Overnight in the forest - How not to freeze

Imagine a situation of extreme survival in cold weather conditions, when your clothes are not able to protect your body, and the appropriate equipment is not available at all, or it is very limited and ineffective. An exhausted person at risk of hypothermia needs to sleep, but you know that you will never wake up if you pass out.

I will tell you how to survive in such a situation. There is a way that can provide a comfortable, warm place to sleep in severe weather even if your clothes are not adapted to low temperatures and you have little to no equipment or special survival skills. wildlife, except for the opportunity to build a special place to spend the night and light a fire. In fact, you will have to take a lot of care to ensure that this “bed” is cool enough to sleep in!

A special “bed” for survival that will allow you to stay warm in cold weather and can save your life is called a “firebed” or “bed on coals.”

Before I start explaining how to build a place to sleep, I would like to emphasize that if you are not in a real survival situation, but just practicing, try to pay special attention to the issue of conservation environment with minimal damage from your actions. Avoid damaging tree and plant roots and be careful with fire in the wild.

Show respect for nature and it will definitely take care of you!

Requirements for building a "fire bed"

Since creating a “charcoal bed” requires a lot of time and effort, it is important to first find a suitable location. You need to look for various features that will make the construction of the “bed” easier, as well as the natural materials needed to build it and create additional comfort.

Preferred areas:

1. Protected as far as possible from wind, rain and snow.
2. With soil that you can dig to a depth of about thirty centimeters without encountering large rocks, tree roots, ice or water.
3. Places rich in dry fuel to support fire. Hard deciduous trees are preferred. They burn longer and create a hotter flame. Soft rocks burn quickly and produce a lot of sparks.
4. Places with an abundance of dry bedding material (leaves, pine needles, grass, cattail, etc.) to insulate the body.

Let's look at each point in more detail.

Weather protected areas

If possible, choose a place with natural shelter. Rock ledges, overhanging thick trees, and even the roots of fallen trees can provide good shelter compared to open areas. You will need to find a piece of flat ground that is at least half a meter or a meter longer than your body and wide enough to sleep comfortably.

Suitable soil for digging

Since you will be digging a hole in the ground, choosing the right soil is essential. Give preference to areas where:
* Groundwater is not close to the surface. If you get to the water, you need to dig somewhere else.
* The soil is easily cultivated with improvised means.
* Few roots or large stones that make work very difficult.
* In snowy areas, look for a place where you won't have to dig too deep into the ground.

If you don't have a shovel for digging, don't despair! Use your own cutlery set, a knife, a sturdy stick, or even your own hands.

Typically, in cold climates the soil freezes to a considerable depth. Depending on the situation, you may find soft ground at the base of south-facing slopes where the sun's rays warm the ground sufficiently. Or you can build a fire to melt the soil layer before digging.

Fuel for the fire

A good “charcoal bed,” as the name suggests, requires a layer of hot, long-smoldering coals. For this reason, the best fuel for building such a “bed” is hardwood. If possible, locate your overnight camp near a source of dry fuel.

Softwoods can also be used, but they are not capable of creating the high-quality coals more typical of hardwoods. Dry grass and other natural materials do not leave embers, but can be used to start a fire and warm the ground.

Hardwoods: hornbeam, eucalyptus, pear, cherry, apple, elm, teak, hickory - North American hazel, beech, oak, birch, ash, maple, walnut.

Soft tree species: linden, spruce, fir, aspen, cedar, alder, hemlock, pine, chestnut, willow.

Insulation material

If you do not have enough warm clothes, and sleeping equipment is poorly adapted to cold climate conditions or is completely missing, you will need good source dry, soft material for thermal insulation and upholstery. Typically, the forest floor is a nice natural "blanket" of leaves, evergreen needles and grass.

Even in areas with deep snow cover, if you try hard, you can find insulation material. Inspect large boulders, where the ground around the stone is often not covered with snow and dry leaves accumulate there (by the way, a good place for arranging an overnight stay). Check south-facing slopes and patches of evergreen forest, which tend to be less snowy.

In winter, wet areas (swamps, rivers, lakes) can provide excellent insulation material in the form of cattails and reeds. These plants are easy to reach, since all the water freezes and the snow is blown off the smooth icy surface.

