Bushcraft, Wild Camping and Encumbrance

I’ve recently posted about the fallacy of the adventurers backpack and kit for wilderness travel. I’ve become increasingly interested in creating my own adventurer’s kit to see how easy it would be to get out and go wild camping. At the same time, I though it would be cool to learn a bit more about bushcraft. So I purchased these books.

Handy, if I Ever Get to Play a Ranger!

I’m in the process of gathering my kit. Hopefully, when the weather gets a little bit better, I’ll be off on an adventure! I’ll keep you posted.

Published by

Creighton

Creighton is the publisher at Raging Swan Press and the designer of the award winning adventure Madness at Gardmore Abbey. He has designed many critically acclaimed modules such as Retribution and Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands and worked with Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, Expeditious Retreat Press, Rite Publishing and Kobold Press.

3 thoughts on “Bushcraft, Wild Camping and Encumbrance”

  1. My reading selections have included real-life exploration stories, and those guys always (ALWAYS) have a mule train. Or multiple ships. Or . . . you get the idea.

    It turns out that the world is really hostile to humans. Weather could not be predicted until fairly recently. Food, for example, in any quantity is hard to come by, so if you have more than a few people, you need that train of supplies. High calorie diets are necessary for people working/running/fighting on a daily basis. And you just don’t find 4,000 kcal/day foraging.

    There’s an old television series I’ve found, Bush Tucker Man, where the host goes into the Australian Outback and forages. Great stuff to remind yourself that if you don’t have the knowledge of how to get food, you’ll probably die. Hope you brought a ranger or druid along!

  2. This reminds me of a lesson from a bit of wilderness training a few decades back:

    Surviving is not necessarily thriving. In fact, surviving is rarely, if ever thriving.

    Hiking, climbing and engaging in combat require enormous amounts of calories. There are good reasons when in a survival situation, its a good idea to make camp and do little more than:

    1) Make shelter

    2) Make fire

    3) Find food

    4) Wait. And maybe signal rescuers, should they come near you. Don’t waste calories. Hiking out, finding civilization is doable, depending on terrain, knowledge of LandNav and presence of calories. But don’t get crazy.

    Think Military: How much logistics go into producing the supplies to keep the Tip Of The Spear ready to fight?

  3. I taught our scouts to start fire with bow-drill the last 2 years. There are some great youtube vids with good tricks of the trade. I couldn’t do it for a few days, but the first time I finally got a good coal, dropped it into my “bird nest”, and sat their blowing life into it…when the flames erupted I ran around like the kids on Lord of the Flies. You need to give it a try. Obviously, matches/lighter work too, but there is something to be said for doing it more “primitive”. However, the smart investment is a magnifier glass – my daughter made fire in about 60 seconds after putting a good bird-nest together. Cool…but I don’t think she felt the same as I did blowing life into that bow-drill bird nest.

Leave a Reply to GM1990 Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.