Sphagnum moss has a fairly acidic pH and high absorbency. It collects a large amount of water from dew and rain; water may literally be wrung from it. This water should be sterile with the rare exception of a halophile that has only shown up in very rare cases…so it is a calculated risk with low probability of problems. I have now consumed the water squeezed from sphagnum moss on several occasions with no ill effects paying credence to my extensive research.
Sphagnum moss, due to its pH can also be used in a bark water filter to add extra filtering ability.
Another use would be for feminine hygiene pads as the pH will help to keep it sterile and absorbent properties. This is the same moss seen used by Cody Lundin to bandage a wound on a popular television series.
Sphagnum moss tends to grow in bogs or other places with high acidity. One of the things you will notice with sphagnum moss is that if you wring it, quite a bit of water will often come out. The way you can tell sphagnum moss from other moss is due to the way it clusters, it has quite a different branching of stems than other mosses.
I believe also, due to some anecdotal evidence and late night discussions with my biologist friends as well as confirmation by Dr. Robertus (biologist), one should be able to consume the water from sphagnum moss “raw” as well as from the pitcher plant with relatively little concern. There is still the chance of illness but the odds are on your side during an emergency situation.
Winter Cress is a simple to identify plant that is great for beginners. Though it is easy to confuse with different types of mustard plants, I have not found, through research, any poisonous look-alike. The best and true way to identify this plant is by its leafs. You may notice the leafs are differently shaped and more lobed than wild mustard. The leafs will be a dark green and waxy. It grows in moist waste areas and flowers in April-August. Winter Cress may be found year round, and if you’re lucky, can be dug out of the snow even in winter.
The young leaves may form dense rosettes during warm spells in late winter and may be picked into the spring while the nights are still frosty. Though the plant is edible all year, the frosty nights of the transition of winter to spring is when they are most delicious. They make a great addition to salads or as a cooked green similar to salad.
As the nights warm up and it is no longer frosting, the plant tends to become bitter. This is quickly remedied by boiling the plants in two or three changes of boiling water. The tight yellow flower buds (at the top of the below picture) appear after the leafs become too bitter for most palates. They may be collected and then boiled for approximately five minutes in two changes of water and served as a broccoli treat.
A simple oil lamp can be made from numerous materials found in the bush or around the home.
Sustaining light away from the fire or when the power goes out may be difficult especially if candles are not on hand. This is an easy solution of using spare oil or rendered fat to keep the lights on when the rest of the world goes dark.
Many different containers could be used to hold the oil. In this case, we will be using a scavenged clam shell for holding the oil. A spoon, a tin can, a soda can, ceramic bowl, or anything nonflammable and not at risk of melting could be used. The wick could be made from a piece of cloth, a rag, a twisted paper towel, or just about anything that will soak up the oil. The oil can come from “waste” cook oil that has dripped off into the cook pan as is the case here. One could also use olive oil or vegetable oil as a fuel or from rendered fat in the bush.
Here we use a clam shell as the container for the oil
Next, some cedar bark is acquired to process into the wick.
Processing cedar
The cedar wick is then made by using the reverse wrap cordage making technique
Add some rendered fat (oil leftover from cooking) and the cedar wick soaks it up
The wick is lit with a match and the shell oil lamp will burn for about 30 minutes on one filling. It can be increased by adding more oil or rendered fat.
The same method could be done with more modern tools or scavenged goods such as a soda can and a piece of reverse wrapped paper towel.
Usnea is the generic and scientific name for several species of lichen in the family Parmeliaceae that are found throughout most of the world. It is commonly referred to as Old Man’s Beard and Beard Lichen, favoring to grow on trees rather than rocks as some of its lichen counterparts. Often a green color due to its content of Usnic Acid, and having stemmed the name of the color ‘usnic green’, this lichen has been used medicinally for hundreds of years and it is this content of Usnic Acid that gives it these medicinal properties.
Usnic Acid (C18H16O7) is a potent antibiotic and antifungal chemical found within most Usnea species. It was traditionally used as a bandage due to these properties. In an emergency situation, Beard lichen could be used solely to bandage and keep clean a wound. Old Man’s Beard could perhaps be used in combination with balsam fir sap (which is a topical pain killer and adhesive) to secure the lichen to the wound, keep it clean, safe from infection, and reduce pain. Usnic Acid has been found to be extremely effective against microbes like Staphylococcus, streptococcus, pathogenic fungi, as well as exhibiting antiviral, antiprotozoal, anti-mitotic, anti-inflammatory, and its own analgesic properties. These characteristics allow Old Man’s Beard to be far superior in backwoods bandaging than that of Sphagnum moss which is antimicrobial only due to its acidic pH.