Canvas or tarpaulin, wool blanket, polyethylene or other similar material (waterproof and/or heat retaining) can be a great help.

Survival situation

Let's imagine that your truck breaks down in a remote mountainous area and you have to spend the night outside in cold weather, without special equipment. Your clothing consists of sneakers, thin cotton pants, a T-shirt, a cotton jacket and a cap. Of course, you had to use a three-layer clothing system, but no one could have imagined that the truck would ever break down - this is the main mistake in the mountains.

You also have a folding army shovel, an old wool blanket and the ability to start a fire (flint, matches, lighter, you can use a car battery or even a cell phone battery).

You can make a “fire bed” without a blanket or a shovel, but without fire you won’t be able to do anything. Therefore, it is extremely important to always have an emergency kit with you, which will contain waterproof matches or, better yet, a flint and a magnesium block.

To work

As soon as you decide on a place, start digging a trench of the following dimensions: width - about 30-50 cm, length - about 180 cm, depth - 30 cm. Do not scatter the earth at random, but carefully put it in a heap. We will need stones later, so separate them from the general soil.

Once the trench is ready, line the bottom with fist-sized stones, leaving a gap of 2-4 cm between them. Stones, in principle, are not an absolutely necessary condition, but they will help create an air gap so that the fire will be hotter and better coals will be obtained. If you do not find enough stones while digging, you can look for them somewhere nearby, just do not collect porous or layered stones, or those that were in water. They may explode when heated!

Now you can light a fire. For tinder I used dry pine needles and a pine cone. When the fire flares up and the first coals appear, scatter them throughout the entire trench so as to cover the maximum area. Our goal is to maintain an even fire to create coals and warm the soil around the entire perimeter of the trench. Add firewood as needed and spread the coals over a period of 2-3 hours. This time can be used for cooking, boiling water, and drying clothes or bedding materials.

Then sprinkle the coals with a 10-centimeter layer of soil and tamp it down well. Make sure that all coals are well covered and that steam or smoke does not break through the soil layer.

That's it, now all we have to do is wait. It should take an hour or so before you feel the pleasant warmth of the heated ground. If this happens earlier, then most likely you need to add another 3-5 cm of soil from above, otherwise your “bed” may turn out to be too hot for a comfortable overnight stay.

All that remains is to prepare the “mattress”. Look for dry, soft material and pile it up. Once the coals have sufficiently heated the surface of the trench, you can cover the soil with an even layer of insulating material. The thickness and amount of insulation depends on the specific conditions and your capabilities. It is recommended to use a layer of at least 20-30 cm in thickness.

Several logs laid parallel to the sides of the trench will reflect the heat and keep you warm. In addition, they will serve as a windbreak and will not allow you to slide onto the cold ground.

results

When I made this bed, the ambient temperature was about -4 degrees Celsius. Four hours later, the surface temperature of the soil above the coals reached 43 degrees, and the ground within a radius of 30 cm from the trench was slightly warm. By changing the thickness of the bedding material, you can regulate the temperature of the “fire bed”.

The main problem when using such an overnight stay is evaporation. The fact is that the soil and/or material used for insulation usually contains moisture. As a result, the heat from the coals turns moisture into steam and you get something like a sauna. For this reason, it is advisable to use only the driest body insulation products. If possible, lie down on a waterproof material (plastic, tarpaulin, canvas, polyethylene).

The next morning, fourteen hours after the “bed” was built, the air temperature dropped to -8 degrees Celsius, and the ground surface temperature was still around 32 degrees. This is an excellent result!

This technique of creating a comfortable, warm place to sleep will allow you to survive in cold weather without equipment or special clothing. Good luck!


Not far from the city of Bordeaux ( France) in a forested area there is an original structure resembling a wooden cylinder. This is a special shelter house where you can stay overnight, spending a weekend in nature with your whole family or with friends.




French architecture studio Bruit du Frigo implemented a project for the construction of a series of original dwellings located in a forested area near the city of Bordeaux. These cylindrical structures called Le Tronc Creux(“Hollow trunk”) are made of natural materials and really resemble a fallen tree.



When creating this dwelling, the architects were guided by the idea of ​​a temporary shelter located relatively close to the house. If desired, a group of friends or a family who decides to spend a weekend in nature can spend the night there.



