Solo Survival part 2: How to Survive Alone in the Wilderness for 1 week --Eastern Woodlands

you all right so I'm in my shelter right now and things are going good yesterday and it started really coming down with the rain last night and I crawled in here and stayed warm and dry throughout the night even though it was coming down it's a little later in the morning and the rains finally let up and so this has been a great shelter unfortunately I can't get the project's done that I need to get done while sitting in this tight shelter so today's projects going to be to build an overhang so I can sit outside keep my fire going we've cordage make traps even in a downpour I need to get more work done and can't spend 12 hours sitting in my debris Hut every day so what I'm doing is building a little patio here I've got two steaks buried into the ground that are why sticks holding up the main beam I'm just going to make a quick a frame roof and then I'm going to go around to the trees around here which are amazingly good because they have a ton of rotten bark on them that peels off in large enough sheets that I can haul it back to the camp lean it up on here and make myself a dry shelter all right so I was able to just peel up a long strip and now what I can do is just work my fingers into this bark it's actually pretty you know rotten it's enough to hold together but it's rotten enough to come off the log so you can see I want to get this in as big of a strip as possible so I'm just going to work my hands in times if I work the other side at the same time she's gonna pound a break eventually I'm gonna do my best and not let it break because everywhere it breaks is a spot where rainwater might drip in or a spot that I have to double up and therefore get my new bark this isn't too bad I just got to handle it gently get it back to my camp but you know ten of those and I'm going to have a really nice patio all right first thing I need to do on my a-frame is tie straight sticks with hickory bar cord to support the bark panels you when it pokes up the top I just kind of gently break it so now it's going to hold its going to shield over the top and hold the bark from sliding down all right so this is about where it's going to be I don't want to waste too much time doing this this thing is obviously not a waste of time but the second it's done and I'm going to serve its purpose I need to stop and work on something else clock is ticking I need to get out there and get my traps going alright so what I've done is charcoal Dover my hands I've already washed them rub them in dirt and now I'm putting on charcoal to mask any scent that I have before I really touch any of this trap this is called a Paiute trap it's a really good deadfall this is the one I have the most success with I'm going to play with a snare as well but probably set about 10 of these while I'm out here because when you set one you don't get one you set ten and you get one generally if you're a better trapper maybe five to one but you're never always going to spring every trap so I'm going to run a trapline with a couple different traps but the Paiute trap is going to be the go-to probably 80% of the traps I set will beep hi you for now those sun's going down so I'm going to sneak this one in here and hope it works I've got the three pieces to the Paiute where I have my upright my diagonal stick it's got a little toggle attached to it now the string is attached to a toggle which goes around the front loops around and clips in and that's held in place by the bait stick now you'll notice I have a piece of bone for the toggle and it's really good in areas like this where it's wet out if you have wood against wood it tends to really bind together so if you're in a really wet area use bone and you can even have bone on bone and it's going to be a better trigger mechanism a lot more sensitive than wood against wood so here we go I'm gonna set this up hopefully the squirrels aren't watching i roasted and put acorn into my bait stick so I split it in half and jammed a bunch of roasted acorn in there now that the squirrels really are going for the acorn out here I need to differentiate what I'm putting in this versus what they're getting so by roasting it it actually releases some of the oils gives it more of a smell and draws them to it so I lift this rock make sure it's nice and balanced I found a good balancing point hopefully it's a good flat rock you don't have to go too heavy this one is just about as heavy as I would ever go with my rock if you do way too heavy of a rock one you smush the animal but two it makes the trap less sensitive you know the lighter weight the more sensitive you can set the trap without having going off during the night or having the sticks bind together because there's so much weight on it so this stick here has got some ground acorn in a split in it so that squirrel really has to work to get out it I've definitely had numerous animals come and chew to bait off my trap so I make sure to do a really good job getting the bait in there and now the tip of the stick is going to hit the tip of the toggle I'm going to slowly release the weight make sure everything looks balanced and then I wait around for about five minutes and make sure that this thing is solid that is really up and doesn't spring because a lot of times they just tend to spring a couple minutes after you set them all right