Tracker of Plants

Monday, April 16th

Today the Feral Failures Club (FFC) was formed! The club was inspired by my frustration at building a working pump drill. See my initial rant and the birth of the idea on the Rewild forum. We decided to make a list of projects for people to choose from so we could discuss technique and learn from eachother’s failures. To simplify things I decided that we should choose projects in accord with Urban Scout’s weekly laundry list. Then we decided to narrow it down. Three projects was deemed a good number, large enough to have some choice, but small enough to ensure that two or more people would work on the same thing. I took the liberty of declaring the projects for the week to be:

• making a stone axe
• boiling water with hot rocks
• making a trap to catch squirrel or other small animals

On this day I also gave my pump drill another go and began to document the whole experience for Project Failure. I had said I on the forum I was going to write a wiki article on leeks and making cheese and yogurt, but I didn’t do that.

Tuesday, April 17th

I finished the pump drill article.

Wednesday, April 18th

After too many days indoors sleeping until 2pm and watching clips of Mr. Show on the internet, I decided I had better do a project. I chose making a trap, because well, that was the only one my boyfriend deemed not too lame for us to work on together. I made a Paiute deadfall since that was one of the two Urban Scout mentioned he would be making and I already had experience with a figure four. It wasn’t too hard to make and it looked enough like it might work that I wasn’t allowed to leave it up in the yard overnight.

Thursday, April 19th

 

 

Party Central.

The next day I headed out to the woods to camp, work on projects, and be alone. The first thing I did was stop at the location of a rock outcropping labeled on the topo map that I had never been to. You see, my ultimate goal is to cache food and supplies at all of the numerous rock outcroppings in the area so that I may wander from one to the other free and unencumbered, utilizing the natural shelter they provide. I did not find these rocks to be very pleasing for my purpose, too close to the road, and lacking good overhangs, but I did find edible rock tripe to experiment with and, to my delight, an abandoned mosquito net in near perfect condition! Believe it or not this is the second good mosquito net I’ve found in my life.

Next I headed on down to my basecamp at another set of rocks for the weekened to do some exploring. I was also hoping to recover a tarp I left there in winter when I jumped ship on a particularly cold night sleeping in a quinzee, but alas it was gone. Oh well, lose a tarp, gain a mosquito net, that’s what I always say. The land is owned by conglomerate Collins Pine. Graciously, they allow public access for hunting and other activities. There are two rather well known rock outcroppings in this area but I thought there might be a lesser-known formation in between them that I could call home. That is the first thing I looked for, but unfortunately I was mistaken, so I returned to the first conglomeration to look for a spot to camp. There are two main shelters at this rock city. The first one is the most used and a well-known party spot. Therefore unsuitable for my purposes. The second one is a bit more hidden and not used as often. No it wasn’t me who drew that crazy primitive spiral!

Lesser-known venue.

Fire pit.

But both these shelters were too obvious for my taste. I didn’t want anyone bothering me. I found a natural depression might make a good scout pit with a little work, but it was a little too damp. I scouted the boulders farther from the main outcropping for a shelter strangers would be less likely to stumble upon. I came upon a promising looking nook.

 

 

Mall.

Now I was feeling hungry and I had no food. Though I had sampled some ants from an anthill I spotted and found them divine, I decided to go to the nearby mall and pick up some supplies. I have been working on revamping and perfecting the survival kit in my car since the last time I went camping, the last week of March. I travel back and forth frequently and also camp spontaneously so my “survival” kit is not in any way limited to emergency situations but geared much more towards ease in daily life.

First I went to Big Lots and got some discount canned and boxed food: smoked oysters, Riga sprats, a dozen boxes of organic mac ‘n cheese, pasta and sauce, etc. Then I went to K-mart and bought some contact solution, painkillers, condoms, and duct tape. Oh, yes, and I bought a People magazine. What can I say? Despite the fact that I think they are retarded and in no way envy their lives, I take strange comfort in reading about celebrities.

