Self-Reliance

Life in our modern times definitely has its perks. It has its conveniences. It has its own brand of skills sets that acclimate and accommodate us to the trends and technology that give this age its character.

This is, like it or not, the computer age.

Even the phone that I carry. Smart. Checks my email. Calls up the weather. GPS and road maps. Internet. Applications of all sorts that can be downloaded and accessed at the touch of the screen. Camera and video recorder. A portable phone that is a whole lot more than a phone. I have grown accustomed to it. I use it a lot. I hate to say it but I have, in some ways, become dependent upon the smart technology it provides.

Modernity and all its smart technology? I like it and I do not like it … all in the same breath.

I admit it. I am inclined toward being a dinosaur when it comes to all this modern technology but I am forced by the times to keep up the pace though I am, more often than not, out of breath and trotting behind trying to stay in sight of the tail end of the pack that is running wildly ahead.

My preference is for simpler … a lot simpler … a lot less fraught … where life can be enjoyed at a slower pace … where simple self-reliant woodcraft skills trump all the smarts offered in the gadgets and gizmos that govern modern life.

I think this personal preference is one of the things that draws me to folk like Nessmuk, Kephart, and that vast host of woodsy pilgrims and pioneers. Some of them left behind written legacies. Most, though, are unsung heroes whose lives were never chronicled in pictures and on written pages … the forgotten ones … like many of my ancestors being discovered through Shirli’s genealogical research. Those were some courageous souls. Knowing the recorded history of those early Colonial times it is quite easy to surmise the physical challenges they faced and the will they lived with to overcome those challenges.

It is not difficult to show folk basic woodcraft skills … those four areas that cover fire, water, shelter, and food … areas that may indeed utilize some modern materials in our kits … areas though that do not depend upon the technology designed into smart phones and other computerized gadgetry. It takes only a little time, a few days, to walk a group into a wilderness setting where putting these skills to work is a short-term necessity. That experience is a step in the right direction. It is, however, merely a step, especially where the food item is concerned. Staying fed in a long-term situation is a full-time job.

Self-reliance is developed.

I think we are born with it in our nature. I also think our self-reliant nature is something that is discouraged by this modern culture that promotes pack sameness and something that is discouraged and dumbed down early in life. That element in our nature has to be individually rediscovered and positively developed.

Sure the skills can be taught to those willing to invest the time and effort in learning them. But becoming self-reliant is something that is developed over time. Self-reliance involves a skills set. It is, however, more than a set of skills. It is a concrete mindset. It is a developed lifestyle that folk rediscover and grow into. It is something that sets us apart from the rest of the pack.

Skills? I can teach them.

Mindset and lifestyle? No. I cannot teach these.

I can only show them.

Record Keeping and Upcoming Trapping Camp

Record keeping.

I have for a lot of years kept a small notebook and writing instrument in my shirt pocket. It is handy to have for jotting notes and numbers from time to time. I prefer one with a sewn binding. The little spiral wire bound ones do not hold up and tend to lose pages. Waterproof versions are available though they cost a good bit more.

Sure. That little notebook in my pocket is old school. Smart technology has fairly well replaced it. Smart technology is great but it has a way of letting you down deep in the woods when the battery runs out of juice.

A small notebook and something to scribble with, in my mind anyway, should be part of our kit … whether it is carried in a shirt pocket or in a pack. Mental notes have a tendency, even on a good day, to get lost in the barrage of mental notes that pile up. On a bad day … in unfamiliar territory … when health and safety depend on remembering a particular rock or tree or bush … it is wise to have some things mapped on paper.

One of the things that I mentioned to the guys on our early winter adventure on the Conecuh trail was the importance of journaling … keeping a written record of their experiences that they can look back on as a means to chart their progress and personal growth. Having a designated woodcraft journal also provides a place to jot down questions that arise and answers to those questions that are discovered by either asking someone or taking the time to research a discovery.

I also mentioned to the guys that I would be providing them with some questions to answer as a starting point in their journals. Write the question. Think about the question. Answer the question.

These are questions that I will be asking again around our evening fire at our trapping camp that is coming up.

1.    What was the most enjoyable thing you experienced in your wilderness experience on the Conecuh Trail?

2.    Why was it the most enjoyable?

3.    What was the most difficult thing about your wilderness experience?

4.    Why was it the most difficult?

5.    What can you do between now and the Late Winter Camp to be more prepared?

Our trapping camp is scheduled for January 3-4 provided winter rains do not flood the bottoms making it impossible to hike in.

