How To Build A Shelter

Many of our blogs have talked about the four fundamental requirements for survival – fire, food, water, and shelter. Whatever you might be thinking about your need for water, food, and fire, shelter is, in fact, likely to be your most pressing, life-preserving need. Indeed, as we noted in our blog on the 27^th of May, you might not survive even the first three hours in a hostile environment without finding some kind of shelter.

Why you need shelter

The dangers are real and present. Hypo- and hyperthermia are serious risks to anyone in a remote and exposed area, warns the website Woodland Ways, and the dangers should not be underestimated.

When your body is under extreme stress – when it is in survival mode – you are less likely to notice the ways in which you might be losing heat. There are essentially three ways in which this happens:

• radiation – your body naturally radiates heat away into the cooler air surrounding it or you might be absorbing warmth from the reflected or direct heat of the sun;

• convection – heat loss through convection occurs when movement in the air, a draught or breeze, which removes the layer of warmer air which otherwise envelops you, or, in a hot climate, might remove the cooling effects of your sweating; and

• conduction – heat conduction occurs when your body is in contact with or touches a surface that is hotter or colder than you are. Since water conducts heat up to 25 times faster than air, you will lose body heat very quickly if you are caught in torrential rain or need to ford a river and have no way of drying yourself.

Shelter offers the chance to make sure that your body is neither losing heat nor absorbing it. Both are dangerous. Both need to be avoided. And a shelter will help to do that.

The problem, of course, is that following some emergency or disaster, when you are making your way to your bug-out or other place of safety, you are unlikely to stumble across a ready-made shelter. You might need to build one – if only to hunker down in it temporarily so that your body maintains the temperature at which it can function normally to get you back home or onward to some other place of safety.

Building a shelter

Whether or not you need to build a shelter will depend on:

• the environment in which you find yourself;
• the purpose for the shelter;
• the period of time you expect to need that shelter;
• where it is going to be built;
• and the number of people that will need to be using it at any one time.

The shelter you build to escape the cold and wet, for example, is going to be different from the one intended to provide a cool place to shade from the ravages of the midday sun. A temporary shelter will need to be built more quickly but perhaps with less care and craftsmanship than one you will be using for a long time. A one-man bivouac calls for a quite different structure from a shelter intended for a group of people.

Your options are also going to be determined by the materials that are immediately available or the distance you or members of your group are prepared to travel in order to gather those materials.

Types of shelter

The type of shelter you build depends on two basic principles, suggests the Primal Survivor:

• what is best suited to your needs; and

• the skills necessary to build that shelter.

The first of those questions will be answered through your understanding of the situation in which you find yourself – the risks and dangers that make shelter-building essential. In many instances, this is likely to be a question of using your head to think carefully through the needs for some kind of shelter. Shelter pared down to its most basic, for instance, is the shelter present in the very clothes you are wearing and the extent to which they might be modified to preserve or lose the heat from your body.

There are any number of designs you might want to learn. Whether you get the ideas from browsing online or by attending a survival or bushcraft course, make sure that you have practised at least the most important of the possible designs – if nothing else, so that you understand what materials will be required and how long it is likely to take you to build the shelter.

Here are just a few examples:

Tarp shelter

• probably the easiest and fastest to build, it involves tying two ends of a tarpaulin to two uprights and pulling out the side to form a shelter – which could even protect a whole group of people if the tarp is big enough;

Tarp tepee

• resolve problems by the wind and rain blown in from the side of your tarp by wrapping it around a pyramid of tepee poles – the hole at the top can be left open to let the smoke from your tepee fire out;

Tarp tepee – with no poles

• even if you don’t have enough poles, you can still make a tepee from your tarp by folding the material into a triangle, tying a heavy rock into its point, and hanging it over the branch of a tree;

Hammock survival shelter

• if you have more than one tarp, you can make a more sophisticated tarp shelter by incorporating a hammock that is slung underneath the main roof – the ability to sleep off the ground can make a considerable difference;

A-frame brush shelter

• if you have no tarp, a wind and watertight shelter can be made fairly quickly and easily from an A-frame of timber poles which you lean against a central ridge;

• variations on this A-frame model have served not only for short-term shelter but also by medium- and long-term survivalists;

Lean-to brush shelter

• the principal variation on the full A-frame structure is a simpler lean-to – basically, just half of an A-frame since you only have to lean poles against the single side of the main ridge pole.

Summary

Some form of shelter is likely to be as essential as the other main life-savers – fire, water, and food. Your immediate need for shelter means that, in the first instance, you are preparing a temporary structure for use overnight or just a few nights at most – allowing you to resume your journey homeward or to some other bug-out place of safety afterwards.

A shelter such as this is likely to be essential for your survival if you are in an environmentally challenging climate but its use as a short-term base from which to recuperate and take stock can have a massive impact on your outlook.