How to Build a Survival Shelter - Your Life May Depend on It (Video)

I often emphasize that your energy output coupled with your ability to adapt to the situation at hand will play a big part in how successful you are at living in a primitive setting. One of your first concerns in surviving outdoors is finding shelter. Short-term shelters are easy to construct an will serve you well in an immediate survival situation but may not last long-term. That said, if you are looking for more solid constructs, this is the video you want to watch.

If you find yourself in a long-term situation where you must shelter in the wild, you must find resources and materials that will serve the purpose of surviving the elements. Though time consuming, if left to our own devices, it is possible survive the elements. All that is needed is where to find the supplies for a shelter and the ingenuity of how to make it. Using naturally occurring materials, this video shows that sheltering in the wild is possible. This daub hut can be made solely from items found in nature.

I built this hut in the bush using naturally occurring materials and primitive tools. The hut is 2m wide and 2m long, the side walls are 1m high and the ridge line (highest point) is 2m high giving a roof angle of 45 degrees. A bed was built inside and it takes up a little less than half the hut. The tools used were a stone hand axe to chop wood, fire sticks to make fire, a digging stick for digging and clay pots to carry water. The materials used in the hut were wood for the frame, vine and lawyer cane for lashings and mud for daubing. Broad leaves were initially used as thatch which worked well for about four months before starting to rot. The roof was then covered with sheets of paper bark which proved to be a better roofing material (*peeling the outer layer of bark does not kill this species of tree). An external fireplace and chimney were also built to reduce smoke inside. The hut is a small yet comfortable shelter and provides room to store tools and materials out of the weather. The whole hut took 9 months from start to finish. But it only took 30 days of actual work (I abandoned it for a few months before adding bark roof, chimney and extra daub).

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