3 Days in Arctic with Bushcraft Hot Tent & No Sleeping Bag

Luke here at the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel and I'm here in the frozen tundra of Alaska and for the next three days I'm building bushcraft shelters, sleeping under animal hides, dealing with broken equipment and I'm bringing you guys along for the ride. Welcome to the taiga forests of Alaska. I think it's time to do some camping. So this is the taiga forests of Alaska. The word taiga comes from Russian. It means little sticks. In English we call these trees black spruce and they grow in the tundra and swamps of Alaska. While these swamps are very difficult to cross in the summertime, once they freeze over we can explore them. But first things first, I need to find a place to camp. I actually like this spot quite a bit. Most of these spruce trees you see are dead. An invasive beetle called a spruce bark beetle came in here and wiped these things out. That means lots of building material, lots of firewood. The air temperature is about 13 degrees Fahrenheit and this ground is still not frozen. In the wintertime the ground temperature is usually a lot warmer than the air temperature and the snow acts as a blanket that traps that heat in the ground. If you can strip away the ice and snow and build your shelter on thawed ground, it's going to be a whole lot warmer. And there's a bit of mud right there. This ground might be a little bit more swampy than I first thought. We'll just have to deal with it. All right, I think it's time to start cutting some I'm going to use one of these fire starters here. Yeah, that's working. You can tell everything's wet when dead pine doesn't want to burn. Little fingers are getting a little numb. I get all the snow out of my ear. Oh, that feels amazing. I've got a shelter. I've got fire. I think it's time to start working on dinner. Gloves are a bit wet. I'm going to go dry them by the fire. I got a sweet potato, a little bit of tinfoil here. We're going to wrap that up. There you go. Got a nice pile of coals here. Bury that sweet potato in the coals for about 45 minutes. Most foods cook at around 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Hold your hand over the fire and count one, two, three. And when you can get to three without it hurting, that's about 375 degrees Fahrenheit. So right about here. As the fire kind of changes, you need to adjust your meat. I like a little bread with my steak, so I brought along some bread dough. I made this up like a week ago. Didn't use it, so I threw it in the fridge. It's still good. Yeah, just got a little bit more of that sourdough goodness. Pretty little piece of bread right there. We're going to have some herbal tea. Oh, that's done. Put that there. Let's take a peek. That's looking pretty good. Some honey and butter I'm going to put on there. Sweet potato is so mushy. It's exactly how it should be. I'm going to put a little cinnamon on my sweet potato and on my bread. We got sweet potato and cinnamon, honey butter and bread, and two massive chunks of seasoned steak. There you go. This is my cow horn mug. I made this. Also made this griddle. I got a video explaining how I made these things. It's pretty easy. I'll put a link in the video description below. That is good. Oh, that was good. Still got quite a bit of this steak left. Just go sit it in the snowbank and it'll be good tomorrow. There we go. Oh, that warms me up. Peach herbal tea with loads of sugar in it. It tastes pretty good, and it's just more fun drinking it out of a cow horn. That is good. I really love this fork and plate. Both of them are antiques. The fork is about 150 years old. It's from the Civil War era. Handle's made out of cow bone. This is my fancy camping wear. Well, now that we've had a fire in here for several hours, we're starting to figure out what the ground situation is. Over here, it is really soft. Look at this. That is just a big, swampy spot right there. I think we're going to end up sleeping on this side. Well, it's pretty clear that I need to make a bed. If I sleep straight on the ground, I'm going to get soaking wet and frozen. I'm refilling my water jug just a cup or two at a ice, so I'm going to try to dry them out and warm them up before I sleep on them. I got all my firewood for the night, and I got it propped up around the fire trying to dry it out. I didn't bring any sleeping bags or sleeping pads, but I brought my caribou hide. Caribou have these thick, hollow hairs. They're really warm. They double a caribou hide over on itself. It's pretty thick. It actually gives you some cushion and lots of insulation. Let's see how lumpy this is going to be. It's almost 10 o'clock. I'm pretty tired. Well, instead of a sleeping bag, I'm going to be sleeping underneath a bison hide tonight. I use the bison because it's one of the few animals big enough to cover me. I'm kind of a big boy. The nice thing about using animal hides when you're sleeping next to a fire is that these won't burn up. Sparks can land on them. The fire can get real hot. It doesn't matter. You'll wake up long before these things catch on fire. It's going to be very cold tonight and my water bottles will freeze solid if I don't keep them near the fire. I'm going to put them just right down here. I had to put some hot coals underneath my bed to get it nice and toasty. It is late and I am tired. I will see you guys in the morning. Oh, good morning. I stayed pretty warm, but the bed is so hard. My feet are cold though. My feet stick out from underneath the hide a little bit. Oh, that feels good. Get my toes warmed up. Ah, frozen boots. How many times have I put on frozen boots? I'm going to warm up the Fresh warm bread and honey butter. All right, time to get up and do some stuff. It is definitely colder today. If I'm going to stay warm, I'm going to need to make this shelter a whole lot better. Let me show you something weird about snow. You can see this right here is the path I made with my snowshoes yesterday. You can see where yesterday I walked on it without snowshoes and I sunk in, but today it's rock hard. If you stomp a trail down with snowshoes and let it sit overnight, it'll freeze up and turn really hard. Snowshoes are great for building paths in the snow like this. I want to push this