Another great property of this easily identified lichen is that it is high in vitamin C, making it of good use in the prevention and treatment of scurvy. This lichen is edible and often was used as a soup thickener by early settlers to North America.
Usnea is a lichen, which is a fascinating relationship between a photosynthetic algae and a fungus with entirely different morphology, physiology, and biochemistry than that of an isolated algae or fungus and occur in some of the most extreme environments on earth. While they may be capable of living in extreme conditions, they are very sensitive to air pollution and their presence may be a good indicator of air quality in the area. This quality should be taken into consideration when attempting to locate Old Man’s Beard as it is unlikely to be found near industrial cities.
Making a debris shelter is a very personalized thing. One has to make them several times to get the specifications fit to one’s spacial/dimensional needs.
Site selection is also very important. I chose an area that was on a bit higher ground than the surrounding area to prevent water running into my shelter and flooding.
First I find a “Y” stick that is about as tall as my waist and a ridge pole to run from the Y stick that is perhaps 2-3 feet longer than I am to make sure I can fit in. If one wants to be super efficient, the narrowed spot that one can’t fit in should be filled in with leaves.
This is my just over waist high Y stick with the ridge pole.
Begin filling in the skeleton. I like to make sure the sticks are filled in quite thick. I have seen people do it with less sticks, but in my opinion, this will prevent leaves from falling in as well as as further protect one from the elements, especially the wind. The more one adds and more time one spends on it the better it will be.
Beginning to fill in skeleton.
Further filled in side-view
Rear view
Front view of the skeleton
From here one begins to pile leaves on top of the structure. The more the better. The general rule is that one should have enough leaves that one can stick one’s arm up to the elbow into the leaf pile. Place some “leaf stabilizing sticks” on top of the leaves. This doesn’t have to be as intricate as the structural skeleton. It will serve the purpose of preventing one’s leaves from blowing away.
A finished debris shelter will be about half arm to full arms’ deep with leaves. This will help insulate the inhabitant and further help to waterproof the shelter. There is a pile of leaves on the bottom left corner of the shelter that will be pulled in with the dweller to help plug the shelter and help prevent the escape of heat.
It is not only the outside environment that can strip you of your heat. The ground itself will suck the heat out of you if you do not insulate yourself from it. Cover the floor of the shelter with leaves, ferns, pin boughs, etc to really protect yourself from losing heat to the earth itself.
To sleep in a debris shelter, one crawls into it backwards and (typically) face down. Gather a bunch of leaves at the doorway so that when one crawls in, the leaves can be pulled in as a “plug” and further keep heat in.
Minimizing space in the debris shelter is the name of the game. I want a little bit of dead air space and enough space so that I can move just a little bit. If I have more space than that, my body will be heating all that extra air, which is less efficient. If it is a cold nigh, one’s clothing could even be filled with leaves to help further insulate body heat.
The choice of location also too into account all of those trees that surrounded the area. They were not big enough to fall on me and hurt me (widow makers weren’t there), and they also added a nice canopy to further protect me from the rain and break up the wind.
Clay has a variety of uses in primitive living. Today we will talk about making clay pottery and how to go about firing clay in a primitive type setting.
Clay may be found in a variety of places. From the dry ground itself, river beds, and lake floors to searching puddles accumulated in the woods where clay may likely be.
Dry method of processing clay.
Harvest clay from ground. Crush clay (rock on rock) break it into small pieces, about the size of a BB and then you can begin to grind it into powder.
Slowly and very carefully begin to rehydrate it. After hydrating the clay, let it sit for a few hours before molding.
Wet Method (these were wet method clay pots)
If clay is found in creek bed or lake (as often is the case) it may be sloppy and full of debris.
Take a 1-5 gallon bucket (depending on how much clay you have but it doesn’t much matter if you have more than you need)
Place clay in the bucket/container with water and mix the clay and debris up. Mash it and mix it until it gets to a “milk shake” consistency. You want no solid chunks of clay floating around.
After no more clay chunks are floating around, you should let it settle for about 24 hours. The layers will separate with the sand and rocks going to the bottom, the layer of clay on top of that, water, and then organic material will float to the top.
After about a day of it settling, skim off the organic material on the top. SLOWLY SLOWLY SLOWLY pour off a little bit of the water. Let it settle. Pour off a little more water, let it settle, continue until you’re down to the clay layer.
Scoop out the clay (Carefully!) missing the bottom (which is sand and dirt). Let it dry on rock or large piece of wood for a day. That, or you can hang it in a sack, t-shirt, pillow case, burlap sack, etc, and let it hang dry in the sun.
