Loon Calls

I have to say I am a lunatic for Loon calls. I think they are absolutely stunning. Similar to coyotes, their call is something beautiful but also almost has an eerie quality to it. Unlike coyotes, they pose no actual threat. There is something so beautifully lonely about their calls. I can't quite place it.

How To: Build a Fire with a Flint & Steel

The title is pretty self-explanatory. Here's what you'll need:

Flint and Steele
Cotton or some other very small, dry material (i.e. dead cattail fluff)
Tinder (not the app)
Kindling
Large Sticks up to logs

1. Hold flint firmly in you non-dominant hand and place sharp end on edge of cotton. Strike the steel downward against the flint, pressing firmly and quickly. Be sure to aim sparks at cotton. Do this as many times as it necessary for the cotton to light.
2. Once the cotton has lit, guide it to the tinder. Begin creating a sort of "tepee" shape, because fire catches best this way. 
3. Keep building the fire. Gradually add larger and larger pieces. Be sure to not use wood that is too wet, green or rotten. When the fire is really going, moderately wet pieces can be placed near or on the fire to dry out and eventually burn.

How To: Build a Debris Shelter

Debris shelters are some of the easiest to build and most stable shelters you can make. To build one you'll need:

Sticks and logs of varying length and widths
Leaves or other methods of cover
Bark (optional but highly recommended)

1. Assess the size of the shelter you will need based on the number of people that plan to sleep in it. It is better, however, to have a shelter that is a little smaller in colder temperatures to better insulate by utilizing body heat.
2. Based on this assessment, find a log of an appropriate size and strength to be the main support beam. It is very important that this log be sturdy and absolutely not rotten. If the log is too weak your structure could cave in on itself and possibly seriously injure you.
3. Once you have found such log, place it in the Y of tree, ideally by flat ground. If no such place exists, and you have twine, tightly tie this log to a tree by flat ground. If you sleep on steep or uneven ground, you will find yourself moving to the whims of gravity while you sleep. If you neither have twine nor a good location, seek another method of shelter building.
4. Once this log has been placed and is secure, gather sticks and lean them against the main support. Make them close together and don't use rotten sticks.
5. Weave smaller, greener, more flexible sticks between the stick you laid against the  main support.
6. Cover this frame with leaves and other debris. Pack them down while you put them on so that it is tight. To make sure that your structure is as insulated as possible, make the leaf walls approximately one foot thick. Crawl inside your structure and check for any holes, and cover them with leaves if you find them.
7. Lay bark across leaves to make "natural shingles". These are excellent at keeping out rain, and if it does rain, make an adorable "pitter patter" when it starts to fall. 

There you have it! Go forth and be wild.

How to: The Minnesota Fishing Rig

The Minnesota fishing rig is a shore-fishing technique my father and his friends did up in the Northern Woods, when they wanted to catch something but also needed to sleep, or wanted to gather around to fire. It's fairly simple to do and does not require much.

What you need: 

Fishing Rod

2 pieces of split shot

A kayak or canoe

A can

Worms

Hooks

Swivels

Line

1. Take your fishing rod and attach a swivel. Tie a hook to about six inches of line and attach that to the swivel. Attach two pieces of split shot to the line as well.
2. Put your worm on the hook. Stab it through the heart and wrap it around a few times.
3. Have one friend get in the kayak or canoe and take the pole with them. Have them paddle out about fifty or sixty yards and drop the line. Give it plenty of slack.
4. The friend in the kayak paddles back to the shore and hands it to you while they get out. Place the rod in a place where if a fish does come and take it, your rod will not get pulled into the water.
5. Take some of the line and loop it around a can filled about half way with water. It should be light enough to fall over, but not blow away in the wind. 
6. Sleep, play cards, or do whatever and check on your can every now and then. If the can has fallen over, you most likely have caught a fish!

Sentimental

A little while ago Clara and I decided to head back to our old forts and "cities" that we built as ten-year-olds.We walked back down to what seemed like so far away, and found that some of our structures were still standing. All of the interiors were now overgrown with thorns and weeds, some old trinkets scattered around the "mall". For fifth graders, our structures weren't so bad, especially if only a few boards had fallen over. It made me somewhat melancholy, though. We're going to graduate in a month or so, and soon all of this will be so far away both in mind and geography.

