survive in hostile environments
My first DIY Bamboo Knife Video went crazy last month, and I got almost half a million views in just a few days. I don’t know what the demographic was, but it included a lot of very interactive YouTubers; there…
Caveat: This episode does not demonstrate a proper ankle wrap, which requires some basic first aid training and materials. In contrast, it demonstrates doing the best you can with limited knowledge and whatever you might find in your backpack, or…
The key to building an emergency shelter is knowing how to improvise. Whatever the situation, whatever materials you have, if you need shelter from the elements, you’ll have to make do. Be efficient; every calorie spent is a calorie you’ll…
This is Part 2 of the Basic Self Reliance series. In Part 1 we discussed how to select a survival cache location and how to hide it. In this article we’ll highlight the most important aspects of cache recovery. This is…
This is Part 1 of several episodes in a series titled Basic Self-Reliance. The purpose of this series is to help you develop some confidence that you can be self-reliant in case you ever need to be. Accordingly, the focus is…
While experimenting with the SODIS (Solar Disinfection) method of water treatment, I went off on one of my frequent tangents and tried a couple of ways to filter water before disinfecting it in the sun. For SODIS to work, the…
The trick to working bamboo with a knife — as opposed to a saw — is to control the splitting. If you try to baton a bamboo pole like you do a tree branch, you will crush it, resulting in…
It may seem strange, but you can make a knife out of bamboo. I’m not talking about the handle — the cutting edge itself is made of the woody part of a bamboo stalk. It occurred to me to make…