Making Fire with Bamboo?

Back when I got started studying survival, making a friction fire from a Bow-drill was akin to being a magician. Anyone and everyone would get wide-eyed when the two pieces of wood I was rubbing together began to smoke, and they would erupt in applause as the tinder bundle finally burst into flame. Creating that fire confirmed a rumor they had heard, and doubted since they were 4 years old.

Survival was not on TV, there was no internet, Instagram, or YouTube to teach you to create anything you would ever want to learn. To find new and exciting traps I would leave the woods and dare to go to the jungles of New York City so that I could go to the indigenous peoples sections at the Museum of Natural History. There I would spend hours sketching basket-weaving patterns, trap parts, pottery designs, and hiding from the Leopard-man...(if you know, you know).

One of my favorite sections was the Amazonian indigenous sections. There they had pig-traps with deadly spikes, baskets that would constrict around Manioc powder, and best of all, a fire-making mechanism from Bamboo! Finally, making a fire was exactly how I pictured it when I was 5. As simple as can be...cut a piece of bamboo in half, and rub one half against the other and viola!

Making a bamboo fire saw work is all about having the right materials. You want dead, but not rotten bamboo, not too thin, but definitely not too thick. Ideally, the bamboo has not washed up on the beach as for some reason the salt makes things much more difficult. While the bow-drill takes finess, fire-saw takes the right materials and brute strength. Just go until it feels like your arms are going to fall off, and then go a little more. But its simple, and much easier to make when you dont have a knife.

Greenland Indigenous Kayak Adventure

To Stay, or Go for Help?

After 9 days, stuck in the snow, deep in the mountains of Oregon, this is the question the Kim family faced. Up until this point, they had made many good decisions. They ran their car for heat only when needed, and rationed their food supplies, they were able to make a fire and melt snow for water.

We can all remember the iconic advice of staying put if you get lost in the forest--"searchers will find you!" But after 9 days, when no one knows the detour you took into the mountains, your car is now out of gas, and your tiny food rations are running out and your car is covered in snow, 'staying put' must feel like an inevitable path toward death.

Rarely in survival is there a universal approach. While staying put was the obvious choice in retrospect in this case, you can find numerous other examples where going for help was the only reason a group was saved (*the Uruguayan football team in 1972). The answers are never concrete.

What is always universal is that to survive you must find ways to keep your body systems functioning and to do that you must have shelter (protection from the elements), pure water, fire (for staying warm, cooking food, melting snow), and lastly food. Survival training can never give you the answers to all the variables you may face, but what it can do is help you develop the best strategy to create a plan that will get you to safety. By practicing survival you can increase your 'bag of tricks' in the wilderness so that you can provide yourself with a much greater chance of having a solution to the obstacles you will inevitably face.