Winter Wilderness Survival (circa 1750) Part 1 | Primitive Shelter | Bush Craft | Foraging | Pioneer

so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] we've almost got winter sort of comes and it goes but we did get some nice snow last night anyway this is an introduction for for what i'm about to to undertake so every year i go off um on historic tracks in all seasons but i particularly like the winter and typically i i um i track in other words i set up a new camp each night i thought i'd try this time going out and setting up sort of a semi-permanent one like a trapper might do or a hunter that knows he's going to be away for a while and i always do it in 18th century garb and accoutrements because it's a passion of mine to figure out how they do things and the only way i can figure it out is to actually do the things they did and and every trip i go out i learn a little bit more just by trial and error essentially but i'm going to put a little twist on it this time is when i typically go i would take the foods that they had at the time period so cornmeal maybe some pemmican maybe some dried meat dried split peas rice some tea this time i'm going to go with no provisions so i'm not taking any food or beverages and i'm because at some point they would run out of things and then they would had to rely on the land to do them so i'm going to forage i'm going to hunt i don't know exactly how long i'll stay out five six seven days we'll see how it goes anyway uh yeah i'm going to wait wait a couple of days to get to get started but i'm getting my kit together now and i'm pretty excited to uh to give this uh this challenge a bit of a try one last thing i'm going to be doing this challenge totally alone so you might anticipate a poor quality of cinematography then we got kathy's magic behind the lens there so i'll be setting uh the tripod up and that's something new for me to try to capture um all the stuff i'm doing and uh anyway hopefully it's viewable if i was actually living in the 1750s um my modes of transportation are quite limited so i have my feet or as the brits would call it shanks pony um proper season i'd have a canoe in the winter of toboggan so with the last two items i can carry more stuff than i could on foot so in the in the colonies the british colonies pack mules or horses might have been quite common in the canada is not quite as much but if i'm three season camping spring summer or fall i can carry a single single wool blanket but winter camping in canada i need a minimum of three or i simply wouldn't survive so i i have to take more gear in my experiment of setting up this semi-permanent camp than i normally would so i'm not going to be able to carry it on my back in one trip so i'm going to make numerous trips back into the area that i've selected to to build this shelter and then i'll get on with my experiment so it begins i left hearth and home this morning a nice warm fire i've got a full belly which might have been my last meal for a week anyway um my plan today is to not even think about food and it's easy to do in your stomach's full but what i'm going to focus on is finding a spot a suitable spot it's going to be somewhere in this area i've got good firewood water is close i'm protected i don't have to go right to the bottom of the valley or to get really cold i don't need to be up in the wind so somewhere down in there i'm going to find a spot and i'm going to spend the entire day building shelter and i'm going to try to build a fireplace inside my shelter so should be a bit of a challenge but uh yeah while i've got energy i'm going to get at it okay i've uh pretty happy with this spot i've got a nice big natural stone here i can use for a hearth and uh see i got four rather equally spaced trees to build my shelter off of so uh a lot of firewood about me so i think this is gonna work so yeah get unkitted here and get some stones [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] uh nope [Applause] uh [Music] so so so what i'm doing here is i'm making a raised platform for sleeping gets me up off the frozen ground and uh yeah thank goodness i'm doing this today and didn't start yesterday we had about four inches of really good snow and then uh man yesterday it just rained buckets so if i just started yesterday it would have been some kind of cold experience anyway a little trick to it if you stuff the stems at the foot end of the bed which is down there and you keep the feathery part to the top and each layer you put in you do the same makes a pretty comfortable sleeping platform uh okay that was a wee bit of a marathon but i got shelter up got a roof over my head got a pretty crudely built fireplace here and i'm not sure it's going to draw so good i was hoping to get some clay and and get it in the cracks and what have you and sort of make it airtight so it'll draw better but uh anyway i'm losing my light i've still got a little bit more firewood to cut for the night and uh yeah i'm dead hungry uh anyway that's gonna have to wait till tomorrow but i'm gonna see if i can get some fire going and hopefully this is gonna drop my my backup plan if it doesn't is i'm gonna kick the whole thing out i'm gonna just make a reflector flyer here for the night and maybe rebuild it tomorrow you you so far so good it hasn't smoked me out of here yet okay darn thing draws this is my rumford i'm thinking so okay maybe i smoke too soon actually i think it's gonna drop pretty good uh so so so i don't know how cold it got down to last night but cold enough anyway my uh sort of improvised fireplace inside my shelter work pretty good um and shelter still needs some work it's pretty drafty so i'm going to work on that later today but i'm going to go out and poke around see if i can forage for some food do a little hunting maybe as well so here here we are unless uh i'm about one day in actually a full full day now and i'm doing my first renovation so i had this uh my sleeping platform um oriented 90 degrees the way it is now and the other thing i i was in a bit of a hurry given my light restraint that was losing my daylight so i only had five um poles down and the boughs that i put in the cedar boughs and the spruce bells that were going to be my insulation and my comfort they sort of worked their way down between i ended up sleeping on some five naughty old poles and it was rather uncomfortable and i didn't have any insulation anyway i'm fixing that got her across the front of the fire and it should be all good today it took me about an hour to cut those posts and reframe the bed and move stuff around but i think it was worth the effort i think i'll have a good sleep tonight so i was out and about on a scout there this morning with my musket uh for a good hour and a half and i didn't see a single track other than coyotes and those coyotes they had a party and it wasn't very far from this uh my hut here anyway so an hour and a half hunting that was a bust but um foraging not so much i made out pretty good here so i found these are mother nature's wild raisins if you would so they're wild grapes and once the frost hits them they're quite tart in the summer you can hardly eat them but when they get frosted brings a bit of sweetness out in them and they're full of vitamin c and anyway this is the first food in a day and a half so i think it's going to be pretty good there is an annoying little pit in it but aside from that they're pretty tasty darn good i'm gonna have a purple tongue here in