Kits are definitely required. Dress appropriately for the weather conditions.

Individual students will be responsible for building their own cook fires and preparing their own supper and breakfast.

We will hike in from Jude’s.

Schedule:

Saturday

Hike in promptly at 12:00

Establish an overnight camp

Set traps

Cook fires and supper prep

Evening campfire and group discussion

Sunday

Breakfast fires and breakfast

Run the traps

Deal with the catch

Pack and hike out

Boots On The Trail - Early Winter Camp

There is a world of difference between hearing about something, reading something, watching something, rehearsing something and physically getting out there doing something where everything you have heard, read, watched and rehearsed must be reliably put into practice.

Advance preparation is always a critical ingredient for any endeavor worth adventuring into. This is especially true when it comes to walking off into wild natural places where the conveniences, comforts, and controls of home are left behind.

Our trip this past weekend, one involving a slightly challenging hike in, was an opportunity for the guys to put into practice the hearing, reading, watching and rehearsing they have been doing over the course of these past months of classes and exercises. It was much more than that though. It was an immersion … a baptism of sorts … into an environment that was completely different from any they were familiar with … one that moved not according to our dictates but rather according to its own design where our abilities to manipulate conditions are totally ineffective.

I did not measure the distance on the map. It was, I am guessing, between two and three miles from where we parked to where we set camp. I had no set schedule. No set teaching program in my pocket. The lack thereof was not neglect or oversight on my part. It was intentional.

I was not interested in putting together a highly regimented weekend for the group that kept them jumping through hoops to satisfy my own leadership expectations and stroke my ego. I was more interested in this long weekend being a major disruption of their normal regimented life-routine, something that would be replete with its own lessons.

We were not in a hurry. Well, we did kind of hurry to get under our shelters when that rain came through Saturday afternoon. The rain did not last long. Just long enough to get things nice and wet to add a touch of challenge to things. But that is one aspect of being out there where we do not have a control panel. The only real time factor that I paid any mind to was making sure the supper cooking was done and water containers were full of processed water before dark.

Despite the lack of a syllabus or regimentation there were numerous opportunities for impromptu sessions and critiques. There was time for the guys to hike the mile to the pond and fish. There was time for me to slip off to squirrel hunt and explore. It is a good thing we carried rations with us.

Sure. There is a need for guidance and structured teaching. The established basics are fairly well set in stone. I think though that Montessori was onto something important and that, where learning these skills and developing proficiency and confidence in wilderness settings is concerned, more of the Montessori System that develops personal initiative is appropriate not only for children but also for adults. Not only where woodcraft skills are concerned but for all of life.

There is a lot that can be taught. There is a lot though that has to be caught through personal experience and those aha moments that arise on their own through personal experience where personal experience becomes the greatest and most gifted teacher. It is not what is taught and parroted back that is the best measure of growth and development. No. It is what is caught that truly grows and matures a person … whether they are ten or fifty years old.

It was, and is, my hope that some catching took place over the course of the long weekend. I did a little catching myself. I also had the opportunity to do a lot of observation and make some mental notes where this group is concerned … mental notes about some things that I am familiar with and take in stride as givens in wilderness settings that the unbaptized are not familiar with.

One of these has to do with the way our senses, especially our sense of hearing, seem to suddenly come alive when we bed down out there on the ground deep in the woods far away from our familiar security blankets. We hear every sound and the sounds we hear are not the sounds we tune out at home because of our familiarity with them.

Those physical senses … sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing … are ours for significant reasons. We are not, at least on this continent, far from the top of the food chain. Our hunter/gatherer ancestors in a more primitive world depended on their senses much more keenly than we do in the modern world we live in. When we take ourselves out of the modern world picture and place ourselves in a more primitive environment those senses instinctively begin kicking in.

The guys did good. They did really good and I am proud of them. I have to admit though that they had a worn and weary look when they crawled out of their shelters Monday morning. It had been an adventure but they were about adventured out and ready to pack it in.

There was a side of me that did not want to roll up. I took my time, swallowed a 600 calorie breakfast of cereal/fruit bars for a blast of energy, finished that second canteen cup of instant coffee, loaded my pack, and hiked out with them. Had I stayed behind it would have been a long walk home. 

