While we all used to live in the wilderness long ago, this is a skill that most of us humans no longer possess. While we have the brains to be able to make a living for ourselves in the wilderness, the wild is a dangerous and unpredictable place.
While an uneducated person might have a tough time surviving in the wild unprepared, someone with the right knowledge and know-how can definitely make it work. While this guide shouldn’t be taken as an official survival guide, it’s a great place to find a few tips to get you started on your wildlife adventures.
Consider Your Environment
The very first thing you should do before setting out into the wilderness is consider the environment you’ll be staying in. It goes without saying that you’d need to make different preparations for surviving in the desert as compared to a winter tundra, and this is just one example.
If you’re staying in a cold environment, for example, you’ll want to pack extra warm, waterproof clothes. Extra socks, as well as waterproof boots, are a necessity. If you are staying in places with deep snow, you’ll want to pack snowshoes, a warm sleeping bag, a snow shovel, and supplies to create an igloo, burrow, or pine shelter.
Anyone staying in a cold environment will want extra fire-starting tools, too. A fire-starting stick is an excellent place to start, as are matches and other fire-starting tools. Fires are incredibly crucial in cold environments, so you want to have access to much more than you’ll ever need.
However, if you’re planning to camp out in a dry, desert-like environment, the supplies you’ll need are entirely different. Instead of heavy clothes, you’ll need lighter everyday clothes, but with heavy pants and jackets for after the sun sets. You’ll also need hats or parkas for sun protection, a tent for shelter, and other handy supplies.
One of the main benefits of camping out in a desert wilderness is the dryness of everything. Out of all the places you can camp, it’s easiest to start a fire in the desert. As such, a more moderate supply of fire starting utensils should be plenty.
Following this example, the supplies you bring with you should differ depending on the conditions you’ll be facing. If you know there’s going to be rain while you’re living in the wilderness, you should bring tarps and other water-repellent supplies. If you know that there will be high winds, extra rope, stakes, and similar supplies might be most helpful.
Setting Up Shelter
Depending on where you decide to camp or live in the desert, you might be interested in creating different shelters. The duration of time you plan to stay in the desert plays a huge role here too.
If you’re planning to live on your own in the wilderness for a year, for example, you’ll probably want to build a semi-permanent dwelling like a small cabin. If you are there for a few weeks to a month, a stick shelter such as a lean-to might be right. If you are only living in the wilderness for a day or two, you might be able to get by with a burrow or thatch shelter.
The resources you’ll need to use to build your shelter differ depending on your location, too. For example, if you’re in a cold, snowy area, the most plentiful resource to build a shelter out of is snow. If you have the time, you can make a relatively elaborate igloo shelter to keep warm in. However, you can make a burrow in the snow that’s nearly as effective for far less effort.
If you’re in the desert, however, you might be a bit more hard-pressed for building materials. You can’t easily make a burrow in the sand like you can in the snow, and there’s not as much timber to take advantage of. Your best bet might be a mud and thatch hut, but that’s only feasible if you can find water to make it with.
One of the easier places to camp in the wild is in coniferous and deciduous woods. These forests have plenty of animals for hunting, plenty of shelter and building materials, ready sources of water, and shelter from the sun.
In a tropical environment where the ground can get wet and flood, an elevated platform for sleeping, regardless of whether you’re in a house or not, is essential. However, these can be a bit involved to build, too.
Some of the other shelters you might consider building during your adventures in the wilderness are:
- Tarp shelter
- Spider shelter
- Dug-out shelter
- Pine shelter
- Survival hut
Necessary Supplies
We glossed over a few of the supplies you might need for surviving out in each type of wilderness environment earlier in this article, but it’s imperative that you create and check from a survival list before you embark on your adventure. There are a lot of unseen dangers out in the wilderness, and forgetting just one necessary item can set you severely behind.
There are several necessary survival items that every adventurer will want to have in their pack. The very first of these is a weapon of some kind. Knives and machetes are a popular choice because of their versatility, but guns can be used to significant effect, too. While utility knives can be useful, they’re not as effective as true weapons.
