the ridgeline and as the ridgeline gradually stretches as well naturally it will just start to lower itself so always tie it a bit higher than you think you need it you can see that one end of my ridge line here has a loop in it and I make myself three or four toggles like this and it's very very simple you just wrap the loop around like this take up any slack that you have by wrapping it round put that loop through there and put a toggle through and then pull it taut and that's really the first knot you could call it that I make on my ridge line and if you want to undo it at a later stage just pull the pin and give it a tug and it will all fall apart on the secondary where I finally tie the cord off I bring it round like this I've always got plenty of slack go back around the piece of cord get some tension and take up any slack that might be I'll bring it round like this keeping my fingers on top of this loop so this is the bit the sort of slack just there in the back there in my right hand roll it back towards the tree wants to create a loop pinch the slack and pull it through and it's just a very basic quick release knot and then you can toggle that up if you intend to stay there a while and you don't want the things to kind of loosen up so you can see now my tops hanging a little bit like a curtain so the ridge lines up and it can just hang there if I want to pack it away I just draw it a bit like a curtain like this organize it in the fashion I had it before and just roll it up and tie the ridge line rained and then it's very very easy to put away and put up in a short space of time and when you have it like this it means you can adjust it to where you want it to be moving it up or down the ridge line to kind of be over the top of your shelter if you put the tarp up last that is but you can see on the two main sides of the ridge line I've got a little loop up Rasik not just tied on there piece of bungee elastic and I can just put a toggle through there and they can be slid up and down the ridge line so now we've got everything strung up and it's nice and taut and it's in the right place all I got to do is tie it off for each corner and I've got these pre hanged up that's what I've got to do is unravel the piece of cord and start drawing it out to the length I need it they're kind of not I generally do on the lines just just a tension not so you just pinch just like this and then wrap this round three times like that and then go back at this point back here when it's doubled over and wrap around a couple of times like that do three times just like this like the front you can actually do two or three it doesn't really matter and then you thread this part in between two lines just like this and just literally pull it taut like that and it just gives you sort of like a adjustable knot basically where you can sort of take slack up and tighten up at a later date so tied the front off but I haven't done it very tight simply because I want to kind of level everything out you can actually adjust the center of the top based on how tight you do it so if you go real taut one and things are just gonna be skew F and it's not really gonna sit right so it's best just to tighten it all up at the end and just see how it naturally Falls but you can see this is the back of the shelter so the thermal walls there and it's going to be reflecting heat back under this tarp here I can always tie this down to this fallen poplar tree here to get some reflection back from behind me once the heats are actually coming off the thermal wall so the tarps up I really was staying here for a long period of time I'd raise it up another few inches because it's scraping the top of my head but it's absolutely fine you can see I've dropped the back down so it's gonna keep some heat in and Bank some heat back to me from that fire there and that thermal wall and at this time of year this is really more than you need so if we look at where the tarp is in conjunction with the fire you can see it's a fair distance away in even if it was like this I wouldn't really have any concerns because I'd be able to manage that fire and control it and I have fires underneath my tarp all the time even though it's polyurethane and it's not fire retardant at all by the way it's just about the kind of woods you use and how big your fire is and how you manage the fire if you've got a little fire going and you suddenly top up with tons of dry wood expect it to go crazy all of a sudden when it reaches the right temperature and you won't be able to manage it and you have to wait for it to die down I use things like hazel ash and oak that have a controlled burn and in most cases a slow burn but at the same times you don't want to use wood like sweet chestnut or larch that can spit a lot and get very volatile so it's about just managing the fire and working with the right materials you can probably see from my you're standing there's a SAG in the tarp and generally there will be if you string it up this way even if you pull it very very tight you don't want to over tighten them at all or actually gonna compromise the tarp and possibly tear it but obviously water will pull just here and in the night it'll creep its way down there I imagine and runoff but we can obviously wait certain areas down like put a log through one of these loops to create a runoff but then that's bringing us a bit closer to the fire but at the same time we can tie the back off and just pull it nice and taut to create a runoff for water there as well which is the best port of call in this case so the tarps set up pretty good now and I found a young hazel sapling just nice and springy not too strong just a tug on the front of the tarp to a sister I've tied it off at the back to create that run off a minor change I've made is I've just moved my bag so it was hanging on that peg on this tree over here obviously if it rains it's gonna be no good there so I've just shifted it and moved it just here so it's next to me while I'm asleep and I can access my kit if I need to also I've moved the firewood because it was basically behind my run off nor my run off my water it's gonna be going down there just below that log and although under here is gonna be perfectly dry and safe if I have my firewood there it's not gonna be too clever so I've just pegged off at the base of my bed there and put all my firewood there make sure it's well away from the fire if it was the winter I'd have some locks next to me around here as well so if I woke up in the night and the fire was dwindling I could easily just top the fire up and keep a bit warmer you know keep it going for the morning other than that this camp is pretty much up and together and I'm fairly happy with it I may spend some time here I will definitely spend some time here in the future come out here string the tarp up and I'm ready to roll and it can be a nice little escape when I go out and do some stuff and decide to spend some time out here in the woods and enjoy myself the weather's beautiful at this time of year and even when it's not nice it's still good to be out and be dry and be doing the things you want to be doing and enjoying the great outdoors the sound of rain on a tarp is a I find it really relaxing and it helps me get to sleep and I quite enjoy it actually when things get pretty heavy out here but there's a few more things I could do and it really just depends on the weather if the winds were coming real strong in from this direction I'd obviously get a thermal wall up there as well and use that hazel as part of it same here I could back up the end of there and really pack it out with some dead wood and build like a sort of really rugged shelter just their sort of thermal wall just to really block the back bed off there but I've got some great cover here and it's a wonderful little place where you can come and spend time so guys I hope that videos helped out it was actually a suggestion from a subscriber he said you know can you make a video of how to build a camp from A to B start to finish and all the variables in between and I hope you've enjoyed it was a great suggestion and I enjoyed making the videos it was hard work but you know I've got a semi-permanent camp now that I can come and enjoy a later date which I intend to but camps you know building a camps quite a variable thing it's not always going to be a matter of carrying very little and using the resources around you because it depends on the environment and the weather conditions you're having to endure you know if you're in arctic conditions you're going to be pretty foolish just taking a tarp out with you so you need to bring other things so it all depends on the environment you're in but for me at this time of year just carrying a tar for foam mat and you know a wool blanket and some tools and you can do an awful lot so thanks for watching guys and I hope you've enjoyed the video and really appreciate all the comments and subscriptions and things and hopefully there'll be more videos to come soon so I'll see you in the next video take care

Channel: MCQ Bushcraft & Wilderness Life

Views: 1,360,802

Rating: 4.9054317 out of 5

Keywords: MCQbushcraft shelter, bushcraft camp building, bushcraft shelter building, mcq bushcraft, mcqbushcraft, bushcraft shelter long term, raised bed bushcraft shelter, bushcraft camp build, bushcraft shelter raised bed, bushcraft raised shelter, bushcraft camping gear, how to build a bushcraft shelter, bushcraft raised bed - build & camp, raised shelter, bushcraft raised bed, bushcraft, bushcraft skills, bushcraft skills to practice, solo camping, survival shelter

Id: SAlFy67h-0k

Length: 57min 16sec (3436 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 05 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/fernguts]

Excellent! The crow at the beginning made me jump though.

[u/1920sRadio]

This video was very helpful for me, thank you for posting it. The only thing I wish he would have gone into more detail about was the shelving on the thermal wall.