Le Tronc Creux is made of a steel frame covered with planks. Thermal insulation is provided by a layer of recycled wood. There is enough space inside to accommodate 9 people. The cylinder contains three single, three double beds, a folding table and chairs. Through holes act as windows.



This house has neither electricity nor sewerage. There is a dry toilet nearby. You can spend the night in such a home completely free of charge, just by first booking the required day.

When hunting in the forest, the hunter often has to stay there overnight. We have already written about the features of spending the night in the forest on our website - read about it. Today we would like to tell you about how to make such an overnight stay more comfortable. And, will help us with this... a raincoat, a tent, a bed. At the same time, we will try to consider the option of not just how to make a raincoat tent, but how to turn this structure into a comfortable bed. It is likely that this information will be useful to you, and already during your next overnight stay in the forest you will be able to experience in practice that spending the night this way is much more convenient...

Making a raincoat tent bed

To make our complex bed tent raincoat design, you and I will need light water-repellent cotton fabric - as shown in Figure No. 1 - by the way, you can make such water-repellent fabric yourself - this is described in detail here.

Such material will have to consist of 2 canvases, the width of each canvas should be 1 meter. As for the length of the canvases, it is determined based on the person’s height plus 30 centimeters to it. On one of the canvases, using an ordinary sewing machine, you will need to sew end-to-end overlays (they are also called sleeves) along the long side, of such a width that you can later insert poles into them, the diameter of which will be 6-7 centimeters, which will become the basis or the frame of our camp cot bed. You will need to attach loops to the second canvas at its ends, to which you will later attach tension cords when setting up the tent. Don’t forget to also sew the side panels to the top and bottom parts of the fabric. Along the top edge of each of the canvases you will also need to make a fold, which we will need to tighten the cord or braid.

In order for our raincoat tent bed to be fully equipped and live up to its name - do not forget to also sew or fasten the hood. After this, by pulling the tape from the top of the canvas with a slight movement of your hand, you can transform your tent bed into a raincoat with a hood that can protect you from bad weather in the forest.

How to make a tent bed from a raincoat

If you need to make a tent and a bed out of such a hooded raincoat, you simply insert poles into the sleeves, as we wrote above, their diameter should be 6-7 centimeters, and their ends should rest on 4 wooden slingshots, which you previously drive it into the ground. Thus, from a raincoat you can make a bed similar in design to a folding bed, as shown in Figure No. 2.

You will need to stretch the second canvas over the surface of the bed so that you can get a canopy at an angle of 40-45 degrees from the surface of the ground. It will serve as protection for you from rain and wind. In order to stretch and secure the tent canvas at the desired angle of the canopy, you will need to drive 2 stakes into the ground (their height is determined depending on the angle of inclination of the canopy), after which you can tie a cord to the loops and pull it through the top of the stake and attach to a small peg, which you previously drove at an angle into the ground

However, if the weather is clear and there is no chance of rain, you may not need to install an additional canopy. And, you can use the loose canvas as a blanket.

You should install the slingshots on which the ends of the poles of your homemade forest bed will rest at a height of 20-25 centimeters from the surface of the ground.

Let's imagine that as a result of some natural or other disasters you find yourself in the wild. You realize that the charms of civilization are not here, and you will have to live here for some time. Naturally, the first worries will be finding water and food, but building a shelter, this is the third pillar of survival.

Build, and even more so find refuge in the wild- that’s still entertainment. After all, in addition to building a roof over your head, something like walls so that rain and wind are not terrible, you also need to take care of a place to sleep. Sleeping on bare ground has consequences.

Of course, the most reasonable option would be to get out to civilization and people, and not sit still. However, if you do not have a map or GPS navigator, and you do not know the area well, or at all, good option it would be to stay put and wait for rescuers.

There are plenty of articles and advice on building huts from “shit and sticks”, we would like to dwell on place to sleep and relax. How and from what to make bed for the night in the wild so that your neck and back don’t hurt in the morning?

Most often in the wild bed made directly on the ground using grass, branches, leaves. However, if there are coniferous trees in your region, in particular the common fir, it would be a very good idea to use it. The fir branches are lush and elastic enough to be used to assemble something like a bed, durable and comfortable.