a few minutes so i'm um in the process of making some cedar tea giving him any luck with any food i might as well have something to drink and it is a good beverage ah it's pretty good cedar tea is one of my favorite i figure given that i'm not getting much food out here mind you i haven't given up yet it's a low pressure so animals just don't move tomorrow if it clears maybe i'll have some luck with some small game uh but a wee bit of history about tea so first first off what i'm going to do because i'm only for another five days is i'm going to experiment with tea so i'm going to um do a taste test of of all the um wild edible teas that are in the forest around me here and uh yeah sort of uh somewhat subjective because it's a panel of one reviewing it but i'm going to review them i'm going to rank them one to ten and i think i counted eight trees that i can use but cedar is certainly one of my favorites and my go-to one but a wee bit of history behind cedar tea so uh 1535 jacques carche arrives in the acadians and he spends a winter and him and most of his crew almost died to a man because of scurvy and if it weren't for the natives that came along and brewed up some some cedar tea they would have all perished and as soon as they ingested the first cup their symptoms started to go away it works that fast it's just loaded with vitamin c as are most of the trees that i'm going to be making the teas from but if we go forward a few years to 1608 and we've got champlain's third expedition to the americas and there there's there's famous explorers and then there's remarkable explorers and i i would put champlain in that category he crossed the atlantic ocean 29 times uh and he literally his heart was in finding a new france new france and and when he sailed up in 1608 and landed at what we now know as quebec city and he was also a military man so you could see the the strategic value of it if you would uh had 90-foot cliffs rising right out of the water and the word quebec is an algonquin word uh that means the narrow narrowing of the river and that is the narrowest spot of the st lars it's only about a kilometer across there so he knew from a military background that with cannons he could defend anyone trying to come from across the river as well as the heights anyway when he unfurled that fleur-de-lis flag he didn't just found quebec he founded a nation but if we go back to his first two trips to the americas uh he actually was a map maker of renown in fact and and he he uh did all of the acadia nova scotia all the way down to um cape cod but he preferred the saint lawrence and that's where he convinced the backers the investors the king of france to invest their time but i think i think about kind of kind of imagine history and what the map would look like if if champlain had decided that um that jamestown looked good or plymouth rock looked good and he was at both those places before um before they became uh colonized by the british anyway a wee bit of tea uh history about uh cedar tea there long one i'm afraid sorry i'm gonna drink my tea now ah that's good so we bit more filming because the whole purpose of that long litany that i just went through was to talk about the importance of tea so champlain has come in 1608 carchae's here in 1635 1535 but he doesn't bother to mention to to champlain that they could get scurvy and and it was unknown at the time um but he never passed that information on and that first winter in in quebec was uh brutal um and i believe i believe champlain lost 14 of his man he got scurvy himself and it wasn't until june of the following year when resupply ships showed up and they didn't have any friendly natives at that time to uh to help them out so um yeah it's surprising how some of these things weren't passed on by these ex by these explorers but while he was there um champlain was able to to develop a really strong alliance with the wendat which um the the french name for when that is huron uh with the matinees and with the algonquins and he opened up the trade route and basically he was the the start he as a result of him and his making that little outpost in in quebec he was the start of a fur trade that would go on for 350 years now i'll drink my tea still good the fireplace that i built inside my hut has been pretty effective the only thing is it takes more energy because i've got to um i've got to cut the wood smaller in order for it to fit so the advantage of a reflector fire when i'm winter trekking normally is i make it about six feet long and i can cut these pieces eight ten feet long and all i do is put my sleeping rope so i can just reach out without getting out of my blankets and sliding another long piece into the fire so having said all that i wouldn't give up this fireplace it's been darn efficient for both heat and cook and just a thought if you're solo trekking um we get about eight hours eight and a half hours of sunlight it's a long cold night so um if you're alone you got to do all these things yourself when you're trekking with partners let's say four guys are out uh they arrive at a campsite two put up the shelter to go off and get firewood one's uh starting to prepare food the other is getting a fire going so these are all things that one has to do themselves so you you've got to allow more time so if i were moving every night i would probably have to allow at least three hours four would be on the safe side that gives me about four to five hours to track anyway another bundle of firewood and this should be the last for today it should be enough to get me through one more night okay i had a wee bit more success this morning i got out early got myself squirrel and uh yeah my first protein in um in three days it's gonna be good a lot but good so when i was out foraging today i found what's called ghost apples they don't look all that pretty uh so they're apples that will freeze um onto the tree and they won't fall and basically well i've never tried them so but i've been told they're sort of like uh i'm cooking them up in some water here and i've been told that they're sort of like um like a mold cider sort of sort of hides a hard cider and yeah i plan to eat the whole kit and caboodle here yeah you can see some remnants of the grapes that i had for for for for lunch today so sort of meager pickings but anyway looking forward to trying this let the coals burn down over here and and add a little bit of water to that not a very complicated recipe um not sure don't have a resume book i'm not sure when these bad boys are going to be done but i think they're getting awful close and we'll give it a try okay let's see how we made out here it might be a little tropical smells good [Music] oh that is tasty that's a sort of a sweet cidery taste to it definitely going back to this tree i picked a few but i'm definitely going to get some more because this is good enough for company if i had any my appreciation to this i don't think is anything to do with with the fact that i'm a tad hungry i think it's probably one of the best edible things i've ever harvested from the wild so this wasn't a domesticated apple tree it's just a wild something growing wild in the bush not near an old orchard or anything outstanding [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign

Channel: The Woodland Escape

Views: 27,393

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Id: t0MRSrHAo-M

Length: 35min 18sec (2118 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021