did a survival weekend with a friend of mine in the backwoods last weekend.



Built a nice shelter big enough for 4 on the first day, didn't have time to get walls up before dark. Brushed up on all the basic stuff and practiced some new things he found scouring the internet.

Had elk bugle, coyotes yipping, and either deer or elk almost ran through camp at about 3am.

Looks like a lot of fun!! Where abouts did you guys go?

Olympic National Forest. Yeah it was pretty fun. We were both ready to be back home after a couple days though.

I'd like to hear more about the shelter you built.

Sounds great, give us some more details.

Did you pick the shelter location based more on the trees and structure occurring naturally?  Or did it get built around the area where you laid down a rifle...  


I'd like s'more description/pictures of the structure you built and maybe just the basics on the other stuff you tried out.  I went and camped out for one night with a buddy and his son last week but we didn't have time to do anything real cool like built a shelter; it's on our short list of fun stuff to do during the few dry days left of summer.


cheers, Benji

During our hike in we decided first we'd find a water source once we felt we were "deep enough" in the forest. Once we found the water source we searched the area for semi level ground, dense large diameter trees and semi dry ground. Finding that we stripped 4 trees of low level branches to just above head height, saving all the materials for the canopy. Then we searched for small diameter dead fall that we could use as the support beams for the canopy. You can see the one on the top of the picture. We just used simple twine to secure them to the trees (how you tie them is important). Then we just used large needle/leave free branches to connect the support beams in preparation for the green branches to be placed on top as an insulator and waterproofing. The hardest part was finding enough green branches for the canopy. Luckily we found a tree that had the upper half fall and all the branches still had all their needles, so we used the branches from the fallen half and then cut down the still standing half. It takes a lot of evergreen branches to create a completely covered canopy of this size. We ran out of that time that day because at this point its almost 6pm and we still needed to collect firewood and we wanted to insulate the ground (but we ran out of time for that and putting up walls). I'll type up the walls and ground insulation from the next day later.