When will you collect branches for the bed, take long branches, 50 centimeters each, and short branches, 25 centimeters each. Lay long branches directly on the ground to create a “frame” for the bed, and short branches on top of long ones to form an elastic surface. On top of all this, we recommend using something to insulate and avoid contact directly with the branches. The fact is that pine needles secrete resin, and if you sleep directly on pine needles, your clothes and skin will be sticky. Of course, the resin is washed off after drying, but it’s still not very pleasant. If you happen to have a blanket or cape with you, lay it on top of the branches and sleep on it.

Is it possible to use grottoes and natural depressions in rocks as shelters?

Of course, people have been using them for hundreds of years. Such natural shelters usually quite durable and reliable, they will protect you from winds and storms.

Grottoes are usually formed as a result of landslides and erosion of rocks, or from the influence of tree roots growing on the edge of rocks. Therefore, when you find such a shelter, pay attention to the following things:

  1. Carefully inspect the grotto along the entire internal perimeter. There may be small animals inside or, worse, snakes. In some regions, scorpions may also be added to this charm. Therefore, before settling down for the night, make sure that you have no neighbors.
  2. Get a little tidy. Grottoes can often contain natural debris, branches, stones, and leaves blown by the wind. If possible, clear the area inside, this will increase the usable area, and you will also be more comfortable.
  3. Provide rain protection. Make a kind of door from branches and leaves that can close the entrance to the grotto in case of heavy rain and prevent water from getting inside. Also make sure that water can flow freely away from the grotto.

All of us, lovers of forays into nature, sometimes have to stay overnight in the forest or near a pond. Everyone arranges sleeping places differently, some in a car, some in a tent, and some in a boat. But not everyone can drive a car to the desired point or location. hiking you have to sacrifice a tent to take other things with you. And sleep under open air or in a hut made of spruce branches, where the smell of impregnation is much more pleasant than in a tent. Fresh air and the pleasant smell of pine create a wonderful atmosphere for sleep and relaxation.

I often have to spend the night in the forest and rarely get to use a tent. I only use a tent when I go on a hunting or berry or nut picking trip that lasts several days. In the fall and even in winter, when hunting on foot, I always take with me a plastic film or 2.5 - 2 m tarpaulin. If the hunt drags on, and the house is not so close, it is still light (although I had to set up camp in the dark by the light of a fire ) I select comfortable spot(where there is more firewood and some natural shelter blocks the wind) and set up camp. First, I make a fire, then I chop thin poles - from them I build a frame for a canopy (see picture), I attach a film on top of the frame, and I press the bottom edge with a cobblestone or log. Such a lean-to shelter serves as protection from the wind and as a heat shield. Then I chop up spruce branches and arrange something similar to a bed. After cooking and other things, I add wood to the fire located 50 - 80 cm from the bed and start to sleep. If the air temperature is below +5 C*, I prepare two or three dry logs with a diameter of 30 - 35 cm and 2 - 2.5 m long in advance, and use them to build a “nodya” fire (it burns evenly all night and also gives even heat).

You can also make a hut from available materials (for those who walk lightly), but its construction will take more time than for a film shelter. Although the hut also has its advantages.

A correctly folded hut protects well from rain and even hail (according to own experience) water rolls off it like from a regular roof.

Almost anything you find nearby (spruce or fir spruce branches, reeds, hay, straw, grass) is suitable for its construction. First you need to prepare thin poles (dimensions in the picture), two strong flyers and a support pole. We start with installing the flyers; this stage of work must be approached very seriously because... This is what the whole hut actually rests on. The flyers should be driven vertically into the ground by almost a third of their length, so they will stand firmly and will not deviate from the weight of the side rolls. We place a strong pole on top of the flyers. Next, vertically and obliquely adjust thin poles (rafters) onto the support pole at a distance from each other (as shown in the figure). After the rafters are ready, we lay the material that we got nearby in rows from bottom to top, so that the top row covers the bottom. We seal the back wall in the same way as the side rolls.

To make it warm and cozy to sleep in such a hut, you need to place a fire near the entrance and, behind the fire, build an inclined heat screen towards the entrance to the hut.

How pleasant it is to wake up early in the morning in a cozy hut to the singing of birds - only people who have shared all the delights and hardships of wandering and communicating with nature know.