Next, you’ll want supplies to help you start a fire. Especially in cold regions, being able to start a fire to keep warm at night is essential. Unless you have a house wholly insulated from the outside, a fire is a necessity. Matches are the most common tools for helping to start a fire, but you can also use tools such as fire sticks, batteries, and more.
The next supplies you’ll want to pack are all utility supplies. Technically, you don’t need any of these supplies to survive in the wilderness, but they’ll all make your life significantly easier. Think flashlights, lanterns, pots and pans, utensils and dishes, a canteen or water bottle, flares, an axe or hatchet, a radio, rope, etc.
Next, and lastly, you’ll want to pack comfort supplies. This includes things like a heat blanket, non-perishable food items, a pillow, a sleeping bag (for cold temperatures), extra socks, shoes, or other clothing, a sewing kit, vitamins, etc. Don’t forget about first aid supplies, too, such as liquid bandages, antiseptic, and a thermometer.
If you plan to use a small tent, you may want to pack the supplies for this too. Tents don’t provide the best protection against the elements unless you purchase a heavier version (especially in the long term).
Collecting Food
Providing food for yourself is one of the most important aspects of living in the wilderness. While you can bring plenty of non-perishable food with you if your adventure is short, if you end up living in the wilderness, you’ll eventually need to hunt for your own food.
If you have a gun or bow with you, hunting will be relatively easy – once you get the hang of it, that is. However, if you don’t have any long-range weapons, you might have a tougher time. In this case, it’s an excellent idea to learn how to trap your dinner.
Knowledge of how to collect wild edibles is incredibly useful out in the wilderness as well. Wild mushrooms, plants, berries, and fruits can become great supplements for your wild diet if you know how to identify those which are okay to eat. Of course, if you don’t know which wild foods are okay to eat, as well as how to prepare them safely, it may be best to avoid them altogether.
There is one somewhat reliable way of testing whether a wild food item will be safe for you to eat. The method involves taking a piece of the item and rubbing it along the inside of your lip. Ostensibly, if it’s poisonous, it should produce an unpleasant reaction along your lip without causing any further harm.
For obvious reasons, this is neither the most fool-proof nor the most reliable way to test foreign food items. However, if you’re having trouble differentiating between similar-looking foodstuffs, this might just be the tip you need to pick the correct one.
Collecting meat in the wilderness isn’t nearly as easy as it is within civilization. Some animals that you kill can be sick, so it’s even more important to cook your meats completely before eating them. You may not be able to be as picky with the meats that are available to you, too.
Environmental Cues
When you’re living out in the wilderness, you’re more dependent on cues from the environment around you than you ever were before. Night and day cues, weather cues, and the cues from the plant and animal life around you can all influence the way you interact with what’s around you.
For one, you should be able to tell which direction you’re facing instinctually. With enough practice, you’ll be able to tell which cardinal direction you’re facing due to the position of the sun at various times in the day. However, this isn’t often a skill that comes naturally to people. Instead, it needs to be practiced and instilled over time until it becomes routine.
Secondly, it’ll be helpful to learn how the environment around you behaves when various weather formations are coming. We can predict incoming weather patterns based on factors such as:
- Humidity
- Air pressure
- Wind speed
- Wind direction
It’s important that you start to learn the cues that will tell you when rain, cold, wind, and storms will be coming in, as you’ll want to be safely bundled inside your shelter by then.
Additionally, keep in mind that the wildlife around you is an excellent indicator of when a storm is brewing. Animals instinctively know when a significant weather system is on its way, and most (or all) animals will be snugly in their burrows and shelters. If the environment around you is unusually quiet, consider pulling in somewhere to weather the storm.
Nutritional Supplements
When camping out in the wilderness, since you’ll be stuck with limited diet options, there sometimes end up being shortages on individual nutrients. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about this if you’re on your own in the wilderness for many months, but if you come prepared, you can bring most of the supplements you need with you beforehand.
