A Day Outdoors

Today the nicer weather and free time in our schedules permitted Ellie and I to begin the hands on portion of our project. After my boys hockey banquet, at around 5:00, I went over to Ellie's house, we put on warm clothes (although the weather was nicer, it still was 35 degrees out) and trekked back into the woods with our machete and hatchet. 

The focus of today was to collect tinder, kindling of various sizes and larger wood for our fires. We began our search by looking for smaller sticks and tinder. These were both found easily, from dead bushes and various twiggy plants, and within about 20 minutes we had collected a heaping pile. We then set out to find larger wood, which was much more challenging because we couldn't just snap off a branch with our hands and the large pieces on the ground were rotten and wet, making them unlikely to burn. We decided the best way to find this wood would be by cutting down a dead tree. Since all we had was a hatchet and a machete, we found a couple of dead saplings (trunks with approximately 4 inch diameters) and chopped them down. 

We stayed outside for about 2.5 hours and by the end of the evening we had gathered a decently sized pile of wood, which we are storing under Ellie's dad's Adirondack shelter to keep dry. We will use this wood this Tuesday, when we practice our fire building and water purification, and we will possibly use some on our first survival trip, which is just 2 weeks away.