Outdoor Life — The Source for Hunting and Fishing Adventure

While teaching an Urban Survival class this past weekend, the topic of storing your own drinkable water came up in conversation many times. How much water you should have on hand, how you bottle it, and where you store it are the three most common concerns.

So let us suppose for a moment that your town’s or region’s normal water supply has been cut off. You’ll be on your own for drinking, cooking, and some basic hygiene. In the realm of water, being prepared for emergencies means keeping water on hand, and also being ready to disinfect more water as needed. [ Read Full Post ]

Winter has to be the best time of year for a warm cup of tea. Oddly enough, the outdoors is full of wild plants that can give us richly flavored and nutritious teas during the colder months.

As always, when dealing with wild plants for food and beverages, you have to be 100 percent certain that you are dealing with the right plant and using it correctly. The last thing you want is a cup of tea cup brewed with a deadly plant by mistake. Deaths from water hemlock are reportedly the most common plant related fatality in U.S. [ Read Full Post ]

Working with rain-soaked fire materials and without any fire starters or accelerants from home on hand can be a very challenging scenario. Enter the “fuzz stick.” [ Read Full Post ]

The thick winter coats of furbearers are the best pelts of the year. Hopefully, your trap line and predator hunting forays will bring you many of these beautiful skins. A happy problem arises when it comes time to tan them all.

There are specialized tools, chemicals, and materials that make the life of a modern tanner relatively easy, but you can still do a respectable job of tanning pelts with common tools and materials that you probably already have. [ Read Full Post ]

Ever had a thermos, Nalgene, or your favorite canteen swell to its breaking point in winter’s cold temps? Whatever activity you were doing outdoors in sub-freezing temperatures, it’s likely that you didn’t need that extra hassle.

Staying warm can be a full time job, and keeping an ample supply of water in liquid form can also be a constant chore. So how do you keep your bottles from busting and your water filters from breaking? And what’s the best way to consume snow? [ Read Full Post ]

Cold weather can wreak havoc on your trapping activities, freezing triggers shut and imprisoning footholds in frozen dirt beds. But there are a few ways that the cold can help us, whether you are trapping as a pastime or trapping for food during a wilderness emergency.

Frozen Baits
Successfully baiting traps is an important part of the overall art of trapping. Unless you have a creative and effective motion-activated trap, the bait is the only reliable reason for an animal to visit your trap. In weather above freezing, your quarry and plenty of other critters can steal your bait. But a frozen block of bait will take some work for your target animal to chew up, and it will be a lot harder for little bait thieves (like mice and birds) to eat the bait out of the trigger or run off with it. [ Read Full Post ]

Some mammals, like mice, can produce their own vitamin C inside their bodies. Unfortunately, human beings are not on that list of critters. We need vitamin C, which we get from outside sources, because it performs such an important variety of functions in the body, including increasing immune system health, tissue repair, and iron absorption. Without enough vitamin C we can develop symptoms of scurvy, such as fatigue, weakness, capillary fragility, and gum disease.

Fortunately, if you ever get stuck somewhere away from your normal food supply, there are several great sources of vitamin C in winter edible plants. [ Read Full Post ]