Based on the survival rule of three, a person can only live 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food.
This shows that the need for a survival shelter is high up the rung of ladder for survival where it can be considered to be more important than food and water. Hence, the need to learn how to build a shelter in the wild.
Most people tend to give too much importance towards making a fire where they spend too much time and energy on getting a flame rather than building a proper shelter. Usually, they would end up with no proper shelter and warmth at night, ending up not getting a good night’s rest.
Why is this so? Most people think that they can enjoy the warmth of a fire throughout the night after starting it. However, they tend to miss out the fact that to sustain a fire, you will need to put large amounts of fuel into the fire and you need to be constantly alert on the fire’s condition. This would definitely wear you down physically and mentally, which is not practical for your long-term survival.
In this post, I would like to approach it in three parts: (I) The Benefits of building a survival shelter; (II) Primitive-style survival shelter and (III) Pre-made shelters and modern material shelters.
(I) THE BENEFITS OF BUILDING A SURVIVAL SHELTER
Before learning any skills, you would want to know why that skill is important and where does it fit in the bigger scheme of things. This is the main reason why I discuss the benefits of really learning this skill before I move on to talking about what the skills are per se. Here are some benefits you may derive from learning this skill, then you can consider whether you want to read the following parts of the post!
When you are bugging-out, spending the night out in the wilderness is considered as a last resort. If you are capable of making it to your bug-out location without staying anywhere overnight, that would be ideal.
However, there may be situations where building shelters in the woods is inevitable.
Reason 1: Protect yourself from elements
The main purpose of building a survival shelter is so that it can protect you from external elements such as rain, snow and sunlight. There are two elements to this, namely shielding and insulating.
For Shielding, it means that you are keeping out the rain, snow, sunlight or even strong wind. You prevent things from falling onto you or touching your body.
As for Insulating, you want to regulate your core body temperature, ensuring that it is maintained at a reasonable range. Basically, you are trying to keep precious body heat with you and the cold out or the other way around. The goal of building a survival shelter would be building one which is able to protect you from the coldest temperature and sustain through the heaviest downpours.
To protect yourself effectively, you may need to employ both skills involving how to make a survival shelter and how to make a survival fire. You may want to find all possible ways to maintain your body temperature.
Reason 2: Get comfortable!
You will definitely be more at ease if you have a shelter to put all your possessions. The shelter can protect your loved ones too. The thought that all your things and all of your loved ones are safe in the shelter would put you at ease as you carry out your survival task.
It would be wise to avoid having elements on your body too. A shelter can prevent external elements such as snow or water which can drench your clothing.
Further, a shelter in the wilderness would be able to help you regain some sense of control especially in such unprecedented scenarios.
Reason 3: Getting a psychological edge
When you have bugged out for a long period of time and even resorting to a need for shelter, the damage towards your morale must have been quite severe. By building a survival shelter, you will have a place you can reside and feel safe around. This place would act as a base for you to gather your loved ones and give everyone the required morale boost.
Further, only when you have sufficient rest (good rest of course!) you would have the energy to face whatever challenges that come your way. ‘Rest’ is an important factor to keep your frame of mind positive which is essential for completing all your survival tasks.
Reason 4: Increasing or decreasing your visibility
This would depend upon your intention of setting up your shelter, whether you want to increase the possibility of attracting the attention of potential rescuers or keeping yourself hidden in the wild.
For attracting attention, your shelter can help you enlarge your ‘footprint’ in an area where they can easily detect the presence of live in a particular area.
As for keeping yourself hidden, there are certain forms of survival shelter that can lower your visibility when required. There are several situations where you want to reduce your visibility including keeping your valuable gears or when you want to rest.
(II) PRIMITIVE-STYLE SURVIVAL SHELTER
Learning how to build a shelter is comparatively easier as compared to most survival skills. If you are able to learn all the steps that are laid out and understand the methods, you would be able to survive most environments.
Concerning primitive shelter making, I would first introduce the steps to making a shelter under Part A, where some of these basic principles would apply when you are using pre-made shelters or modern material shelters as well. As for Part B, I want to talk about the different primitive-style survival shelters that you can build.
(A) Basic principles for building a shelter
For Cold weather (preventing heat loss)
Except in hot weather, the aim of the shelters discussed below would be mainly to prevent too much heat loss. Before I move on to building a shelter, I would like to discuss about the general idea of how heat loss happens. It can happen in three ways, namely (1) conduction; (2) convection and (3) radiation.
First, heat is usually lost through conduction, when your body comes into contact with materials that have a colder temperature as compared to you.
Second, heat loss can also be through convection which occurs when moisture evaporates from your skin. To evaporate, the moisture would take the heat from your body to do so. That is why when you are drenched in sweat or generally wet, you will shiver when wind is blowing against you.