Around dusk I headed back to the basecamp and decided I would sleep in the back of the station wagon, though it made me a little uncomfortable being parked so close to the road. It’s not that I am scared of people harming me, I just don’t even like them looking at me…or my car. I spread out my sleeping materials, donned my headlamp and set about reading my magazine. I wasn’t expecting to find anything survival related in there, but I did! In a story about Martha Stewart seeing off her billionaire friend Charles Simonyi who is about to become the world’s fifth space tourist it says that to prepare Simonyi, “spent two days in the woods, slept in the rain, washed his face in a stream and ate dry cottage cheese.” Good God man! In a stream! Two days! How ever did you do it?!

At 11:00 pm a group of rowdy drunken or soon to be drunken youths pulled up and headed off to the main rock shelter. I suspect they spent a cold, uncomfortable night there, seeing as how it got down to 34 degrees and they returned at 6:00 am. Wonder if Simonyi could handle it?

Friday, April 20th

 

 

Willow fish trap.

The first thing I did was look for a place to set my fish trap. I knew where there was a small stream nearby and I walked down it until it got bigger. I actually walked down it quite a ways to see how far from civilization it was. I wanted it to be very far since fish traps are illegal and trout season opened only the weekend before meaning the streams are crawling with fishermen. Luckily this stream was pretty isolated. I saw a fish and set my trap nearby. I had also constructed a minnow trap, which I set in a deep pool. I baited both traps with Little Ceasar’s crazy bread. My secret weapon? Nah, just what I had on hand. On the way back from setting the fish traps I passed through a clearcut and noticed there were a lot of large rounds of wood just sitting there asking to be made into coal burned containers. After lunch I packed my bags and moved out of the car deeper into the woods. First, I went up to the rock shelter cover areas I hadn’t checked out the day before and to see how much trash the hoodlums had left behind. Not too much. Some Smirnoff Ice bottles (pussies) and a bag of potato chips. I don’t really look at trash the same way now that I am a scout.

 

 

Bowl in waiting.

It used to depress me but now I see it as an opportunity. Glass and plastic bottles, bits of fishing line, rope, and scraps of metal—all things that could come in handy in survival. It pisses me off when they break the bottles though. That renders them not only useless but ruins a good camping spot for walking barefoot and sitting on the ground. In the end I returned to the same place I had found the day before because it was closest to the stream and clearcut…oh sorry, shelterwood cut…where I would be working. In fact, next I decided to get started on my burn bowl. There were many round logs available already sawed to size but I saw a very flat, split piece of wood sticking out of a slash pile and thought that would make an interesting project, more like a plate than a bowl. It was about 10 feet long. I decided I would burn the end off because I was curious as to how hard this would be, and what it would be like to try and burn a bowl if there were no precut rounds to work with. This required making a fire in the middle of the slash pile, no easy feat. At first I thought it would be easy to find wood in the middle of a clearcut, but the stuff in the slash pile hadn’t been aged long enough and was still a little green. I ended up using it neverthless.

During the time my log was burning I managed to make and set up new Paiute deadfall set. I had left the old one at Nick’s. I baited it with a deep fried mushroom. Nick actually called when I was setting up (good cel reception here) and that was when I realized it was only Friday, I had thought it was Saturday. Hmm, here I was in the woods trying to avoid people for the weekend and it wasn’t even really the weekend yet. Whoops.

I burned on top of and below the plank for an hour or two but it didn’t burn it all the way through before I got bored with it. I let the fire burn out and removed some of the logs pinning it down and pulled it from the pile so that I could build my next fire on flat ground rather than in the middle of a pile of other logs and sticks where the coals tended to filter down to the ground. Then I left it there to work on the next day and went to check my fish traps. No luck, but in the pool where I had set the minnow trap I started turning over rocks looking for crayfish and lo and behold I caught three including a really big one. I continued upstream but only managed to catch one more yet I was pretty psyched to have caught four crayfish! It seems like something that came naturally when we were kids. We could catch them one after another without even trying or being the least bit aware (or perhaps aware on a more instinctual level?) of technique or habitat, but since I have begun to look for them as an adult with the intent of eating them I have had little success (are they aware of my intentions?).