Packing For The Early Winter Trek

We are a few short weeks away from our Early Winter Trek that will take place December 5 – 8 on the Conecuh Trail in the Conecuh National Forest.

One of the objectives of this trek is for our students to have a multiple day-night experience in a wilderness setting where putting their learned skills to work will be a necessity. Part of putting these skills to work involves the mental gear shifting that occurs over a lengthened period of time in a wilderness setting … something that does not happen in a series of three hour classes or an overnight camp in a park setting.

Other than procuring and processing water … we will not be relying on the wilderness to provide all of our necessary food items. That would be an exercise this class is not ready for. We may indeed supplement our packable food items with small game and fish as part of the experience but we will not be relying on them as our sole sustenance.

So here are some easy to prepare suggestions for packable food items for the trek.

Morning

Packets of instant grits

Breakfast bars

Powdered breakfast beverage

Mid-Day

Trail mix

Jerky

Dried fruit

Cup-of-Soup

Evening

Ramen

Dehydrated mix for soup

Bannock mix

Packets of hot-chocolate mix 

The pre-packaged Mountain House meals we have tried are quick and easy to prepare. Simply boil water, add the measured amount of water to the package, seal the package, and wait ten minutes.

I suggest that each day of measured rations be packaged separately in zip lock bags. The zip locks make the rations waterproof. Separate daily packaging also makes daily supplies of rations easy to dispense and account for to avoid borrowing from tomorrow to eat more today.

There is definitely a practical lesson in personal dietary discipline involved in this multiple day-night exercise.

One of the easiest ways to up your daily calorie intake is to pack along a few candy bars. One regular size Snickers contains 250 calories and occupies very little room in a food packet.

Hygiene and First-Aid

Be sure your kit contains hygiene and first aid items. Keep it simple … toilet paper, toothbrush, a few Band-Aids, a few Tylenol.

Clothing

Be prepared for come what may.

Layer your clothing and wear clothing designed to retain body heat.

A good winter weight coat may not be necessary during the day when the sun is out but once the sun goes down, or if the skies cloud up and it is rainy, a winter weight coat is a good thing to have. It can easily be rolled and tied to the outside of a pack to save room within.

Adequate headgear is important. Include a stocking cap to wear as part of your sleeping gear.

Be sure to pack a complete change of clothes in a dry bag in your kit.

Although not as critical in warm weather, in cooler weather a poncho of some type is important to keep dry and to protect your core temperature if it rains.

Wear some blaze orange … at least a hat.

This is not a legal requirement but one suggested by the Wildlife Authorities that oversee the area of the forest we will be in. It is a solid safety practice. I do not anticipate anyone getting lost. However, if the need arises, the extra visibility is a real plus in locating someone.

NOTE –

Now is the time to inventory and inspect your kits.

You have been using your kits in class settings over this while. Check them over. Make sure all of your essential kit items are in good working order. Now is the time to make repairs or upgrade kit items.

Staying Fed

There are quite a number of variables to take into consideration in a wilderness setting. A good many of these can be somewhat duplicated in a backyard, developed site setting, or patch of woods close to home.

Somewhat. But not totally.

We find ourselves in a very different world when we leave development behind and wander off into the wilderness with a few modern material-goods on our backs. Even if it is only a half-day or a good-day hike back to some means of getting back to the settlements.

Wilderness is wild.

Wild is completely foreign to the vast majority of folks these days.

That wildness is something that once called to a lot of people. A good many answered its calling and off they went exploring, pioneering, hunting and running trap lines, hewing out little clearings, using the natural material to construct shelters, making clothing and other usable materials from animal hides, and living out their days and years respecting and cooperating with the wild. Those earlier than our times folks had developed skills-sets that made it possible for them to leave settlements behind and live well in the wilderness for extended periods of time.

Times have changed a lot with the progress of modernity. Are we better off or worse off? I say we are both. Our gain contributes to our loss. One of our challenges in these modern times is to rediscover and recover what we have lost in all this progress. We are, at least we can be, as much explorers and pioneers in our times as they were in those earlier times. If we want to be and if we will only accept the challenge.

Going bare bones … going primitive … at least going primitive in a modern-primitive sort of way … involves a major psychological adjustment for folks accustomed to their cravings for electronic entertainments and the comforts and conveniences that comprise life in these modern times. Not many are willing to trade their gizmos and gadgets for the scree of a hawk, the chatter of a squirrel, the breeze blowing through the trees, falling leaves, the sound of a chiseling woodpecker beak, and the myriad of other sights, sounds, and smells that fill natural environments.

