Sleeping Rough



Sleeping in the Rough

Even if you aren't fascinated by primitive skills and don't plan to sleep in a shelter built of brush, leaves and bugs -- unless your life is at stake – learning some of the basics and using them does enhance the camp experience. No matter how good your tent and your other gear, knowing and using the old tricks makes modern gear work better. Survival skills make the difference between camping tolerably and camping in comfort, even when survival isn't on the line.

Shelter is one of the immediate concerns when you're lost without gear, since building one will take some effort and you'll never feel stronger than you do that first day. You can go without food and water for awhile, but hypothermia could get you the first night. In most places and in most seasons it's a genuine threat. A simple brush hut isn't too difficult to put together but it will take time and a lot of work to do right. The time to build one is about six hours before the sun goes down. When it gets dark, it's a little too late to be building huts. I've been in that bad situation several times, realizing too late that I should have taken circumstances seriously.

For practice, where cutting down live saplings and otherwise disturbing the landscape is discouraged, you can build a debris hut from dead wood and probably find enough dry leaves for padding and insulation. You may even find a downed tree lying in the right position and arrange a snug place for yourself underneath it. Using random quirks of the landscape could make you hard to find, so reserve something colorful to mark the spot when you're done. Dead cedar trees pushed over by last year's snow and ice are too good to be true – they have the perfect shape for a brush hut framework. Just snap off limbs on the underside of the tree until you've created a V-shaped space. Break away more limbs on the top side, removing everything that doesn't connect in that natural skeletal shape. Lean the butt of the tree against another tree's trunk, a boulder, or a tripod framework you've lashed together and you have the bones of the shelter completed.

Lean dead limbs and brush against the center rib of this framework and weave slender sticks and branches horizontally through them to secure it all in place. Pile leaves and grasses against the sides of the hut, holding that down with even more dead limbs. What you'll have in the end, if you've selected materials well, is a dense brush pile with layers of debris sloping to either side.

Underneath you'll find a sheltered spot where you can snuggle in feet first. In warm weather that should be enough, but when it's cold you'll need to literally fill that space with dry dead leaves and grass. Pack it down by crawling into it, and keep at it until the floor layer is several inches thick when you lie down on it. Weaving a doorway is the last step. You can build this with two frame layers lashed together around a core of debris. Pulling it shut at night will keep you warm, and probably dry, even in the middle of winter.

This will take hours, and unless you've practiced you won't get it right on the first try. If you've waited until late in the day to admit you're in trouble, you won't have anything this good by nightfall. Use what you find, even if all you can do is kick a pile of leaves against the side of a fallen log. You're much better off out of the wind under a pile of leaves than hugging your knees all night out in the open. There's always shelter somewhere, even if it's nothing more than a shallow hole scraped in the ground. Many people today just don't have the good sense to use what's around them. That's where adding these skills to ordinary camping comes in handy – it's a constant refresher course.

Before setting up camp, look for more than a flat spot. Pick a spot that's slightly raised, a hummock instead of a hollow. Tents include a short waterproof sidewall to deflect storm runoff but the floor probably will leak a bit. Natural drainage works much better than a waterproof tent floor with some holes punched in it. If you're one of the hard-core ultra-light hikers who prefers a tarp, this sort of planning isn't optional – tarp campers must take advantage of the landscape.

Check around for useful debris like leaves or dead grass. Leaves and other cushioning material collect in the low places, so one of the first sensible things to do is pile some of those where you intend to sleep. A thick layer of soft debris makes a better mattress than a sleeping pad on the hard ground. If you make it deep enough you'll mask the Princess and the Pea effect which always points out the little knob you thought wouldn't make any difference.

Instead of building a brush hut, consider building a brush windbreak. Building a brush wall on the windy side of the tent or tarp, a few inches taller than the edge of the rainfly, turns a summer tent into a shelter fit for the Blackberry Winter (that unpleasant cold spell that always accompanies the blackberry bloom). With my little Coleman solo tent the rainfly extends nearly to the ground, so a short layer of leaves and brush piled over the gap on one side turns a drafty shelter into a snug den.

Campcraft also helps in hot weather. In years when I've done a lot of gravel bar camping, in July and August when the temperature of the gravel rises well over a hundred degrees, the first part of the night is like roasting in an oven. Scraping aside the top three or four inches of hot gravel before you bed down exposes a cool and comfortable layer underneath. If you have a big tent it's a lot of work, but a small tent doesn't cover too much ground and if you sleep in the open all you really need is a hollow about the size of your bedroll. Gravel bars tolerate a lot of camping abuse. Any hole you dig quickly disappears, and if you're staying for a few days there's fun to be had building interesting accessories like food storage pits/coolers and pit ovens.

In most other wilderness areas modifying the countryside is against the rules, but working with dead leaves and dead branches is still allowed and there's often plenty to play with even in heavily used areas. Conscientious primitives put things back where they found them before they leave. Survivalists put things back carefully enough that nobody will know they were there. Leaving no trace is good practice for all sorts of reasons.

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