I placed my fish trap in a new location. On my way back up to camp I noticed a rivulet running down the hillside exposing a layer of nearly pure clay. I filed that fact away in my mind for later. Back at camp I went to start a fire to boil my crayfish but my lighter was missing. Dagnabbit! I must have dropped it in that slash pile. Well, I wasn’t about to make a bow drill since that’s a skill I have yet to prefect and I hadn’t seen any great materials besides. I had better go back to the car and get a new lighter rather than try and look for something I might not find. I returned to find that one of my crayfish had escaped! I wasn’t in the mood to search for him. Soon I had the water boiling and popped the remaining crawdaddies in there for about six minutes, no not five, six.

But when they were done I found there was not much worth eating. I wasn’t expecting a meal out of them but still I was disappointed. I also had never eaten crawfish before so I wasn’t quite sure what parts I ought to eat, though I figured it in a survival situation “all parts” would be the answer. Well this was no survival situation and I saw a black veiny thing running through the tail, the intestine apparently, and decided that was probably not very good. I also found the head area, which is the stomach it turns out, to be filled with unpalatable grey goo. I saved my big guy for last. I would say he was about 6 inches long from tail to claw, as big as any I’ve seen here in PA. But wait! it turned out to be a she—she was filled with squarish bright red eggs. At least I hope that’s what they were. An internet search reveals that the eggs are carried on the outside of the body. I could have sworn these were on the inside. Did I just not notice? Did she have them covered with her tail? Or were these eggs that had not yet been laid?

 

 

Sleeping nook. Or is a cranny?

The sun set while I was eating dinner (mac ‘n cheese, the crayfish were just an appetizer.) As it grew dark I worked frantically to pile up a bed of leaves in a crevice between two rocks. I had found a big flat stone to use as a footboard, holding all the leaves inside. Of course, I had my sleeping bag too, I’m not that hardcore, but I knew without the leaves and the windbreak provided by the rocks the bag alone would be too cold. I crawled into my crevice and boy it was tight around the head and shoulders. Luckily it opened up farther down so I could draw my knees up as I like to do. I finished the novel I had been reading Lost Horizon, the famous story of Shangri-La, engaging but not terribly good with the exception of the quote, “Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue.” Actually, the interesting thing about this book is that is that Shangri-La is supposed to be a secret refuge, a place where civilization’s finest books, music, art, and architecture is preserved and a few lucky people dwell as the rest of society collapses and reverts back to the stone-age. Then eventually when people come looking to rebuild civilization, those things will be there for them. This book was published in 1933, between World Wars. I guess people have been predicting the collapse for awhile…

I went to sleep. The night was a bit of a tossy-turny in so much as I had room to toss and turn but I didn’t wake up for any long amount of time and was warm so I think it was rather successful.

Saturday, April 21st

 

 

Similar quartz pebble.

Soon after waking I decided to head down the hill work on my coal burning, nicer to work with fire while it was still a little cold outside. I started a fire on the ground underneath the now free plank (nearly started a forest fire the way the wind was blowing sparks into the dry leaves). Then I checked my Paiute trap and saw that the bait had been taken without the trap falling. The bait-stick was kind of jammed in there and not nearly sensitive enough. I reset it with new bait. I got bored, so when I was sure the fire was more or less under control I headed down the hill to look at rocks. I was thinking about making a stone axe, but all the rocks in sight were sandstone or quartz conglomerate. Typical of this kind of location. I figured sandstone was too soft and brittle to make an axe but maybe I could use that softness to my advantage try pecking out a little bowl for use as an oil lamp? I developed this idea on my own but I see in fact it can and has been done as evidenced by this article: http://www.wwmag.net/lamps.htm.I tried bashing some rocks together but the sandstone on sandstone only yielded a yellow mess. Good for face paint. Bad for my purposes. I needed a harder type of rock to try but there simply weren’t any. I found a pretty large quartz pebble in the stream two or three inches long, but it was still too small for pecking. I had been wondering if this type of rock could make a useable blade so I dropped another rock on it to smash it but it fractured irregularly, crumbling along what seemed to be pre-existing fissures. Not sure if a blade is possible with a more controlled strike.

 

 

Primtive ashtray.