so I've got my stinging nettle in here with the red clover onions and cattail I'm really stoked on that meal I definitely want to cook the cattail and the stinging nettle absolutely singing Natalie get rid of the stingers and so to cook the veggies what I've been doing is just putting them in this pot filling it with water and then I put nice red hot rocks in the fire wait about an hour until they get red one and just fish them out with a couple sticks this is always a pain but do your best so these are red hot right now and I can put them right into my bark bowl and they're going to boil water all right so I got a great little vegetarian meal here this is all the stinging nettle looks like spinach when it's cooked up all the stingers are totally gone so I can just eat that there's a bunch of the ramps which I can only take one little bite at a time because our seriously young uni and garlicky that makes a nice flavor to the water um red clover a little flower hedgy tomorrow is the first time I've ever cooked them up and okay and you know nice little vegetarian meal going on here definitely gonna do fine energy wise out here on plants I could probably go you know forever on this amount of plants in the springtime in eastern North America there's so many plans all right this is my first morning after having the roof up everything went great when the rain came down really isn't much for drips or anything like that so she's holding up really good for the time I put in it was probably one of the most worthwhile things I've done while mounting yourself frogs are amazing last night and I just sat up and worked on some cordage so now I'm just getting my day going eating some cattail roots and I'll probably get out my traps in about an hour so I would just kind of let the night animals go to bed and the day animals wake up and hopefully in that interim they spring my traps the fishings been working out good but it'd be great to have a little bit more protein all right so fishing has been good and using those little hooks that I made there all day long in order to get fish and because there's so many in here and they're kind of trapped because a little beaver dam and so what I've done is made just a little maze where the fish are funneled in from deep water and it's a deep water trench coming right through here and it exit right here where my baits going to be where all the guts are going to be that smell will attract them into this pool here and hopefully some of them are going to just get trapped in here and swim around and not find our way out as I made a little bit of a narrow passage on the way out so I've got a bunch of rocks is really doing the trick bunch of sticks here to kind of let the water flow this way and through here so they think they haven't escaped they can come kind of sense up to escape is through this way and they'll stay in this general pool without backtracking their way out what I'm going to do now is just tie up all these sticks again with some bass wood bark and I could just peel this off washi sticks together so they make a nice tight fence and that fence will allow them to think they have an exit here when they really don't the greatest thing about this type of trap is when I do catch more fish than I can eat if I leave them around my camp they're going to get eaten by other things that are going to rot what I can do is just hold everything in here once the fish get in here I can block it off and this will be a little holding area and this is your primitive refrigeration nothing is going to rot in here they're going to stay alive until I need them and then I can just keep them in here indefinitely until I want them all right after the fish trap I set up my trap line of numerous deadfall traps for squirrels and chipmunks there's a bunch of those out there hopefully one of them Springs rains starting to come down again so I need to do this one quick and I'm a camera out too long but what I've done here is put a strip down this piece of bark on the standing tree I can't get this tree down so I'm just going to strip it from the tree and what I've done is just peel back the bark I work my fingers in there after hammering my knife in there a nice slit let's hop this bark off this becomes an amazing basket so I've got this bark here makes a really good basket and it's going to be great for holding back all the supplies that I get so they just can't carry all this stuff anymore all right so finally stopped raining I'm gonna work on this basket so that when I get out in the woods and I'm collecting a bunch of stuff I can just throw it in there it's getting really hard to carry stinging nettles back in my hands so having a basket in survival is really handy I've got some spare time to do that so I'm going to try to crank out a really quick bark basket I'm going to find the center line and from that line and the closest point there I'm going to draw just a football shape so to ensure that it's going to bend right on these marks that I made I take a rock or a knife and I carve away a whole bunch of the outer bark just take your time slice down this thing shouldn't be that difficult and when I score right here then when I go to bend it up later and the inner bark is still remaining but the outer bark is gone it's going to want to bend right on the line that I've drawn so what I'm going to do now is on this kind of put some pressure here and