Oh no, I have lost my way. Whatever shall I do? All right, guys.
Guys, I'm in the middle of nowhere here in Alaska and I'm going to show you how not to freeze to death if you're stranded in the woods in the winter time. First things first, we got to start moving some snow. The snow is never all the same.
There's layers of powder and layers of crusty ice. You can cut up the crusty ice layers with a knife. You're going to move a whole lot more snow if you can take it out in blocks rather than handfuls.
All right, we got down to the around and cleared out a section about the size of a queen mattress. Looks pretty good. It's got to be hard, well draining soil.
You've got frozen mud, standing water, ice, any of that stuff. You got to change spots. You're not going to last if you try to sleep in the mud or sleep on the ice.
A little bit more slope than I'd like, but I'll take it. I think it's time for a little snack break. My wife made me a block of butter coconut mochi.
It's a Japanese Hawaiian dish made with rice flour, butter, and loads of sugar. It's got like a bazillion calories and stays fresh forever. It's a great trail food.
Just save this for later. This right here is a dead paper birch. You can see this little papery bark.
That is an excellent fire starter. And that's how we're going to get our tinder for our flint and steel. I got to make really sure not to stick this in the snow, though.
Got to keep all these snowflakes off our tinder. Going to cut up this birch bark and try to get this really fine stuff for tinder. Got a nice little pile of dry bark.
Oh, there we go. Woo! That is going to go up quick.
The heat from this is intense. It's hard to stand next to this thing. We've got to thaw the ground out.
If we sleep on warm, dry ground, it'll make all the difference in the world. So, I've got to build a massive fire and I got to keep it going for a long time. All right, check it out.
We got a bunch of water right here. Can't sleep in that. Well, the fire has done a great job thawing the ground out and pushing the walls of the shelter back, but we're getting water pooling up here and here.
Now, hopefully once the ground gets a little more thawed, that water will just go straight down. It won't be a problem. But if we can't get rid of that standing water, I'm going to have to make a raised bed, and that's going to be a lot of work.
Well, I got a lot more wood cutting to do, but I'm going to get a start on dinner. I'm going to be making some baked beans. Got a bag of great northern beans here.
Dump them in there. Going to let those beans simmer and soak for a couple hours while we work on our shelter. [Music] All right, I'm going to move the fire and see if the ground's drying up at all.
If anything, it's muddier. You see all the snow and ice it's melting is just draining straight down into this corner. And to a lesser extent, we got it going on over in this corner, too.
I'm hoping if I can dig little trenches on either side, then the water will go out this way and I can make the middle nice and dry so I have a place to sleep. We'll see what happens. But this is the problem in the winter time.
You really don't know what type of ground you're dealing with until you get it all shoveled out and thought out. The ideal place to do this is like a gravel bar or a sand dune or a beach on a lake. But you don't always get what you want, so you just got to adapt.
[Music] I want to make a platform to sleep on. And to do that, I need to get rid of all these little branches. I don't have an axe, and doing that with my knife will take forever.
So, I'm going to use the fire. Aha, there we go. Dr ground.
My little gutter trick seems to be working. We got firm dry ground right here. Yeah.
All right, we're getting there. All right. Got a little sleeping platform to keep me out of the mud.
And it's a little bit softer than the ground. The wood bends a little bit. Got this just in case it starts to snow really bad tonight.
I can throw my blanket over the top and use it like a tarp. Well, I think my beans are about done and I've worked up quite an appetite. So, I think it's time to make some dinner.
Now, I know this is a survival video, but I have a very important rule I live by. I don't mind being cold. I don't mind sleeping on the ground.
And I don't mind being hungry, but I only do one of those things at a time. So, tonight I'm eating like a king. Time to cut up some firewood.
My blanket got a little wet from the snowstorm, so I'm just drying it out. Also kind of makes a nice little windbreak on my back. All right, let's test the beans.
Nice and soft. Add a little pepper. Add a little salt.
Add some ground mustard. Some brown sugar. And tomato paste.
Beans are almost done. So, I'm going to go ahead and make some bread. I have this dough I made up last night.
Take and wrap this bit of cheese. A little bit of bread dough with that gouda inside. Cooking bread on the coals is really easy.
Either you make a disc and you lay it straight on the coals and flip it, or you make a ball and you bury it in the coals. A little bit of campfire ash that gets stuck to the bread. Tastes just like flour.
Coming along nicely. All right, we're going to put that right on the coals. Just like the bread, the coals are going to stick to it while it's rare.
And once it's cooked, the coals will fall off. Slow forward over the stove. Yes, that is perfect.
A little cheese filled biscuit cooked in the ash right there. Oh, check out the melted gouda in there. That is so good.
Oh, those are good beans. It's got so much pork jowls in there and the brown sugar. These are good beans.