Music from Students

My fellow CBC teammate Isaac Lawson plays guitar, and he can finger pick pretty well. Recently I asked Isaac if he would be willing to record and send me some of his own work/covers of other songs, and he did. What he's sent me is pretty good, and I will end up using it. This helps me out a lot too, because then I don't have to worry about copyright infringement or licensing fees.

Possible Community Outreach

Clara and I were both girl scouts many a year back, and we had a blast at campouts and meetings. Besides our initial interviews, our community outreach has not been the strongest component of our project-so we were thinking, we would have a workshop with some girl scouts on fire building. We feel that this is our strongest survival asset, and we could do a good job teaching young girls about fire safety, how to start a fire, maintain and build a fire, and also partake in some campfire cooking. We will reach out to the troop at Ellis Hollow, if there still is one, and give back to our old troop stomping grounds in a way I never could have guessed.

The Morning of Our Departure

I took these photos with my flip phone the morning of our departure. It takes surprisingly good photos.

Back from the Adirondacks

Clara and I got home from the Adirondacks on Sunday, and we had quite the time. Black fly season has begun, and I got so many bug bites that weekend I still am finding some. We really lucked out on the weather- it didn't rain once. I can't wait to edit the footage from our last trip- it's going to be great.

The View From the Kayak

Manly?

A hot topic of recent conversation is the (not surprising) announcement of Hillary Clinton's 2016 Presidential Campaign. Not only does this mean that I will be registering to vote very soon, but also that if she wins, she will be the first female president in the history of the United States. Obnoxious, sexist things have been said about the possibility of a woman being president- from wondering how she'll manage being a grandma and being president to periods impairing a female president's judgement once every month. Not only is this nowhere even close to reasonable- periods do not impair judgement- and even if they did, Hillary Clinton is in her sixties- she hasn't had a period in about ten years.

I'm talking about this because like the Oval Office, for some reason the woods is seen as a place for men. A "real man" knows how to hunt, catch, skin and gut his own food, and should know how to survive so he can "save the day". Now this is a load of bull and in no way reflects my own opinion, but this is what's enforced when we find survival information on sites with titles that have the word "man" or "manly" somewhere in them. This idea is demonstrated in survival shows on television- almost all of them are exclusively male, except for one in which the participants are naked (Naked and Afraid), and another which features a married couple (Man, Woman, Wild). There are no large survival shows that solely feature female survivalists. According to television, a woman in the wild is accompanied by a man- always.

Let's talk about Naked and Afraid for a second though because the way gender dynamics play out in that show is interesting, and changes episode to episode. Naked and Afraid is a show in which two survivalists, one man and one woman, must survive for 21 days without even the clothes on their backs. The nudity serves another challenge to the survivalists to make them both more vulnerable and is in no way intended to be sexy for the viewers. However I do remember one time when the male contestant, a devout Mormon, was uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping in a smallish cave with a naked woman- even though he had signed up to do the show- because he had a wife, and thereafter was just ungodly rude to his co-contestant.  Throughout the show he would interrupt her, insist that his opinions on what to do were right, even though he was wrong and it cost them two perfectly good meals of snake. Some pairs work better than others, however, and the way their friendship blossoms over the course of those twenty-one days is quite amazing to watch.

Sometimes, too, the men will get sick and the women end up doing all the work for the entire three weeks. One episode the two contestants were on a large island, and the man drank some nasty water, even though the woman told him it probably wasn't worth the risk. He spent the rest of the stay lying in the shelter in agony, red as a lobster from the sun and having to pass diarrhea on the regular. Not only did that woman take care of herself- she took care of that poor, smelly man. I'm by no means saying that women are better survivalists than men, but there are some excellent, highly skilled female survivalists, and they deserve their own shows as well.

Trailer is Here!

Trailer Tomorrow

Yes the trailer will be out tomorrow! I'm very excited to release what I've spent a lot of time on. This trailer however has also helped me practice editing in a way which is much more manageable, considering it's only 2 minutes long, whereas the documentary is still going to be pretty long in comparison to that. It also helped me chose clips rapidly and know which parts I wanted to use, which saved time in the long run and will help me when I return to editing the big documentary.

In Class- April 28th

Clara has been the main force behind pushing me out of my comfort zone. As one of my closest friends and teammates, I've had a very strong desire not to let her down. It's very rooted in a similar desire to keep pushing your hardest in a crew race. You have faith in your other boatmates that they are pushing their hardest, so the thought of giving anything less than your hardest is unthinkable. Clara has been doing a lot of research on her survival, so in turn I have been staying after school to edit.