Next, after your day of drying the clay, is to test its plasticity or in other words, “how well it works”. Work the clay for a minute or two and turn it into a coil/ring/or pretzel. It should not crack. If you can make a coil you have OK clay. If you can make a pretzel without it breaking/cracking, you probably have some good working clay. Make a small pinch pot to see how well it responds and works.
Next, is a big part of guess and check. Tempering one’s clay. Angular pieces of sand are good for adding to clay, very fine gravel, ground bone, ash, they all work for tempering.
Take a 3 small balls from your clay source (pinch pot sized), flatten them to a pancake, slap in one side to your sand (5% temper), flip it over and slap into tempering material again (10% temper) then roll and mix the clay.
Take second test pinch pot ball of clay. Make clay into pancake, make it 10% temper and then mix it up, flatten to pancake, add another 5%-10% temper by slapping it into the tempering material on both sides once again.
Make a 30% temper pot as well. It will help to have a no temper pot as well.
With these pinch pots, put them in the shade for 24 hours where sun and wind can’t get to them. What you’re doing is looking for cracks and such. It will help to fire these later on to see how well they hold up.
You want them to be “bone dry” before they are fired. A week, 2 weeks, to a month before firing them. It is very possible, that if you wake up early in the morning, you could temper and fire pots all in the same day. The thing with waiting after you have your pinch pots is that it will have less and less water in them giving them a better chance when firing.
Wedging is next!
After the clay has the correct temper, smack and roll clay to get air pockets out of the clay; taking special care to NOT fold the clay. The goal is to get all the air pockets out. You can and will probably need to add a little water to allow pliability.
Molding:
after the clay is wedged, you may begin to mold the clay. Having wet hands is a good idea to prevent cracking. Adding water when needed to keep the clay moist.
Using the pad of your thumb, work a hole into the pot. If you see a crack form, smooth it over. the back of ones’ fingernail seems to work well.
Be careful not to over hydrate your clay. If it is too wet, when left to dry, it will lack integrity and slouch, allowing for cracks to form.
After your thumb gets to the bottom of the pot, begin opening it up. Get the pot as thing as safely possible, making sure to not leave the bottom too thick. The thinner the pot, the less likely it is to crack when you fire it.
Drying can be done in a day to a year or more. It’s all how long you want to let it dry and how careful you are when firing it. These pots were dried for 3 weeks.
Firing:
Make Tipi fire with pots surrounding it. This is the beginning of getting the pots warmed up and slowly getting rid of any water that could be left in them. You want all water to be out of them by the time it heats up to 212 degrees F. This is why they will slowly be moved closer and closer to the fire.
After about 15-20 minutes of moving the pots closer every so often, move them onto the coals
Next, is to cover the pots with sticks, in the tipi fire and continue heating them. This FIRST layer is to cover the pots with ash to help protect them from the environment.
After that initial layer of ash, it’s time to beef up the fire and maintain the heat for about 1.5-2 hours, sustaining a warmer fire. Build this layer again on top of your pottery.
It’s better to fire at night because the goal of this is to get the pots heated up until they are glowing orange. You can let the pots cool over night, letting them cool slowly so they do not crack.
After the pots have had sufficient time to cool (about a day) it is time to dig them out from the ashes.
Here is an example of finished pinch pot.
The reason the pinch pot showed above is round is due to trying to keep with traditional shapes of pinch pots in the Great Lakes region. The pots were held upright between stones and heated near fires to bring water to a boil or otherwise cook the pinch pots’ contents.
We all know how absolutely important it is to take good care of your load bearing life dependant ropes are. Whether you use the for climbing rock faces & trees, effecting a rescue, or descending steep faces or even hills; it’s imparitive to take good care of them.
Having vast experience spanning decades in climbing & rescue I thought I’d share some tips for taking care of your ropes, and specific technique I’ve been using for ages and absolutely love when it comes to protecting your anchors from abrasion.
General things to look out for
Stepping on ropes – you never want to do this as you could press dirt, debris into the rope weakening it as well as cause an abrasion against a sharp rock beneath the rope.
Dirt is the enemy of a long life for ropes as it winds up between the fibers and sheathing and causes wear. When you have you ropes laying on the ground try using a tarp, shirt, pack or something to isolate it from the ground is the situation allows for it
Sun Damage – leaving a rope out in the sun can and will break down the fibers. Ropes are not made to be left out in the sun and can be damaged by UV rays, it will fade, dry and effect your rope longevity
General Rope Care
Make sure you know what kinds of ropes you have Static or Dynamic, and their manufacture ratings as for one to retire them based on number of falls, type of loads placed on them etc.