Third, heat can be lost through radiation. Since heat always flow from hot to cold areas, the fact that your surrounding air is cooler than your body will cause you to lose heat through radiation. This is despite the presence of windy or rainy conditions.
After reflecting on the three ways of heat loss, it can clearly be seen that your shelter has to be dry, surrounded by sufficiently warm air and insulated from the cold ground.
For Hot weather (preventing heat gain)
When you want to prevent heat build-up, the principles discussed above are applied in the reverse. Basically, you must avoid conducting heat by touching objects which are hotter than you. Next, you can utilize convection to help your body cool down, but you have to be careful to not lose too much moisture. All these can be done more effectively if you have the proper clothing.
Lastly, concerning radiation, you may want to avoid heat building up by staying out in the sun for too long which cause you to lose moisture as well.
(1) Choose your shelter location wisely
When you are choosing a location to build your shelter, there are several factors to consider including (a) whether the ground is sufficiently dry; (b) whether there are natural hazards around your location; (c) whether you are near natural resources; (d) whether the location is discreet enough.
Moving on to (a). No matter your environment is too cold or too hot, it would be ideal to get a dry place to build your shelter. Wet places are not preferred because it increases your chances of developing hypothermia although your surrounding temperature is as high as 50°F (10°C). To find dry place, try to build your shelters located top-hill because water tend to travel downwards. Another indication of a dry place would be how often the place is exposed to sunlight.
Concerning (b) natural hazards, you need to keep an eye out for poisonous plants, stinging insects and steep cliffs. If these are present in your surroundings, avoid building a shelter in that area.
As for (c), it would be better if you could build your shelter near areas where you can easily access water, building materials and fuel for your survival fire. Bear in mind that if you build a shelter near a water resource, you would want to ensure that you are far enough so that you don’t get wet.
Finally, about (d), you may want to build your shelter in a discreet manner if you fear that other people may steal your resources. To minimize contact with such people, you need to choose locations which are far away from trails, roads, hospitals and even convenience stores. During a disaster, schools and churches will be used to house many people. It would be wise to build your shelter far away from these places.
(2) Avoid sleeping on the cold ground
Especially in a cold environment, you would want to reduce as much as contact as possible with the cold ground. Through conduction, the cold ground will suck all of your precious body heat which increases your chances of getting hypothermia.
The goal is to build as much insulation as possible between you and the ground. Things which you can use include leaves, branches, grass, newspaper, cardboard or sleeping matts. Of course, you can include ‘modern items’ including getting the right sleeping bags or sleeping mats.
There are several things to look out for as well. If you use loose insulation to create your makeshift bed (by using leaves or newspaper), you need to contain these things with a bed post. This is important because if you do not contain loose insulation materials, you may be sleeping on cold ground several hours after you fall asleep. To create one, you can take two long logs and places them parallel to one another so that you can fill the middle with the materials.
Next, you can consider raised bed as well where you can get your body off the ground and allow your body to get proper air circulation. But, you need a couple of logs to build this where you need to get sufficient logs to build the bed frame.
(B) How to build a primitive shelter
In this part, I will answer the query on how to make a survival shelter in the woods.
For these kind of shelters, it would be mainly those that can be built with materials found in the wilderness. Also, the principles that are introduced here can further improve modern shelters that you put up, making it more durable.
To build a shelter in the wild, you will need invest a lot of time and energy. Unlike modern shelters, primitive shelters are usually not portable, but it would be much more durable.
In this section, I will introduce different kinds of primitive survival shelters. Here’s a list of wilderness survival shelter designs.
Rock Shelter
To build a rock shelter you have to first find a suitable cave or overhang. The place you find should be able to protect you from the sun or any of the external elements. A smaller cave would be good to keep you warm but if you want to build your rock shelter in a larger cave, you may need to build a teepee fire to keep yourself warm.
Next, start covering the cave with rocks which you can find. Remember to stack bigger and flatter rocks below so that you can easily stack them up. You should cover the cave until you are sufficiently concealed.
While you are at it, you need to build a bedding to lie on as well. If you are planning to sleep on branches and leaves, remember to place two logs to hold your loose bedding together.
Debris hut
The debris hut is one which is made of piles of dry leaves, resembling a big heap of compost materials. This shelter is really good because it insulates heat, where the air spaces in between the heaps of leaves can be great at trapping heat.
Since it is more complex to build a debris hut, I would lay them out in steps.
1. First, scope out your location where you want to build the shelter. You will need to clear the space where you want to build the shelter from shrubs, trees and leaves. The entrance of the shelter should be one that catches sunlight in the late morning and afternoon so that it can grab some heat.