Consider Vitamin C, for example. For someone living in a pine forest, it can be tough to get their hands on Vitamin C, which is most common in citrus fruits. However, you can bring a can of Vitamin C powder to make up for this deficiency if you think ahead far enough.
Other nutritional supplements, like daily multivitamins, are helpful as well – for as long as they last you, at least. If possible, you should be equipped with the know-how to harvest the nutrients you need from the environment around you whenever you can, but since this is not always feasible, supplements are the next best thing. Just use them wisely!
Take Classes
One of the most valuable things you can do for yourself before setting out into the wilderness is to take a survival course or two. A wilderness class, especially in a given area, is a great way to learn the environment around you when you’re not familiar with it.
Survival skill classes come in many different types and skill levels. Beginner survival classes are a great place to start, but they’re offered at all different difficulty levels, too. For example, if you have decent survival skills, but you could use some brushing up on your hunting skills, you could easily put your time into a hunting class instead.
The goal before venturing into the wilderness for your wild living experience is to be as experienced as possible beforehand. The more you experience while reading or taking classes, the more you’ll be prepared to deal with when you’re actually in the wild and on your own.
One specific survival class you should consider taking is a poisonous plant course. Both poison ivy and poison sumac run rampant in many different areas, and you could encounter even more toxic and unpleasant animals and plants on your journey, too.
Backpacking
When you’re living and camping in the wilderness for a short while, your backpack is your best friend. Unless you happen to have a cabin in the wilderness that you can stock up with essentials, there’s no way that you can bring more than what you can fit on your back. Not only is carrying armfuls of supplies through the wilderness ill-advised, but it can tire you out incredibly quickly, too.
As such, you only want to pack the necessities into your backpack. Think multiple pairs of clothing and boots, cooking supplies, salt and pepper, a compass, lights, and similar items. The space in your pack will add up faster than you think.
Predictably, the size and number of things you carry on you will largely depend on how long you plan to be gone. If you’re only going to be gone for a day or two, a smaller, lighter backpack might be enough to do the trick. However, if you’re planning to stay for a week or more, you’ll need a larger pack that can hold more necessities.
Drinking Water
Drinking water can be a problematic staple to come by when living in the wilderness, but it’s not something you can live without, either. In this case, finding the water isn’t the problem, either; the issue is purifying it, so it’s safe to drink.
Technically, if you’re severely dehydrated, you can drink water from any lake or stream. The chances are that you’ll be okay, but on the off chance that you ingest some kind of bacteria or parasite, you could end up sick or in debilitating pain.
The safest way to prepare dirty water for drinking is to boil it over a stove or a fire. However, this can be a prohibitively slow way to purify water, especially if you don’t always have a fire going in your camp.
However, if you have the forethought to bring one, there are water purification filters, straws, bottles, and other devices that will let you drink directly from a stream or lake safely. Packing one of these is ideal, but not necessarily required for your adventure to be a success.
If you lose your purification devices or you’re desperate to get some water, it’s often considered acceptable to drink from clear, fast-moving streams. While this method still isn’t fool-proof, primarily if contaminated debris is located upstream of your drinking spot, it’s a reasonably reliable way to go when you really need a drink.
If you’d rather, you can drop an iodine tablet into the water you’ve just harvested, too. An iodine tablet will purify any harmful bacteria and creatures living in the water you collected.
The Perfect Campsite
Your search for the perfect spot on this camping trip doesn’t end with finding a pretty place. Setting up the perfect campsite is both an art and a science, and over months and years of adventuring, you’ll begin to discern the same spots, pick out the best ones, and just do an overall better job in less time.
The perfect campsite is relatively close to a body of water, but not close enough that flooding and spray will be a problem. You don’t want your sleeping site to become soaked by lake water in the middle of the night.
Next, make sure your campsite is set too far back from any rocks and cliffs, especially if you’re staying in a tent. Tents are notorious for coming unstaked and tumbling their way across the land if you don’t secure them well enough. Keep away from any cliffs that could be a danger to you and any camping mates you might have.
