Video: Winter Survival Basics – Fire

Hey, this is Tyler with Survivopedia.

Ok. Me and Chris here in the back country. We do a little bit of a filming and we have a very hasty quick setup for a winter survival situation.

Now, we’re just going to kind of explain what I’ve got going on here. We took length, length, 16 foot long logs, laid them vertically with one log on the top, one on the bottom. And the reason I’m doing that is I’m creating some space underneath the bed. Then I took boughs and bent them together and lay them on top that kind of gives you springiness because we want oxy…, we want air underneath this, right?


Insulation comes from having air between you and the stuff that’s going to make you cold. So, after that, I created a dogleg fire with a platform and that’s up and burning now. So, that’s the basic essential of what we would do for winter survival, right? Yeah.

So, what will we do next?

Well, part of survival after this, we need to get to what, hydration?

Correct! So, first though, we need more wood.

Yeah.

It’s got to be like three times this amount of wood, maybe two or three large trees that we can burn all night long. And if we look at the rule of trees, will start with that.

Three minutes with no oxygen…

So, I have a variation of the rule of trees that I use personally.

There’s three seconds without security, right? That reminds you that if you’re in an austere environment, you need a gun to defend yourself.

Three minutes without oxygen. And the reason we do that one is kind of confusing us, is if you’re in an airplane that just landed in the water or something is flipped over, you gotta get out first, right? If you don’t have on your body, you don’t bring it with you? Yep, right. So that’s kind of a proper prior planning thing.

The next thing is three hours in inclement weather without shelter. Here’s shelter. Here’s the beginnings of shelter. More fire would pile up that shelter.

The next levels: three days without water. Yep. Now, that might be four hours in the desert without water. That might be four days in the jungle, with that water.

Yeah, right. It’s kind of a relative to the humidity, right?

Yeah. The next thing is three weeks without food. The reality of the second be up to 40 days and then three months without companionship. So, we’ve got fire. We’ve got the beginnings of shelter. The next thing is gonna be water. Okay? All right. All right.

So, the basis of winter survival are: get the fire going, get yourself up off the snow at the bed, copious amounts of fuel for the fire, three trees, at least minimum, and go from there.

Hopefully, this is valuable to you and thank you for watching.

Written by

Tyler White is one of those rare creators of online survival content who is amply qualified. Growing up on a ranch, Tyler learned about homesteading and preparedness as a way of life, taught by grandparents who had lived through the Great Depression. Although he had already worked at a guide in Alaska, served with U.S. Army, Tyler knew there was more to primitive survival than he could learn from military schools or other outdoorsmen. His passion for primitive survival drove him on a quest to track down the most knowledgeable instructors in the field, traveling from Utah to the Amazon to Canada and finally back to Utah. Like all competent survivalists, Tyler has experience in a broad range of subjects. Highlights from his background includes criminal justice, law enforcement, archery, small arms, amateur radio, farming, gardening, raising cattle, and poultry. He has attended classified schools, worked in law enforcement, studied too many martial arts to list, and achieved the rank of 2nd Dan in Shōrin-ryū karate.

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  • Thx for these helpful posts. We all need to learn things things.

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