Store your ropes in a cool dry place. Do not leave anything sitting on top of them
Before and after every use of your rope you need to inspect it! Whether this takes 1 min or 10 mins your life depends on it and all ropes need to be inspected for abrasions, cuts, or any sort of damage. Go through every inch of the rope squeezing it between your fingers also trying to feel for any possible interior fiber damage
It’s a good idea to wash your ropes once in awhile to clean out any dirt particles. Do not use any harsh degreasers or chemicals. Use luke warm water with a mild detergent like Dawn. You can do this in a bathtub, buckets, troughs etc. Dry them out in the open air out of sunlight and uncoiled, do not use any sort of heat.
So now that we got the rope care basics out of the way I wanted to share a little trick I’ve been using for many years. If you climb, rappel, descend hills etc alot you’ll probably have some pre made up anchors. You can never have enough good rope anchors, as you’ll find yourself in many different situations and different distances from your edge. Personally I always use a minimum of 2 anchors and often 3 if one is a little shady i.e rock or bush.
My anchors get ALOT of use, and this is a trick I picked up decades ago, and I love it!
The best way I have found to protect and add life to my anchor ropes is to take a piece of tubular webbing and slide it over my anchor rope. It doesn’t have to cover the entire thing but just where it will be in contact with the tree, rocks, bushes etc. I’ve yet to have any wear and tear on any of my anchors using this method.
Amadou is a spongy, flammable substance prepared from Fomes fomentarius, also known as Horse’s Hoof or Tinder Fungus. Ötzi, the 5,000 year old Iceman, was found to have had amadou as part of his belongings. It was a valuable resource to ancient peoples like Ötzi as it could be used to catch the sparks from flint and iron pyrites or used as a coal extender. Amadou would often be processed, pounded flat, and boiled in a solution of Salt Peter to add to its flammability but will work just fine if found and extracted dry from the Tinder Fungus as a coal extender.
Other uses for amadou include felting as amadou was once used to make hats. In more modern day use, amadou is used to make artificial flies for fly fishing. Amadou may also be felted into pouches or similar products. It’s best to use it for something that will not be treated roughly as it is not the toughest substance. That is enough digression for now; what I want to talk about is Amadou, nature’s char cloth!
This is Fomes fomentarius, the tinder fungus.
I most commonly find it growing on dead and dying birch trees. They tend to grow in clusters dispersed over the birch and are easily spotted from afar.
Here is what a birch tree riddled with tinder fungus looks like at a distance
As you can see by this photograph, tinder fungus is a polypore. This means that, unlike some other mushrooms, this mushroom lacks gills but has tubes or pores all over the bottom of which it disperses its spores.
Often times it may take a good whack from a log or a hatchet to sever the tinder fungus from its bond to the tree. Once the fungus is removed the backside and some of the brown spongy amadou is visible. The brown corky textured substance in the middle is part of the natural char cloth known as amadou.
The extraction process is fairly simple. All you need is a sharp knife and to pay attention to the layers of the fungus that you are carving. The amadou is found just below the outer “shell” of the mushroom and just above the inner core of pores.
A shallow cut reveals the brown, spongy, natural char cloth material.
The light brown substance is what you are trying to preserve. Cut off the darker brown as that is still part of the outer “shell” of the fungus.
Here is a cross-section of the pores. This porous part of the mushroom is not what you are after when extracting amadou. It should be cut from your extraction if any is found hanging on to it.
When you have delicately removed the outer shell you should be left with something that looks like this:
Now, delicately remove the first few centimeters of the spongy substance with your knife. It is a very shallow cut to remove the amadou. When you have completed the cut, it should result in a thin felt or leather-like sheet.
From here it will be necessary to increase the surface area of the amadou. To do so, one beats it with a rock until it is of proper flatness (which takes a little experimenting to get it just right). This also helps rough up the surface giving it even more surface area to catch a spark from a flint and steel or even a ferro rod.
After pounding out the amadou it should take on an even more felt-like nature.
It is now ready to receive a coal or be spark with a flint and steel. The only better thing to do is boil it in a solution of Salt Peter but that is an added and more complex step I will not be discussing in this article.
A flint striker and a sharp edge of quartzite which I dug out of the mountain should work nicely to spark the amadou
Here it is with a nice smolder going. I had timed this single piece of amadou smoldering and it had burned for just over 20 minutes. That is long enough to have a coal and build a new fire or to find and add it to a new piece of coal extender.