Whether out for a day hike, off on an overnight camp, doing a long extended woods trek, or discovering yourself in a dire long-term survival situation … there are some rules that always apply.

Rules of Three

Three minutes without air.

Three hours without shelter.

Three days without water.

Three weeks without food.

Beware of small air-tight spaces.

Making fire, if you have the tools needed to generate the combustion of some fine tinder material, is not all that difficult. It can be, given marginal or adverse conditions, a bit of a challenge. But it is still doable.

Shelter shades us from the sun, breaks the chilling effects of the wind, turns water from the sky, and offers protection from the dew that forms at night.

Without adequate hydration we are toast.

Fire, Shelter, Water, Food

We come now to this business of staying adequately fed and there is a lot more to this item on our list of actual needs than can be dealt with in a brief article on the subject. So what follows is not an exhaustive summary and does not take into consideration the plethora of packables that we can purchase ready made or manufacture in our kitchens.

A planned outing always takes food into consideration. It is easy to accommodate this need when you have the space to pack a cooler and room for a few shopping bags of goods picked up on the way. It gets a little sticky when your means of conveyance becomes your feet and legs and that pack on your back. Weight and space become a major issue … not nearly as big a one for a weekend as it is for longer treks or long-term survival in wilderness settings.

Wild Edibles

I mention wild edibles because they are a resource that surrounds us.

No. I do not consider myself an “authority” on the subject of wild edibles. What I have done though is educate myself regarding what is local to our area. Some of it grows in other areas. Some of it does not. Other climates have offerings that are not available in ours. The fact of the matter is that there is nutritious wild food growing around us wherever we are … food that could be essential in sustaining our lives … food that can, at the least, be foraged as a supplement to what we are carrying.

IMPORTANT NOTE: There are plants that will make you violently ILL if ingested. There are plants that will KILL you if ingested. Some plants require particular types of processing to render them edible. Do your homework before you eat a wild plant. You are the one that is liable for your health when you swallow it.

Eating a “weed” is a little scary at first. Even with a good field guide with color pictures. It is just not something we are accustomed to doing. Once you have positively identified a wild edible and tasted it a few times you find yourself doing quite a bit of grazing even when grazing is not necessary.

Part of the challenge is learning to identify and utilize wild edibles. Another part of the challenge is to adjust to the seasonal nature of things, just like that garden of raised beds that we tend. Things in the wild are seasonal also. As seasons change so do the available resources.

Regardless of the climate region one lives in, a mental page of a selection of wild edibles ought to be embedded in a memory bank.

Hunting

Hunting has always been a way of life for me. Not so much in the way it has been commercialized and marketed in the magazines and mega sporting goods stores where it has become big business. Mine is more along the lines of subsistence hunting … procuring meat for the table whether it is small game or deer.

By the time I was ten years old I was already a skilled small game hunter going solo into the woods and fields armed with an old single shot .22 and some “shorts” or a .410 shotgun. I had access to those guns 24/7. They were never locked away in a safe or rendered useless by trigger locks. I had been taught to use them for their designed purpose, used them regularly to that end, and often casually wandered miles from home with gun in hand … exploring … just to see what I could see.

Hunting small game is still my favorite type of hunting. Maybe because it hearkens me back to my childhood days when life was a lot simpler, back when a mile or two away from home seemed like a long way.

Ten? That was over fifty years ago. Times have changed a lot in five decades. A ten year old kid wandering miles from home these days with a gun in his/her hand is apt to be picked up by the police and their parents charged as criminals.

Small game is the most practical game to procure on a trek where hunting is allowed. Small game is also the easiest and most practical game to pursue in what is termed a “survival” situation. There are several reasons that I consider practical requirements here.

It is abundant.

It is easy to kill.

It is easy to process.

It provides a compact serving size.

A large game sized animal such as a deer … though it provides a generous amount of meat and a good hide that can be utilized … does not readily meet these practical requirements. There is a lot more meat to a deer, even to a smaller deer that bones out 20 pounds of good meat. Keeping that extra meat “good” in a wilderness setting and turning that hide into something useful involves more sets of important skills.