Now, the essential part of this job is to find the perfect flat area of land that’s close (but not too close) to a body of water so that you can use it.
Preparation Is Key
Preparing for any contingencies that might happen in your wilderness battle is the best way to assure that you’ll get through the ordeal happy and alive. Most of the time, this means bringing as many back-up solutions, clothes, and resources as you can feasibly fit in your backpack.
For example, if you’re staying in a snowy region and your socks get soaked, your toes could quickly become victims of frostbite. In this situation, the saving grace is having another dry pair of socks handy and ready to wear.
This applies to any clothes that you might have, but especially socks and shoes. In cold regions, socks and boots tend to get soiled the fastest, so back-ups of these articles are the most important. Fortunately, it’s easy to roll up a few extra pairs of socks into your bags for the wettest nights.
Aside from clothing, your next most important items are your quality-of-life improvements. Think of any water filtering devices, pots or pans, eating utensils, matches, and more. Anything that would be tough to live without merely by losing the first pair should have a back-up available.
Study Wildlife
Studying the poisonous plants all around your wilderness area is an excellent place to start, but you shouldn’t stop there as you prepare. You should take the time to learn as many plant and animal species that you’ll be likely to see in the wilderness as possible before you leave.
While there are always the usual dangerous predators to watch out for, such as bears, wolves, and large cats, you should be aware of small hazardous creatures that might live in your wilderness area, too. Porcupines and skunks, for example, are neither large nor predators, but both species can cause significant trouble to you if you don’t give them a wide berth.
Consider bears, for example. Several different bear species exist across the USA and the world, and different bear species should be addressed very differently if you’re unfortunate enough yo meet them out in the wild. Black bears, for example, tend to be nonaggressive as long as they don’t have cubs, but grizzly bears, on the other hand, can pose a danger to you if you’re not prepared with bear repellent spray.
The same goes for plant life. You should know several of the most dangerous plants, mushrooms, and other life that you’re likely to see in the environment. If you can, try to learn some of the most beneficial ones, too, like we mentioned a bit earlier on, as they can be excellent supplements to your diet.
Taking Care Of Yourself
The human body has various basic needs that it must meet at all times, regardless of whether it’s safely at home or camping in the wilderness. We introduced one of these needs earlier on – Vitamin C – but this isn’t all you need to watch out for, of course. A healthy human being needs to eat the following nutrients in order to be healthy:
- Carbohydrates
- Fats
- Proteins
- Vitamins
- Minerals
- Water
Of course, the nutrient categories above can still be broken down further, but they’re a great place to start. Carbohydrates, for example, commonly come from grains and sugars, and they release energy when they’re digested. However, they don’t release long-lasting energy like protein does, so they shouldn’t make up as much of your diet in the wilderness as protein does.
Protein, on the other hand, is extremely easy to come by in the wilderness. All you need to do to get it is to be successful with a hunt, as protein is common in all kinds of meats. On the other hand, while wild grains do grow and offer sources of carbohydrates, they’re just not easy to mass-produce like modern grains.
Fats also come from animals, and you should get most of your fats through eating animal meats. However, vitamins and minerals can be harder to come by. If you’re lucky enough to run into wild berries, fruits, or mushrooms while you’re out foraging, they can be great providers of vitamins and minerals. Red meat provides a decent selection of minerals to the human body, too.
Since you won’t likely have access to a freezer out in the wilderness (depending on how permanently you plan to stay, of course), your options for harvesting and storing meats and other foods are very limited. If you’re brought enough salt, salt curing is one way to preserve your extra meats, as is smoking them over a fire.
While eating a balanced diet while living in the wild might seem daunting, as long as you tackle the task with your eyes wide open, you won’t have any trouble. The amount of meat you harvest will depend on your hunting and trapping skills, and the vegetables, mushrooms, and fruits you find will depend both on luck and how well you know your environment.