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How to make fire
Trail Blazer Survival School in Union teaches outdoors enthusiasts the essentials of how to survive in the wilderness. Instructor Justin Williams, blowing into a handful of tinder to start a fire, starts with the basics of fire, shelter, water and trapping.
Photo by Andrew Haworth
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Trapping food
As part of their entry-level wilderness-survival course, students Landon Gardner and father Ricky learn to build bird traps. They also learned to set traps for game and throwing a rabbit stake, a hand-carved hunting tool.
Photo by Andrew Haworth
Just as the last daylight starts to fade in the west, I find myself alone in the woods.
Falling back on my training, I force myself to slow down—to observe, to plan, to run through my mental checklist.
First, I survey the area for a flat space between two trees. Next, I tie a taut line with parachute cord and set about pitching my lean-to tarp, hammered down by four wooden stakes I’ve carved with my knife. And then I go looking for a cedar tree. When I find one, I know to scrape its bark for fire tinder, which I spark with a small flints-parker called a ferro rod. The twigs hiss and crackle as I pile on the kindling, coaxing a small fire to life.
So far, I am meeting the “survival equation.” I have shelter. I have fire. I have packed in my water, as well as some dehydrated food that I prepare and eat as the sun drops down and a thin sliver of moon rises in the south. Finally, I lie down beneath my tarp. But I can’t sleep. I keep thinking about something my instructor, Justin Williams, said during my first day of wilderness survival training.
“We all think, ‘Who wants to die?’ ” he says. “But the reality is, you get out there, and your comforts are taken away, your conveniences are removed, and the people around you who provide you that comfort and security … are taken away. You begin to isolate yourself and retreat within yourself. That’s when people begin to lose hope and give up the will to live.”
All around me, the night forest is creaking. What sounds like footsteps echo in the leaf litter. The fire has died down. The night is dark. And sure enough, even though it’s only been a few hours, I can feel that isolation setting in.
Into the wild
In truth, my survival is not at stake, which makes my reaction all the more startling. I have voluntarily stranded myself in the woods as part of the Essential Wilderness Survival Course at Trail Blazer Survival School near Union, and if it all gets to be too much, I can walk a quarter-mile back to my car.
“Here, we’re off the grid, but even this is too much civilization,” says Tom Weathers, a Laurens Electric Cooperative member and founder of the school. “But it’s good for people who are green to the woods. You can start them off with something they are comfortable with before throwing them in the deep end.”
Weathers and Williams at first seem like an unlikely pair. Williams has a degree in theology and is a former pastor, originally from Arkansas. Weathers retired from the Air Force and now owns a private preschool with his wife in Greenville. They befriended each other at an advanced survival school in Missouri, where they discovered they shared a love for the woods and a similar survivalist’s ethos, which is reflected in their slogan, “Living for Today, Planning for Tomorrow.”
Their school is part of a growing survival movement — conventions, websites, reality TV shows, even college courses and dedicated lines of outdoor survival gear. Williams believes that much of this is a natural response to two pervasive influences in our modern lives: technology and consumerism.
“A lot of what we’re about here at Trail Blazer is not just self-reliance,” he says. “It’s sustainability. Our goal is to teach you to learn not to be so dependent on things.
“We’re trying to teach minimalism. How can you get by with less?” he continues. “We want to instill the confidence to survive with very little, in any situation—in a doomsday situation or just getting off the trail.”
Keys to survival
The school is located on 22 acres of hilly woods that back into Sumter National Forest—a perfect location for learn-by-doing survival courses. Students begin by taking the two-day Essential Wilderness Survival Course, learning the basics of fire, shelter, water and trapping. Upon successful completion, students can then take the four-day intermediate Applied Wilderness Survival, and then the five-day Advanced Wilderness Survival.
At the start of my essentials course, Williams begins his intro lecture with a stark warning.
“There’s a lot of stuff on survival shows that will get you killed, straight and simple,” he says.
He’s referring to the abundance of so-called reality shows, with names such as Survivorman, Dual Survival, Alone, Naked and Afraid, Survivor, and Dude, You’re Screwed—not to mention the thousands of YouTube channels dedicated to survival techniques; the movies like Castaway, The Martian and The Revenant; and the books that go back at least as far as Robinson Crusoe.
The other two students in my class—Ricky Gardner of Clemson and his 10-year-old son, Landon—have seen almost every episode of every survival television show, and they have enrolled in the class to hone their skills, partly with the hope that it will help Ricky when he tries out for Naked and Afraid.