Fishing

A few assorted small hooks. Some line. Maybe a few split shot weights and a bobber. These take up very little space and add very little weight to a pack.

Our woodland environment is full of bait. A little digging around deadfalls and under dead bark will yield grubs and earthworms. During warm weather there are plenty of crickets and grasshoppers to be caught.

Walking into our outdoor class site yesterday I noticed a bird feather on the ground. Blue Jay. Something as simple as a bit of bird feather tied to a hook turns the hook into a fly that will catch fish.

A hook baited with some innards from a squirrel or rabbit and tossed out overnight may very well have a catfish or freshwater eel on it before morning.

Trapping

We had a few old rusty single spring traps on the farm when I was kid. I played around with them a little but was never successful as a child-trapper and lost interested in them.

I must have been in my late 30’s or early 40’s when an old man in the shipyard where I was working offered me a piece of coon that he had cooked. One bite and I knew that some traps would soon be on their way to my house.

Traps involve a small investment. The nice thing about them is that once you have them you have them and you can use them over and over. A little care and maintenance and traps will last long enough to pass on to the next generation coming along on our heels … if some of them will only take an interest. Otherwise the little pile of steel is apt be hauled off as scrap iron and that would be a real pity.

There are basically two types of steel traps … foot hold traps and kill traps. Both types come in various sizes depending upon the target animal being trapped. One smart invention to come along in the evolution of traps is the dog proof coon trap. DP’s are good news for free ranging domestic dogs that their owners ought to be keeping home.

I recently added a half dozen DP’s to my trap collection and look forward to setting a few just as soon as it is legal season.

The weight and bulk of steel traps, with the exception of the small single-spring 110 Conibear style kill-trap, make them impractical to include in a kit.

Every kit should already contain the items necessary to construct snares … CORDAGE. Along with cordage in my kit I also carry a dozen or so 18” fishing leaders that make excellent small snares when attached to a length of #36 tarred bank line. The leaders roll and pack easily in a snuff can.

Two things about snares … . 

They are effective and, in most cases and places, they are not a legal means to harvest game. 

If you discover yourself in a survival situation you do what you have to do in order to stay fed! Legal or not. In one of those situations I would rather come through it fed and healthy and maybe find myself paying a little dividend to the State for my legal transgression than for my loved ones to discover themselves making arrangements with the Undertaker.

Practice is the rule.

Every skill requires practice.

Practice requires a commitment of time.

This rule applies to trapping as well as it does to fire-making and every other skill.

Every skill category involves learning and understanding its component aspects. Learning and understanding these aspects demands paying attention to details if success is to be an expected outcome. Neglecting what may appear as a small detail is a sure way to failure. Failure to succeed in a dire situation is not something anyone can afford.

Shelter

I do not know how many tents I have owned and used over the years. Quite a few of them. Even now there are four tents in our pile of gear that we employ in our assorted outdoor doings. A couple of modern tents, a canvas wall tent, and a small canvas A-frame.

Tents have some good things going for them, especially the modern ones with the sewn in floors and screened windows. Warm weather insects and crawling creatures have a difficult time getting inside to bother you. They do also afford you some indoor privacy when camping in developed sites where other people are around.

They also have some not so good things about them that make them impractical to carry on our backs when our two feet and legs become our mode of transportation … their size and weight being two primary issues … and that pack on our back is our home away from home.

The Big Four

Fire, Water, Shelter, Food

When it comes to shelter it just does not get any simpler than a tarp. One of the beautiful things about a tarp is that their simplicity lends itself to a lot of set-up versatility.

A sewn tent, regardless of its style, is designed to be set up one way. If any of the parts are broken or lost there is a serious problem when it comes time to set up camp. A very close at hand example of this came last weekend on our overnight outing.

We took along our large dome tent for Shirli and our little pooch. I felt no need to check it out before we loaded it. We had used it in the spring and everything was intact and in good usable condition when it was taken down and packed.

So we get to our destination and begin setting up. I unrolled the tent and got it into position. All was well. I pulled out the flex-corded poles and discovered that the shock cords on both sets had decided between spring and fall to literally fall apart.

That roll of gorilla tape in my kit had to be employed to hold the pole sections together and save the day. It took a little time to tape all those sections together. It took longer to tape the two sets of poles together than it did to construct my tarp shelter and lay out my bedroll. Had time been an urgent matter it would not have been a good situation.