Oh, that is delicious steak. This bread dough is so easy to bring on winter camp outs. You just tear off a piece and bake yourself some fresh bread whenever you're feeling like it.
If you refrigerate it, it'll last 3 4 days without any problems. It just slowly becomes sour dough if you let it sit for too long. Oh, that bread was good.
I'm going to make some more of that. That is good. Prime rib.
That's good. Oh, look at that. That's gorgeous.
But it looks like it's going to be windy and cold tonight. Dinner was really good, but I am so thirsty. So, I need to clean my pot out and start melting some snow.
Get some water. Well, the wind is really kicking up and it is getting cold and the sun's setting and I don't have enough firewood to get me through the night. So, I need to go start chopping some more wood.
Well, there we go. That's a healthy pile of firewood. And I got a bunch of tinder over here as well.
This pine burns about 1 inch radius per hour. It's about a two and a half, three inch radius. So, this piece of wood should last 3 hours in the fire.
You need about four of these to have a fire. So, I'm going to burn up about four of these logs every 3 hours. So, I have about 12 hours of firewood right there.
Got my water. My socks are all sweaty. I'm going to go ahead and try to dry my feet and boots off before I go to sleep.
Look at all the steam coming off my feet. Yeah, my socks are really wet. Oh, that makes such a difference.
My feet are all dry. I got all my firewood. I think it's time to go to bed.
I'm going to be waking up throughout the night to stoke the fire. So, better get to bed sooner rather than later. But before I go to bed, I'm going to show you one little trick.
It's going to make my bed very warm. Well, there you go. Got my bed set up where my fire used to be.
I got all those hot coals and hot rocks underneath there. It's going to be so toasty warm. Oh, wow.
Yeah, that is awesome. Now, if you're going to do this, you want to make sure you use a real wool blanket. If they did this with a synthetic blanket or a polyester blanket, it would melt and cause me all sorts of problems.
Oh, that is nice and warm. I can feel the heat from the ground coming up through the bed. It is really nice.
I'll tell you what, it is so toasty in here. I'm low enough that the snowm is blocking the wind. I've got the heat from the ground coming up underneath me and this fire is just baking me.
But I'm going to have to get up and stoke the fire several times throughout the night. So, I better get going to bed. It's going to be a long night.
I'll see you in the morning. Oh, good morning. Well, there you go.
I didn't freeze to death. I even got some sleep. Was it comfortable?
Not particularly. Did I have to wake up a lot and stoke the fire? Yeah, but it's pretty warm in here.
Oh, time to get up. Had a little bit of snow last night. You know, I woke up with these snowflakes hitting my face, which is really annoying when you're trying to sleep.
Was able to pull my face under the blanket and stay dry. But my blanket's a little bit wet, so I think I better dry it out. All right, I think next step is to soak the fire up and get some coals going so we can make breakfast.
All right, I think it's time to cook some breakfast. I got some leftover dough, some leftover pork jow bacon, and a jar of honey and butter. I think we're going to make something good.
Four fingers, the universal signal. All right, I got honey and melted butter. All right, got a little bit of pork jaw bacon here.
Honey butter. [Music] Fresh bread, slabs of bacon smothered in honey butter. This is nice.
That is so good. I'll tell you what, guys. I've built a lot of leantos and bushcraft shelters, but hands down, the best way to stay warm is to build a big fire, clear out the snow, dry out the ground, then move the fire over and sleep on the warm ground.
If you get really cold, you can switch places with the fire throughout the night. But unfortunately, you need to be able to make fire and you need access to a lot of firewood for this to work. And if you don't have that, there's another trick I've heard about.
When I was a boy, my grandfather told me a story about a Native American woman in his community who got lost in the mountains. Crazy blizzard came in, dumped multiple feet of snow, deadly cold. And when this Native American woman realized that she was stuck in this blizzard, she found a tree, went under the branches, and went to sleep.
And so what my grandpa told me is that you don't freeze to death without waking up at least once. And so when she'd wake up cold, instead of ignoring it and going back to sleep, she'd pop up and run around the tree until her blood was going and she was hot. And then she would go back under the tree, go back to sleep.
Apparently after 2 days, the blizzard broke and the community went up into the mountains looking for her and there they found her. And she'd just been running around this tree for 2 days. She was tired, miserable, and cold, but she was alive.
But the more survival bushcraft camping trips I do, the more I realize that this survival stuff is really a lot of work. You're going to have to push yourself for hours every day just to make it. If you're not willing to work hard and if you don't have that self-discipline, you're just not going to get it done.
But on that note, I think it's time to start packing up. Just blows me away how good of a job that fire does in clearing away the snow. It actually reminds me of the Donner party.
They had a fire pit like this and it snowed 15 feet on them and the wall of their fire pit was so high that they had to carve stairs to be able to get in and out of the fire pit. Well guys, hopefully you enjoyed this. If you want to see more videos like this, check out the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel.
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