Large sheets of old bark can provide you with ample roofing material. Bark is often filled
with small holes, but these can usually be covered by laying the bark in shingles.
As with any natural material, boughs may not always be where you
need them to be. Once, while teaching survival skills to a husband and
wife, I was touting the benefits of boughs as shelter materials. It was a
perfect teaching opportunity, because we were walking right through a
“Christmas tree” forest. Two hundred yards later, however, we had left the
spruce forest and entered a deciduous forest, where there wasn’t a bough
to be seen! Our discussion naturally turned to making an emergency short
term shelter out of leaves.
A couple hundred yards can make all the difference in the world
when it comes to survival. When you travel, make a note of the natural
materials you see.
You might be lucky enough to come across a tree that’s been blown
down by the wind, root bed and all. These root beds are walls of earth as
large as 10 feet (3 m) in diameter that often stand up perpendicular to the
ground and can be used to form the walls of a shelter.
You may also come across a boulder in the forest. If it’s large enough,
use this as one wall of your shelter, as described above for root beds.
Shelter (^) | 169