I'm going to pull the sides up it's going to bend the weak spots the spots where I've removed some of the outer bark and hopefully the inner fiber doesn't break and it holds up and it's going to make a really nice wide basket then I just sew it up with some bark real quick and it's good to go here's my supercool wilderness basket because of the football shape on the bottom it allows it to be wider than just a piece of bark folded over flat and I've got my 1 inch seam right here running at the side so it overlaps a little so I can actually drill holes up the side and sew it together with some hickory bark or whatever I've got lying around all right so I could use my knife but I actually prefer to make a little drill out of some of the local rock I don't have any great shirts or Flint's out here obsidian or anything like that so my next best thing is quartz and so I'm just going to make a little drill that I can make some holes into this basket so I can sew it up I've got one huge piece of quartz here and one smaller one and I'm going to knock some flakes off of either one and see if I can just lash it in order to make some sort of drill out of it to make the holes and scoured some holes going up and down the edges in my basket so I can sew it up cool and I get just little flakes like this off of there now this quartz is extremely sharp and its really you know hard stuff so it's going to drill through the basket pretty well I just need to get a good enough flake off of maybe pressure flake it a little bit with some bone but just anything that's going to be a point I can lash to a stick or just use and drill my way in and make a bunch of holes in the basket all right so I've got a lot of holes all drilled in didn't actually take that long definitely less time than I thought it was going to take and I quartz worked out really well got them all matched up on the inside for the two layers and now I've got a long piece of hickory bark that I'm just going to sew it together with and I've just fashioned an awl or a needle out of a piece of wood and the Hickory barks tied to that that way I can just insert in the holes I can hopefully sew this thing up quick you amazing I'm strong as hickory bark is that's it got a killer basket two little handles here that I can make a shoulder strap on and can go collect ton of stuff in this now now have to load my arms up with all my stinging nettles and edible plants and pieces of wood and bone and everything else that I'm carrying so pretty stoked on that alright so I'm going to show you probably one of the top five plants that you should know as a survivalist this is cattail it's found all over North America and you've seen it before it's with these big sausage like heads and have the ton of fibers at the top of them when they die in the fall and this plant is edible different parts of it are Hannibal all year round right now really good thing is the roots of this plant a little you get down there and pull them out they're loaded with starches there's a good amount of it it definitely doesn't taste great but this is your absolute survival food if you find a cattail swamp you can eat this stuff all day long and that's all you would ever need so well it's great to have the fish and hopefully some squirrels or something for my traps this is the absolute go-to I could I could survive solely on this because it's loaded with starches where a lot of those green leafy plants are so what I'm going to do is grab hold these big leaves dig down underneath until I find the root and yank that out and that's going to be a great edible plant so Marcia areas our wins are found the marshy or the better as far as digging them out you don't want to find an oil that's difficult to get to be gentle with it really loosen the soil when you do find the root work this out of the ground there you go this whole root here so it's a rhizome it's amazing because it's just loaded with starches and so cattail is going to be a great plant I can even peel back all these leaves and on the inner part of all these leaves is a little thing that's kind of like maybe a celery or something like that so I can break that off get to the heart of it looks like a heart of palm and you got to go real far in once you get in a bit where it breaks off easily it's not too stringy you can eat this so that's really good try it out I do like to cook these though because they are underwater you never know you know how much water has been touching them if they're loaded with bacteria or not so you know fair warning I'm probably going to cook these up if nothing else dry out the roots on a rock and once they're fully dry they're also going to be free of bacteria so I've got a huge swamp here I'm going to spend the solid day just running around grabbing as many cattail roots as I can that's a really good one super good root the ends of these are actually decently good compared to the rest a little more flavor all right so I'm out checking my trapline right now and this is the third trap in a row that I've checked and the trap is sprung the bait is gone and there's nothing under there so I'm gonna reset these and hopefully just make sure that baits on a little bit better this time and that should catch it it's a little bit frustrating that the things getting my bait and getting away you know a lot of times trap lines don't work but not normally when they're actually springing the