snow berm back a little bit and make a little bit more room, so I've been throwing my tree limbs and logs in here. It takes a long time for the fire to melt keep me nice and warm. I got my shelter set up just in the nick of time. It's already starting to get dark. Luckily, I already have a lot of firewood laying around. I'm not going to need as much as I did last night. I am almost completely out of water, so we're going to go melt some snow. I've been getting a lot of pine needles and pine cones in my drinking water, so I'm going to go find a spot a little further away from the trees. There we go. Got my leftovers. It is frozen. I'll just put it over here. Hopefully it'll thaw out. Well, now that I've got a wood floor instead of all that mud, I can change into my little slippers. Nice. I can put my boots up here on the wall to keep them from freezing in the night. Oh, it's nice to get my slippers on. All my wood is cold and wet, so I'm putting it on top of the stove to dry out and warm up. Then it'll burn really well when it comes time to feed the fire. Well, it's about five o'clock and I'm in for the night, so I think I'm going to start making some dinner. All right, I got some black beans here. Oh, these onions are frozen. Oh, we got a little smoke going on. The log's over on that side. We're starting to smolder. You can tell the logs are getting hot. There's pine sap bubbling out of them. Have to watch it carefully. You don't want anything starting on fire. Oh yeah, that's thawed out nicely. It's warming up well. All right, just added some rice. It's starting to smell so good. All right, put a little hot sauce on there. I'm so hungry. This smells amazing. Can I tell you what? Beans and rice are an amazing camping food. Not only are they delicious, it's non-perishable and takes up hardly any room in your backpack. Oh, that's so good. I want to check something here. Two degrees Fahrenheit. Let's compare that to what's inside the shelter. Put it right there and give it a few minutes to warm up. All right, it's been a few minutes and you can see it's just a little over 50 degrees Fahrenheit here at the bed. I mean, it's not exactly warm, but that's a lot better than outside. But watch this. I'm going to put the thermometer on the ground. There on the floor, it's about 22 degrees. When you're sleeping in a heated shelter, the higher you can make your bed, the better. You want your bed to be at least as tall as your heat source. Ideally, a little bit taller. Well, I've been in the shelter five hours and I've already gone through two-thirds of my firewood, so I had to go out and cut some more. Got to split that too. I think it's time to go to bed. See you guys in the morning. Tell you what, I slept a lot better last night. It was a lot warmer and more comfortable, but I did have to wake up a bunch to stoke the fire. I woke up about 2 a.m. the first time and then at 3, 4.30 and then 6 and then 6.30-ish or so. I was pretty much up. So for breakfast, I've got an omelet. I made this at home. It's got sausage, vegetables, cheese, eggs. Went through it in a vacuum sealed bag and then froze it. Now all I got to do is just warm it up. All right, got my honey butter sitting over here melting. It's getting hot in here. Yesterday, it was cold even with my jacket on and the stove going full blast. I got the stove turned down to halfway and it's still hot in here and it has to do with all this mass inside the tent. There's 400 pounds of wood in here. There's all my gear. There's the ground, the tent itself. All that stuff needs to be heated up and it takes a long time, but once it all gets warm, it stays really hot in here. It gets really nice and even when the stove goes down, it stays warmer in here for a longer time. Doesn't that look good? This is so much better than dehydrated eggs. All right, well, I think it's time to get up and face the day. Oh, I got to tell you, it is so nice to have a floor in this tent. It's so much warmer and it's so nice not to have my feet down in the mud. It's an absolute luxury. Oh, look at this. My pants are all dry. My mittens are all dry. I always bring backup food for a lot of reasons and I had this bit of pork here that I didn't get to use and I was keeping it underneath my bed to keep it cold. A mouse got into it, ate up all that pork. See that? It's probably a vole or a lemming. I just cut off that part. It's still good. I have more trouble with mice than any other animal, hands down, and the longer you camp in one spot, the worse the problem becomes. It's like more and more mice find you. When the mice get really bad, they'll start coming in at night and grabbing your hair and pulling out bits of your hair to make their nest. It's not great. All righty. It's 10 a.m. and we're just in time for the sunrise. Uh-oh, that's not good. The car doesn't want to start and it sounds like it's the battery. It's zero degrees Fahrenheit right now, so I wouldn't be surprised if the battery's so cold that it just doesn't want to start. I'll make sure it doesn't overheat. I just need to raise the temperature of the battery like 20-30 degrees. I don't need to boil it. All right, it's feeling warm. All right, I'm going to try to warm up the engine block and see if that helps. Fortunately, the engine block is way back there. I got to be careful. This K truck is sitting on top of 18 inches of snow. If the snow gives way and it settles, it's going to squish me. All right, we're going to give that a 30 minutes or so and see if that doesn't help. Well, there she is. Once I got it all dialed in, it was really nice. This would have made a really good long-term shelter. It's warm, but it's not hot. Obviously, this is a little bit sketchy. Got to make sure you don't catch anything on fire or melt any wires or anything. Well, it's like a Cheech and Chong video in here. The smoke coming out. This is living in Alaska in a nutshell. Stuff goes wrong, things break, and you just got to deal with it. It's not like I could call a tow truck. Engine's warmed up. Let's see if we can want to see more videos from the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel, make sure to click subscribe, activate that notification button, and I will see you guys in two weeks. 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