About the worst thing that can go wrong with a tarp is to have a grommet tear out. But that is a simple problem to remedy.

Unpacking, setting up, taking down, and repacking a tent, even a small one, can be something of a chore that takes a generous amount of time. Even on a good day. A wet tent is just short of a nightmare.

There are times when available time is a crucial matter. Maybe daylight is growing short and you need to get a camp set. Maybe a fast moving weather front is approaching and you need to get yourself and your gear under shelter before the bottom falls out.

With a tarp you can be set up, hunkered down under shelter, and ready for a storm in five minutes. Or, in better weather, that few minutes of constructing shelter allows more time to gather firewood for the night, prepare your evening meal, boil water for drinking, and enjoy that mystical transitional time when the day critters go silent and the night critters begin their chorus.

Poly vs. Canvas

There is an awful lot of commotion and debate going on in the woodcraft-bushcraft-survival circle about this and what I offer here is simply my two copper cents worth on the issue.

I think the debate is a bunch of guff unless what you are attempting to achieve is a good authentic looking replica of a kit carried by a frontiersman prior to or during the Longhunter Era. If that is the case then there is no room in a kit for paracord, ferro rods, Bic Lighters, Pardner 12 Gauge shotguns fitted for using Black Powder, titanium or stainless bush pots, modern material clothing, and quite a lot of other modern imaginations.

What I see too often in this debate is what I call bushcraft bravado … that my kit is better than your kit because I have this, that or the other ego stroking thing.

Personally, I do not have any interest in adding the extra pounds of an oilcloth tarp to my kit.

Besides, for the cost of a good oilcloth, the average person can put together a good usable kit that will get them started and serve them well for quite a long time. A rain fly from a defunct tent makes a good usable shelter. That is what I am using in the picture at the top of the page. I picked up this one and a blue one at the Coleman Store for $3.00 each.

A good quality poly-tarp serves me well and I do have a preference for woodland camouflage. It blends well in a woodland environment. We paid a little more for the ones we ordered and have in our personal kits. You will not find them at Walmart or any of the discount stores.

Debris Huts

I place debris huts in the same category as friction fire. Knowing how to build one is something good to know and something that does not require a degree in drafting or building construction.

If we have a means to construct shelter in our kit then there is no need to invest the energy and time to build a debris hut unless we discover ourselves in an unexpected long-term situation with winter coming on and need the extra insulation against the cold.

Another thing to consider is that, unless you own the property or have the owners permission where you will be cutting living saplings to use in constructing a debris hut, you had better not do it. National Forests, State Forests, and State Parks have usage stipulations that need to be adhered to. Step outside those stipulations and you might very well find yourself paying a hefty fine and discover yourself banned from future access.

Introduction to Traps and Trapping Class Information

Our trip to Little River State Park was truly a great experience. I really enjoyed being there and having the company of such a great bunch of folks for the weekend.

Here is a little heads-up regarding our Introduction to Traps and Trapping class coming up Saturday, November 1^st.

Be at Jude’s ready to begin the hike in at promptly 0900. We will endeavor to wrap up at 1200 but due to the content of this class we may go a little past.

As this exercise will take place in a woodland environment PROPER DRESS is important. Wear appropriate clothing: long pants and long sleeves, sturdy shoes and socks, headgear. No sandals, flops, or open toes permitted.

Bug Dope – You may want to wear a little something. Thanks to the drier and cooler weather the mosquitoes are not real bad but there are still enough around to be aggravating.

Kits – Bring them. You will be utilizing your kit items. Also bring a full canteen of water. I will have some additional potable water at the class site.

Part of this exercise involves conditioning to pack weight. THIS IS IMPORTANT. I strongly recommend that everyone begin working on a regular program of conditioning NOW in preparation for our upcoming Early Winter Trek the first weekend in December. What you do in the way of conditioning between now and then will pay a huge reward.

I will have an assortment of traps with me. I will also demonstrate how to construct and utilize snares for survival trapping from items that are normally carried in our kits.

Fire and Food Prep – As part of this exercise we will also be working on constructing our fire lays, using either ferro rod or primitive flint and steel to generate fire, and cooking lunch in our bush pots.

I will NOT have a heavy cast iron Dutch oven in my kit. This is a YOU BRING IT YOU COOK IT on YOUR FIRE meal as a practice run for our early winter trek. Ramen is light to pack and easy to cook. So are items like instant grits and oatmeal.