Ricky says, “I like to go out as far off the trail as possible and see if I can make my way back. I’m one of those hardcore…”
“You’re not as hardcore as Bear Grylls!” Landon chimes in.
“No, I’ll never be as hardcore as Bear Grylls,” his father admits.
“He eats yak brains,” Landon says of Grylls, the British adventurer who popularized survivalist reality shows as host of Man vs. Wild.
But we won’t, Williams tells us, be eating yak brains. Not today. Today, we must understand the rule of threes. The human body can go three minutes without oxygen, three hours in extreme exposure, three days without water and three weeks without food. Wilderness survival is primarily a matter of managing these priorities.
Preemptive measures begin with having a good survival kit. In the essentials course, our kits include folding saws, cordage, water bottles, tarps, flashlights and water filters—the things you might carry in a backpack while hiking or hunting.
But, from here on, Williams says, “Your goal is to get where you don’t need all this stuff. Your long-term goal is where you can simply survive with a knife.”
Williams takes us through pitching A-frames and lean-tos with our tarps and cordage, and we learn new knots—the trucker’s hitch, the Prusik knot—and how to carve effective stakes. As I learn these skills, it occurs to me wilderness survival requires looking at the woods in an entirely new light. You are an active participant, like an animal, looking for the path of least resistance, which is the path that keeps you alive.
With our basic shelters pitched well enough to keep out any rain, it’s time to learn fire-building.
“Nine times out of 10 in the woods, I’ll use this,” Williams says, holding up a Bic lighter. “But in a survival situation, you would put this away for an emergency on wet, rainy days.”
He demonstrates instead a variety of alternative methods for building a fire. We learn to use magnifying glasses, friction, flint and steel, ferro rods, and other tools to get our flames going. Thinking about what he calls an “urban survival situation,” Williams also shows us how to start a fire with steel wool and a battery, and a chemical fire with potassium permanganate.
Then he ties a string between two trees, about 2 feet high, and we have a contest to see who can spark a fire that will burn the string first. Like so many survival-school teaching moments, we must imagine ourselves in a scenario where making a fire quickly might be the difference between life and death.
Water and food
At night, alone in the woods—even with my car close by, and the others camped elsewhere on the property—imagining such a scenario is much easier. Indeed, I remember in the night that fire is even more than warmth, even more than something you use to sterilize your water or cook your food. Fire is security and protection, the comfort of light.
That is why, all night without it, I toss and turn, retreating within myself. And that is why I welcome the morning light when it comes on the second day of the course, a day devoted to water and hunting.
For these skills, we drive our cars to a quiet stretch of the nearby Enoree River.
“Whenever you are considering a water source, you want to find the cleanest, purest water you can find, and preferably running water of some sort. And at the same time, you want to make sure there are no animal tracks or animal carcasses,” Williams says.
As we scout the river’s sandy banks for a good watering spot, Weathers points out freshwater clams that could provide calories if you were extremely hungry. Our lesson this morning is making primitive water filters out of bamboo. We cut a hole in the bottom of the bamboo sleeve, and then we place a layer of charcoal at the bottom, then sand, then gravel, then grass.
While we wait for the water to drip through the filter, Williams sets up four metal targets shaped like woodland creatures. With 2-foot pieces of wood we’ve carved, called “rabbit stakes,” he shows us how to approach the target slowly and how to throw the stake at deadly speed.
After a few attempts, it’s clear that becoming a proficient wilderness hunter will require practice, just like everything else Williams shows us the rest of the day. We learn how to make cordage out of leaf fibers, build wire-noose snares for catching birds and deadfall snares for trapping squirrels, and how to weave a gill net to catch fish.
Back at camp, Ricky Gardner says, “So many good ideas out there. You can never learn it all. Just when you think you know something, somebody comes along and does it better.”
Sitting by a fire and sipping pine-needle tea out of bamboo cups, we all nod in agreement.
“The modern comforts of our lives have come to own us in some way,” Williams says reflectively. “It’s hard to step away from that. But once you do, it can be revolutionary in someone’s life. Because now we are enjoying creation and nature for what it is.”
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Get More
For more on wilderness survival training, contact:
Trail Blazer Survival School & Adventures
Offers survival courses on a private, 22-acre tract near Union and Upstate adventure tours from the main office in Simpsonville.
PHONE: (864) 263-3850
EMAIL: tom@trailblazersurvival.com