11. Water Collection and Purification
When traveling outdoors, you should bring a supply of water that will last at least three days. When your water runs out, it’s important to know how to find water. When you do, I suggest you make your camp close to your water source, but take precautions for flooding and animals and other people passing through. Filter your water to remove debris and other contaminants, then boil it to kill bacteria and pathogens.
If it’s winter, know that you can drink water from melted snow, so long as you bring it to a reasonable temperature. Don’t leave it up to your stomach to do the heating, you’ll ge headaches and expend precious calories doing so. Use a bandana to prefilter debris, and let it melt into a container.
12. Making Shelter
Building a shelter is a critical bushcraft skill. Hypothermia is a real danger, building a shelter keeps you dry, protects you from the cold and from animals lurking nearby. If stranded without a tent, make use of branches, leaves, moss, and other materials you see lying around. You can even use items in your bug out bag, such as paracord, your tarp or your poncho.
13. Tracking People and Animals
Humans who are not skilled in stealth movement will always leave a trail. If you know how to track signs you will find a missing person quicker. There’s so many things you can learn just by looking at tracks. You can figure out whether it’s a man or a woman, how long ago they were there, how many people in the group and so on.
Much like humans, animals are also creatures of habit and follow the same paths in obtaining their food and water source. Finding them means you can set traps in strategic places, increasing your chances of catching them obviously.
Keep in mind you should also look at torn branches, overturn rocks and other things besides the tracks to give you more clues.
14. Batoning wood
Batoning is wood splitting technique, where a knife is wedged in a piece of wood and struck repeatedly with a baton-like object, usually another piece of wood (see photo on the left).
You will need a sturdy bushcraft knife for this, though I would suggest a hatchet to spare your knife’s blade.