2. Next, outline your body by lying on the ground. This is for providing you a rough estimation on how big you need the shelter to be.
3. Start creating your bedding. You can create the bedding either by digging a one foot deep pit or making a one foot high mattress. The raised mattress is ideal if you are building your shelter on cold ground. The downside is that it increases the complexity of getting into the shelter and you have less space to move around.
4. One-foot deep pit bedding – For this kind of bedding, you need to first dig a one-foot deep pit by using a shovel or anything in your surroundings such as a sharp branch or stones.
5. Next, start placing the bedding branches. You have to arrange fixed length branches into the pit so that it fits nicely. You can put one row of branches diagonally, and the next row on top horizontally.
6. Add a 1-foot-thick layer of dry debris on top of the logs you arranged. Make sure that the debris you add are dry, having no form of moisture.
7.Tme to construct the main body of the shelter. You need to select a ridgepole which should be half the length of your body and as thick as your upper arm. After that, try to find two strong branches to be the fork branches which holds the ridgepole on top.
8. Start placing branches up to the ‘Y-junction’ where all of them should be the length of half your arms.
9. When the body is balanced enough, you can start securing the bottom end of the ridgepole by hammering sticks on it so that it is stuck to the ground.
10. Once you have your frame, start creating the entrance. This is important because you do not want heat to escape from a poorly constructed doorway. You can start by using flexible branches and insert them into the ground using pegs or stones. Make them into a semi- circle shape which covers the front of your entrance.
11. The hoops that you create should be placed at least 12 inches away from the main frame. Add another hoop 12 inches away as well. The goal is to build these hoops to allow you to cover the entrance with branches. The hoops are basically there to support the branches, allowing them to be on top.
12. Start gathering and distributing debris on your shelter. The thickness of the debris depends on how cold you think the night would be and how much heat you need to be stored in the shelter. If the night falls until to about 50° to 60°F, you would need about 3 feet of debris surrounding the whole frame. This may sound easy to do, but it is difficult to carry out!
Also, you can check out this video to learn more about how to make a debris hut.
(III) PRE-MADE SHELTERS AND MODERN MATERIAL SHELTERS
Setting up a tent as a shelter is totally fine as long as you are kept safe and warm. In this part of the post, I would like to discuss the possible modern shelters that you can find in the market and how to utilize them.
These kinds of shelter is advantageous in terms of its portability, where you can travel and eventually set-up your own shelter in minutes.
Hiking tents
The quality of hiking tents you get usually depends on your budget. Of course, you need to pin down what are your goals in getting a hiking tent and get one which fits your desires.
Tents will usually come with flexible poles so that you can build a sturdy structure of it. Most of the materials are waterproof as well. (if it’s not, try getting one that is waterproof)
There are several things you need to consider before choosing a hiking tent such as the ease of setting it up, rain protection and the number of people you want to fit in the tent. You may want to avoid those tents that are too time-consuming to set up especially when you only want to get one good night’s rest before bugging out to another location. Here’s how you can set up a tent.
Hammocks
Net hammocks are relatively cheaper as compared to other modern survival shelters and are durable too. Since they are lightweight, you may want to consider getting one as well.
Hammock shelters are generally really quick to set-up but offers limited protection to elements. Basically, you get to get your body off the cold ground!
Hammocks are really great for setting up in most situations. Since you are suspended, you are kept dry as well if the ground is moist. Only able to find a place with a rocky surface to put your shelter? A hammock would be great as long as you are able to tie them around.
This means that you would need a sufficiently big tree to tie them around. Here is a video which illustrates comprehensively on how you can set up a hammock.
Bell tent
Bell tents are great because it is easier to set up as compared to hiking tents while it gives you protection from elements. Basically, you have to lay the canvas out and then peg it in the ground. Once all the pegs are secured, you can start by unzipping the entrance and assembling the pole. Basically, push the pole up until the tent can stand upright.
Bell tents usually cost more money because the cloths need to be strong enough to retain its bell-shape. These kinds of tents would give you a huge space to move around inside which is really comfortable. Because of its solid construction, you would be able to even set up a fire inside the tent if the weather is really cold.
Here’s a video on how you can set up a bell tent:
Conclusion
Throughout all of these lessons, don’t forget your bug-out attitude! Remember to always keep a positive mind and be decisive in what you do.
Having a great survival shelter does not mean that you can disregard clothing too. Only when you wear the ‘RIGHT’ clothes and have sufficient amount of them, only then you can properly maintain your body heat.
Throughout this post, I have shown how different shelters can be built so that it can be optimized for your survival. Feel free to leave your thoughts by commenting below!