trap and getting the bait a lot of times they just don't hit up the trap so it seems like most everything to me is functioning well so I'm not really sure exactly what's going on here but um I'm gonna set this up if the traps don't work then I'm just going to go back to to catching fish that was definitely a great staple dammit dammit the same thing kept happening to my entire trapline unfortunately I couldn't view my trail cameras until later to find out the real culprit all right the first problem I was having was the red light on my emotion sensor cameras in numerous videos the light spooks the squirrels and they went running just before they were about to spring the trap and the real culprit was this guy this raccoon would reach his hand and steal the bait and set the trap by the time the chipmunks and squirrels would come through it was already sprung next time I'm setting raccoon traps fortunately the fish trap did score all right so I got two in here right now it's just pretty sweet I was really hoping for more but I'm just happy at work they're swimming around in there it's pretty murky what I need to do now is just splash them up on shore so I'm gonna I didn't think this far ahead so I'm gonna try to get in there scare them out I can only see him every so often at the right angle um there's this honey right this is gonna be a problem anyway I've sealed out the exit so I can do this all day if I have to alright I'm back in my trap and I got to which isn't great but it's not too bad the trick was getting them out of this larger pool I chased him around for a while that wasn't working and so what I've done is I've pinned them off in this smaller area kind of chased him in here and piled up rocks so I hit him on the head a little bit and so now I'm gonna get in there come on alright so I've got two really hot rocks down below I might even try to sneak a third one in there sneak that one in there alright so now we got semi deep hole with a bunch of really hot rocks in it so what I can do now is chuck on a bunch of leaves and make a nice little bed of leaves and they're wet leaves and then dump some water these leaves don't ever have a chance to light on fire even though they're wet now I'm going to put my fish right on top of those leaves okay what we're doing is just creating a steamer now if I wanted I could throw the garlic mustard on top of this or something and maybe some of the ramps and that would flavor the fish with some onion right now I'm just using maple leaves so now I want to cover them again with as many leaves as I can to protect them from dirt and then I'm going to do is just use a slab of bark and cover the whole thing over with bark to really make sure that the dirt doesn't get in because I'm about to dump a ton of dirt on top of this so what I'm going to do seems a little crazy but you're going to take all the dirt that you dug out of the hole bury it over that's going to trap all that heat in your steam pit it's going to lock it in create a perfect little steamer I remove the dirt carefully and the fish in about 20 minutes to a half an hour are going to be perfectly cooked alright so I've had this the fish hopefully cooking in here for about 20 minutes so far and as I peel this back I can already feel the heat in the soil so definitely was working I'm just going to be gentle as I pull this dirt off because you know I've had it before where the dirt falls in a little too far don't just keep those fish as clean as possible so if this really works once I pull this bark off hopefully there should be some steam but I just want to peel back all the dirt before I even do that just and none falls in oh ho ho oh it's hot in there I was a little worried for a second that I might not do it but that definitely is overdoing it and reach under the leaves lift this guy out it's very well cooked but came out pretty clean especially now I'm gonna remove the skin on these guys and use it for other stuff so I'm just a little bass all right looking pretty good not much meat on these guys but it's much appreciated to have some meat out here right now time went down pretty quickly after this meal I spend the last evening just enjoying my surroundings hanging out on the beaver lodge and watching the baby beaver survive until its mom chased me away after a week like this reentering society is always difficult well everything didn't go perfect this week in my opinion there's nothing close to adding freedom to your life then the empowerment you get from spending a week in a survival situation if interested come out in a class learn how to master the art of survival register wild survival skills calm where I've courses in shelter water fire trapping bow making basketry pottery edible medicinal plants high tannin flint knapping and survival excursions like this one in numerous environments throughout the world thanks for watching

Channel: Tom McElroy-Wild Survival

Views: 2,467,645

Rating: 4.900569 out of 5

Keywords: wilderness survival, survival, primitive technology, primitive skills, how to survive, how to live in the wilderness, how to survive in the woods, off the land, rewilding, full survival, alone in wilderness, tom mcelroy, preppers, naked and afraid, dual survival, alone, survivorman, trapping, shelter, spear thrower, spearthrower, bed shed

Id: EwSrpxMJ3LU

Length: 25min 50sec (1550 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2016