The amadou burned very hot. As it got smaller it became unbearable to hold it. To remedy this, one simple may place it on a gathered rock and continue on their way making sure to shield it from the wind lest it blow away.
All that would be needed is to place the smoldering amadou into a dry tinder bundle and blow it to flame for one’s fire to be preserved.
If you have ever been out in the bush on an extended trip then you know how useful being able to tie things down or lash a piece of gear to your pack truly is. From shelter, to fishing line, snares, to tying one’s shoes, rope is a very important part of everyday wilderness living. Carrying cordage into the bush is one way to make sure you have it but that luxury may be exhausted, be lost, or degrade over time.
What I mean to do today is discuss and teach a method of making cordage from natural materials found all around us. Many materials will work for use in the reverse wrap method that I will be showing. Human hair, cattail, cedar, dogbane, and willow are some very common plants that have exceptional strength and easy use as cordage. The material I will be using for this tutorial is cedar from a fallen tree. While cedar is not the strongest material, it is readily available yearlong and may be doubled up to produce even stronger cord.
The first step is to find suitable material for producing cordage. Any fibrous material can be used. The First People would remove large sections of bark from a standing cedar tree to produce all sorts of materials from which cordage was only one tool of many.
This is a Northern White Cedar
When in dire need, a sheet of bark could be removed from this tree without killing it. For our purposes I located a down and dry cedar.
I begin to separate the bark from the hardwood by using my knife to pry it up and sliding the knife down the log
After enough cedar bark is collected, it must be processed. This is done simply by breaking it up in your hands and rubbing it back and forwards between your palms.
After thoroughly processing, your cedar should come out very fibrous and similar in texture to that of rough cotton.
Once the fibers are processed, and any hard bits of wood or outer bark are removed, it is time to begin making the cordage. Separate the amount of fiber desired with more fibers producing a thicker rope and less fiber producing a thinner rope.
Hold the fibers between your forefingers. Rotate the fibers away from you with your right hand and towards you with your left hand until the cord becomes taut and kinks over.
Hold the kinked portion between your left thumb and forefinger.
Now for the reverse wrap portion of this process. The top strand needs to be twisted away from your body with your right hand while your left hand stays stationary.
Pull the top strand towards you over the bottom strand.
After that step, pinch the formerly top strand with your left thumb to hold it in place.
The process continues with the twisting away of the new top strand, pulling it towards you and down, and then pinching it once again. This continues until the piece of material becomes a bit too short.
When the material becomes too short, it is time to splice in more material. It doesn’t have to be made of the same material that the cordage was started with but in this case it is. It may be beneficial, at times, to use the same material so that a consistent strength can be expected throughout the cord.
To splice more material into the cord, pick up the amount desired to be spliced. Keeping the cord even throughout is the tricky part. When splicing, it is advised to splice a piece with one end longer than the other. This will help build strength within the cord.
Place the new strand in the crook of the old piece of cordage, making sure one end is longer than the other.
From here begins the same old process. While holding the new strand to the crook of the cord, twist the top strand away from you.
Pull it down and over the bottom strand.
Then, pinch it off with your left thumb and forefinger.
Continue the original steps once the piece is spliced in until the cordage reaches the desired length.
Just about any fibrous material can be made into cordage with the proper technique and treatment. Here is a list of other tried and true plants for making decent cord:
Cedar (inner bark)
Juniper
Basswood
Tulip Poplar (inner bark)
Willow (inner bark)
Mulberry
Elm
Dogbane (Indian Hemp. STRONG rope)
Stinging Nettle
Velvet Leaf
Whole leaves with shoots and fronds:
cattail leaves (strip down so it is thinner)
Blue Flag Iris
Lily
Saw Palmetto
Yucca
Grape Vines
Virginia Creeper (is a weaker material)
Sphagnum moss, due to its pH can also be used in a bark water filter to add extra filtering ability.
Another use would be for feminine hygiene pads as the pH will help to keep it sterile and absorbent properties. This is the same moss seen used by Cody Lundin to bandage a wound on a popular television series.
Sphagnum moss tends to grow in bogs or other places with high acidity. One of the things you will notice with sphagnum moss is that if you wring it, quite a bit of water will often come out. The way you can tell sphagnum moss from other moss is due to the way it clusters, it has quite a different branching of stems than other mosses.
I believe also, due to some anecdotal evidence and late night discussions with my biologist friends as well as confirmation by Dr. Robertus (biologist), one should be able to consume the water from sphagnum moss “raw” as well as from the pitcher plant with relatively little concern. There is still the chance of illness but the odds are on your side during an emergency situation. 