I back went up the hill to make sure I was not burning down the forest and to stoke the fire around my plank and then returned to the stream to find that clay deposit. That morning I had gone to the car and brought back Thomas J. Elpel’s book Participating in Nature to read up on making primitive clay pottery. His method involves digging out the clay, dissolving it in a bucket of water and then pouring the mixture into a hole to filter out the impurities. I was feeling lazy and, besides unlike Montana, the clay here seems pretty pure so I just scooped some up and started working it, wedging it and tossing it back and forth between my hands. Then I started trying to form it into a bowl. It was not holding it’s shape well and developing a lot of cracks along the rim so I decided I ought to follow Elpel’s instructions and add 1/3 temper. I worked some sand into the clay and started again. Things were a little bit better but it still didn’t seem stiff enough to hold a bowl shape, especially not one with ¼ inch walls. Hmm. I tried making primitive pottery once before and even though it cracked during firing I don’t remember it being this troublesome.

 

 

I call this a Pennsylvania king.

Maybe I should have filtered my clay. Perhaps I need to make my bowl in a pre-made bowl. Oh well, I made a really small bowl with thick walls and left it on a rock to dry in the sun. When I returned to the fire my plank had finally burned through. Yay! Now I could actually start burning it for real. But I didn’t want to work on it just yet and I figured it would be easier if I just brought it up near my base camp and cooking fire so I hauled it up the hill.The next few hours were spent sunbathing and writing in my journal. Then I decided to work on a new bed, that little hole in the rocks was just too small. I would build a nice big bed back at the lesser-known of the two major rock overhangs. It was kind of cold and shady under this overhang and I didn’t really want to hang out there on a sunny day like this, but at night I wouldn’t know the difference and this bed would be a good thing to have in extremely rainy and snowy weather. Plus it looked like there was a big enough space for me to build a bed for two people, for future romantic interludes. I told myself I would only gather leaves for an hour and then stop. Unfortunately, the debris on the ground near this shelter was not nearly as thick and fluffy. At the end of the hour I had a “frame” and a very decent “mattress”. I went back to my old camp to make dinner and begin burning in the bowl.

I knew the piece I had chosen was a hardwood since all of the trees on the plateau were and as such would be a pain in the ass to burn, plus I knew from previous experience that things tend to move slowly until you get a depression started that holds the coals together so they keep burning on their own, so I was prepared for it to take awhile. Back when I was first freeing the piece from the rest of the tree I had serendipitously found a pithy piece of wood to make a blow tube out of? Blow tube, is that a technical term? Anyhow I’m not sure what it was made of. It may have been a blackberry stalk, are they hollow? Had I not found it, I remembered there were elderberry plants nearby from previous visits to the area and could have found one of those.

At dusk I headed off to my new bed, and read again until I felt tired. Although it was the same temperature that night as the last, this bed seemed much colder, even when I tried to bury myself in the leaves. I attribute this to a constant breeze being filtered down between the rocks. I admit there are disadvantages to these rock shelters, though I believe they are cancelled out by the advantages. For example when the air temperature drops below the rock temperature, about 55 degrees, that cold becomes warmth. In any case I shall need to build a windbreak in the future and pile on more leaves. As for this night, despite the cold, I slept better than the previous night. The bed had good eastern exposure so I woke up early.

Sunday, April 22nd

What to do today? Though overall I enjoy my outdoor life much better than my civilized one, to be honest I was getting a bit bored of this survival stuff. Fooling around, not knowing what I am doing tends to get on my nerves after awhile. Plus and I become eager to get home and get on the internet and find answers to all the new questions that have arisen. What frog makes that noise? How are you supposed to eat a crayfish? Besides, Desperate Housewives is on Sunday night. But I didn’t want to go home just yet.

 

 

As much as I got done.

The first thing I did was cook up a new batch of coals for my burn bowl. There were some parts that were burning well and some where hardly a dent had been made. I decided to concentrate on these parts. After an hour or so of that I thought it time to go on a walk. There was a logging road branching off to the south I had yet to explore. After awhile I came across a skull in the road, how exciting! Then I saw a tooth, then another skull, then a jaw. I began circling the area in a spiral looking for more parts when I smelled something rank. I sniffed at my fingers, then I saw it, a whole rotting pile of bones. Deer carcass was my first impression, but as I approached I saw that it was not one deer but dozens of smaller animals. What the fuck!?

