Welcome bushcraft friends to the new year. Over the Christmas and New Year's holidays I decided to spend a few days building a large debris shelter as an experiment. It was based on a design I saw in a video done by Ray Mears for a Country Tracks episode (number 10) on the BBC Television network. Here is a link if you would like to view it first hand for reference. Ray Mears Debris Shelter
It took about four days over a couple weekends, working about 6 hours each day. It proved to be a good experience and taught me just how much energy and time and materials it would take to build such a shelter, especially by myself. Even Ray mentions that this is the kind of shelter that would be semi-permanent and would usually be done by 4 or 5 individuals in 4 to 5 hours. I can believe that. I was very fortunate to have access to a small piece of private land that would be in a wooded area on the edge of prairie and farm land. I will be sure to spend lots of time there and I am even planning on doing an overnight in the hooch, once I have done a few more improvements. I want to add a canvas door flap and enclose the opening on top a little more. Also I will be practicing very careful firecraft in this shelter as it is very apparent that I am in the midst of a large tinder bundle.
So I hope you enjoy the video about my debris shelter construction and experiment.
Thanks for watching, and I hope this has given you some ideas of how to construct a primitive debris shelter and given you a sense of how our aboriginal minnesotans might have done it on the woodlands and prairies of Minnesota and beyond. Happy Exploring.
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