[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- Here we are.
♪ ♪
[water trickling]
Little brook right here.
♪ ♪
I find this spot, and I like it,
because I've got a little creek running through it,
and it's not on the river.
The creek's got a lot of clay in it,
the creek's got a lot of rock in it,
and there seems to be a lot of fuel wood around.
It's also gonna be sheltered.
It's got a really nice slope behind it.
Right on the side of that hill.
I figure it's got enough of what I need
that I'm gonna be able to make it work.
♪ ♪
I'm gonna try to build this shelter pretty simply.
But we'll see how it goes.
♪ ♪
Winging it and sort of flying by the seat of my pants,
playing by ear, has always been my style,
for better or for worse.
And, you know, sometimes it works out,
and sometimes it doesn't.
This'll end up being my floor.
♪ ♪
So as I'm building my shelter, I have this concept where
I wanna use as much economy of motion as I can.
If I'm gonna cut a tree down and haul it back to my shelter
then I'm gonna use it from the stump to the tip.
Very sophisticated digging technique.
♪ ♪
Learned it from my dog.
♪ ♪
[quietly] Yes.
♪ ♪
[patting]
[soft music]
♪ ♪
Think I'd like to build sort of an A-frame
into the hillside
and then pile a lot of moss on top of it.
♪ ♪
Timbers on the inside, like a mine shaft.
Moss on the outside.
That should keep the rain from washing it away.
♪ ♪
As I'm looking for my structural timbers,
I'm also trying to find something to do
with all of these long, green branches,
and I settle on this idea
of weaving part of my structure
the way that they do a lot of cattle fencing
in East Africa.
♪ ♪
I'm liking this.
Tying these things to the hill with the spruce roots.
That'll make me feel a lot better about this.
♪ ♪
[ominous music]
♪ ♪
[tapping]
♪ ♪
I sort of start one wall as a cabin
and start the other wall
as a giant sort of wicker structure.
♪ ♪
The wicker is time-consuming,
but it's pretty energy-efficient.
♪ ♪
[grunts]
A raised bed's important for me.
You gotta get off the ground in any survival situation
'cause it just sucks the heat out of you.
I've chosen to get really high off the ground
because I like, as a tall guy,
to be able to sit on the edge of my bed
and have my feet just barely touch the ground.
But also, underneath my bed,
it's gonna be all my firewood storage.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
I wove the willow and the alder
and drove stakes in the ground
to get my stove up off the ground.
Um, I'm a tall guy,
and I don't want to spend the entire time hunched over.
So I built it up that way and then packed it with rocks
and clay, and then I mixed the clay
with grasses and horsetail
to give it some sort of structure.
[soft music]
♪ ♪
I turned to this idea of this leaning chimney.
If this chimney sort of leans back into the hill
and doesn't have to stand on its own,
I can use this clay and this rock
and build this extensive flue system
that's gonna keep sparks from coming out
and landing on my roof and such.
♪ ♪
Just gotta make sure that
everything gets covered up with moss.
Again, it's just that thermal mass.
I'm layin' 'em all in roughly the same way.
So they should shed water.
So on the front, we just did moss and branches,
but on the sides here,
where we have sand so convenient,
we're mixing sand in there too.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
I've got myself a bulletproof shelter
that I can really stick the winter out in.
And now I can just focus on food and firewood,
and staying warm and staying sane.
[fire crackling]
♪ ♪
There we go.
♪ ♪