There were three main types of skeletons in the pile. I collected a skull and jaws of each type and put them in a plastic bag to bring home and add to my collection. I am not entirely certain of the identity. At the moment they are completing their rotting in a bucket of water. I suppose I could go out to look and confirm their identity with the help of my identification guide but that can wait. I believe that one is a fox, another is a raccoon, and the last is either a porcupine or groundhog. This begs the question why? Who killed all these animals? Were they trapped or shot? If they were trapped were these three species targeted or were they incidental? Were they killed nearby or far away? Legally or illegally? Did the person eat their meat or take their furs or just kill them and dump them? Clues: They were dumped far down this gated dirt road, yet they were right on the side, not hidden in the trees. A 12-gauge shotgun shell was found nearby, may or may not be related. A few skulls had holes in them, bullet holes? The skeletons were all in tact from head to toe, not butchered. There was at least one fur in the pile. Besides who would want groundhog fur? From the amount of decay and the condition of the skeletons it seemed as if the animals had simply been killed and dumped there whole to rot, but what kind of person…???

After bringing my new skulls back I went down to collect my fish trap, and check my Paiute trap. Once again the fish trap was empty and the bait had been taken from the Paiute trap without tripping it. Darn. I think the problem with the fish trap is that it is sized for larger fish and I have only tried it in small tributaries due to my fear of someone discovering it. There aren’t that many fish in these streams and the fish that are there are small enough that they might be escaping. Perhaps I will even wrap the whole thing in a bit of screen from the windows of my old busted tent so that it can catch anything from minnows up to trout. I also don’t trust the door. I made the door, indeed the whole fish trap, based on a drawing in Larry Dean Olsen’s book Outdoor Survival Skills but I made some adaptations since his door wasn’t working out for me, and it looks a bit rickety. I think I will make another door AND wrap the trap in screen, AND put it in a bigger stream AND bait it with something really good. Then I can’t possibly fail! Ha. Ha. Ha.

As for the Paiute trap, the problem once again was the bait stick. This was another adaptation that didn’t work out so well for me. You see the bait stick is supposed rest between the trigger and the deadfall itself. Even when I first saw the picture in Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Wilderness Survival of that bait stick going perfectly horizontal between the trigger and the rock I couldn’t understand how it would say there. Even with the pressure from the trigger there is just nothing on a slanted rock to hold it in place. Testing confirmed that this was true (or was it true because I didn’t believe, you New Age freaks?). So I was resting that end of the bait stick on the ground near the base of the deadfall. But this had the effect of wedging it into the space between the rock and the ground over time and making it too stable. I see what I need to try next on Wildwood Survival. You will see that in the pictures on this website most of the bait sticks are either slanting upwards to meet the rock, or are held in place by an additional vertical stick.

Next, I brought my fish trap back to the car, and decided to go for a ride. You see, if I was walking east from my home this current camp would be my first stop, but where would my next camp be? The place where I found the mosquito net was no good. I consulted to topo map looking for promising areas and drove down a road I had never been down before. It ended in a turnaround and with several dirt roads with open gates. Hmm…Public or private? Logging or houses? I wasn’t sure but I decided to scout it out. I saw some sort of watershed destruction permit (okay, that’s not what it was really called) stapled to a tree by a logging company and there were not any “no trespassing” signs around, but there were also some mowed fields, and a power line, a confusing mixture. I walked down the road a bit and saw both a clear cut and some trucks parked along the road and a brand new house. I turned around intimidated. There were however several roads there, and only one mailbox where I parked. Perhaps it was just this one last house before the logging bonanza.

This is not to say that I respect private property in the least, my only goal is to avoid detection. Nor is this to say that all logging land is open to the public, like the Collins Pine land, or that that a logging company even owned the land. Maybe the people in the house owned it and were contracting it out, but these roads had been established on my map for quite some time indicating that they were there long before the house. In any case I plan to go back and scout it out some more. Perhaps approaching through the woods rather than by road…though a bicycle would be nice for a quick survey…too bad mine was stolen around this time last year…or I could just knock on someone’s door and ask if it was okay to walk around…nah!

I went back to my camp and read about tanning for awhile in Matt Richard’s Deerskins into Buckskins before deciding to pack up and go home. Or rather pack up and go shopping. I wanted to get more supplies to cache at these locations. A trip the brand new Wal-Mart (gag me with a spoon) proved that they did have items such as a magnesium striker that I was unable to find in any other local stores so I guess it was justified (my going there, not the existence of Wal-Mart itself). I also went to the Aldi’s grocery store (oh the German efficiency!) and stocked up on canned foods. And on Desperate Housewives Susan decides not to get married to Ian …okay, okay… Stay tuned for next week’s episode of Project Failure!

Summary

Successes

• Wiki page documenting construction of pump drill
• Continuing to perfect car survival kit (purchasing items)
• Continuing to work on developing a system of caches
• Scouting for new camps
• Catching four crayfish with hands
• Making two Paiute deadfall sets
• Sleeping outdoors in two partial debris shelters
• Acquiring mosquito net and new skulls
• Freeing blank from rest of tree by burning and beginning to coal burn a bowl
• Beginning to make a small clay bowl

Failures

• Starting fire with pump drill
• Constructing leek, yogurt, and cheese wiki pages
• Catching minnows in minnow trap
• Catching fish in fish trap
• Catching a squirrel or chipmunk in deadfall
• Making a quartz blade
• Pecking a sandstone bowl
• Constructing a both warm and comfortable shelter
• Making a clay bowl with thin walls

Reflections

Given than my only stated goals for the week were to make those leek and dairy project wiki pages and to try just one project for the FFC you could say I accomplished a lot. Even though I didn’t make those pages, I made a different one that took way longer and I did construct the Pauite trap, two even, and really, honestly tried to kill something with it. Plus coal burning was one of Urban Scout’s original goals that got thrown out when we narrowed it down to just three. I can’t really call that a success or failure since we have yet to find out. Cooking over a fire 4 times was another goal of his and though I’ve done it too often to consider it challenge, I did it two more times during my camping trip. Another original goal of Scout’s was to gather greens and write a wiki page about them. I gathered leeks Sunday the 15th, which I used during the week, and am still using (amazing how long they last without proper refrigeration!). Plus I nibbled violet leaves during my campout.

After writing it all down, I feel like a lot less of a failure. I mean really, I’m pretty cool. And looking back pretty much everything I did during the week had to do with primitive living. Even when we rented a movie on Wednesday night it was Clan of the Cave Bear. (By the way I’ve fallen back in love with Ayla. I think she is a good role model for me because she is often alone, she experiments and fails with many things, and she doesn’t have perfect self-esteem.)

But while all this stuff is going on I often vacillate between frustration, impatience, and confusion. I think maybe if I could concentrate just a little bit more, like 25% more, I might achieve a modicum of success in some of my projects. I notice that a lot of times I can guess what I am doing wrong before I even look it up. I know the next step. It’s just that my pessimistic attitude gets in the way, and I give up. That’s one of my weaknesses, giving something up because I’m not confident that it is going to work. On the other hand thinking up and getting excited about new projects is one of my strengths. Thus I am caught in a cycle of beginning a project, running into problems, giving up, starting a new project…How to break the cycle?

Goals for the week of April 23rd-29th:

Given that I write this on a Wednesday I’m already behind. That’s why I’m going to make things simple. For the Feral Failure Club our goals are going to remain the same as last week, members are to attempt one or more of the following:

• boiling with hot rocks
• constructing a stone axe
• building a small animal trap

As far as my personal goals, to choose just two simple ones, I would like to:

• continue working on my cache system
• reorganize the car, adding my new purchases and finds to my survival kit

Questions

• So we have a lot of sandstone. What else can it be used for?
• What can quartz pebbles be used for?
• Has anyone ever tried to eat minnows?
• Any tips for making primitive pottery?
• What was up with all those dead animals?

Good Luck My Failures!!!