Surviving a -36° Night - No Tent & No Sleeping Bag

We are in the middle of a cold snap here in western Canada. Temperatures tonight are expected to get down close to minus 30 degrees celsius. I've only brought five simple items with me, and I'm going to be spending the night out here. Come to this area where I found this uprooted spruce tree, which I'm going to utilize as part of my shelter. But first, I need to get a fire going. When it's this cold, it's crucial to have some way to warm yourself up. All right, so the five items that I brought, obviously my belt knife, my axe, and a pot. Inside of my pot, I have a ferro rod to start my fire, and I've got this pouch with a little bit of food inside. Well, I got my fire started. I got some snow melting so I can keep myself hydrated. Now I have to shift my focus to making a comfortable place to sleep tonight. There we have it. Finished shelter. Very simple, nothing fancy. Just made up of some dead logs and thick bark. It's not perfect, there's gaps and stuff, but it should do a pretty good job of keeping the wind from blowing through here. I have a nice bow bed underneath of me. Laid down some dead boughs first to give me a little more loft, and then some green branches on top for comfort. I'm hoping that this root ball behind me will heat up throughout the night, since there's a bunch of dirt and clay and stuff. Hopefully the radiant heat from the fire will heat this back wall up, then throughout the night it will re-emit that heat and make the inside of my shelter nice and warm. But I am going to have a bright fire burning all night. You can tell I left the entrance real open. I'm gonna have a nice long fire out in front, so that's going to provide me with a bunch of heat throughout the night, keep it burning hot. I've only got about 45 minutes to an hour left of light, so I gotta get in gear and start collecting firewood. Hopefully that's enough wood to get me through the night. Guess we'll find out. I'm just gonna keep my fire burning small like this until I go to bed, and then I'll start piling on the bigger logs. The sun is completely set now. The thermometer's reading minus 24 degrees Celsius, so we're definitely dropping in temperature. We'll see how cold it gets throughout the night. I got a pot of spruce tea steeping right now, so I'm gonna grab my little food pouch and have myself some dinner. My boots were wet from working in them all day, so I got them drying out by the fire. So for supper, I've got true-to-the-term survival food. I've got hardtack and dried meat. So the meat is just beef that's been salted, dried, and smoked, and hardtack is just flour and salt mixed into a thick dough, and then spread out thin and baked until it's basically a hard, dry biscuit. I actually made this stuff over a year ago now, and just had it stored in a jar, and it still tastes the exact same way that it did when I made it. It's a nice thing about these foods is that they don't require any refrigeration or special storage. You can pack them in the summer, or when it's minus 20 degrees outside, don't have to worry about them freezing. They're just foolproof foods that will fill you up. See if this spruce tea is still too hot to drink. That's good. So I'll make sure my boots are good and dry before I go to bed, that way I can sleep with them on, and they should keep my feet warm all night. Hopefully I have enough wood to keep a bright fire going all night, and I'll be able to stay warm. So this meal may not seem like much, but in the jerky there's protein, there's salt, maybe even a little bit of fat. In the hardtack, there's carbs and more salt. And in my spruce tea, there's lots of vitamin C. Tastes really good too. So it may seem like a pretty simple meal, but it's good food. Definitely fills you up. And like I said, having foolproof foods like these are just so ideal out in the bush, especially in these extreme temperatures. You know, when it's this cold out, you got to worry about things freezing and stuff. With this, you just throw it in your pack and forget about it. This fire is putting off some awesome heat now. I got, I just laid all my long logs across here, and I'll just keep feeding them in from the end. Hopefully each section will last about two, three hours. That should be enough to get me through to the morning. It's putting off just incredible heat. Wow. I just checked the thermometer. It's reading minus 28 degrees Celsius. So it's pretty chilly, but it is like a nice little warm bubble in this shelter. This fire is putting off intense amounts of heat. It feels good. I got some food in my system. I got a bunch of water in my system. I got my fire going real good. Boots are dry. So now it's just time to lay down, try and get some sleep. We'll see how the night goes. Not too sure what to expect, but right now it feels great. So we're going to lay down, call it a night, try to get some rest. All right. Well, we are about halfway through the night, I guess. It's getting to be about three in the morning. My wood's burning through pretty quick. A couple hours left with this, and then a couple hours left with what remains. So another four hours or so. Still hopeful to make it till sunrise. We'll see how that goes. Just checked the thermometer and it's minus 32 degrees right now. Sleeping has been going okay. I think I've been sleeping in like 20, 30 minute stretches. Wake up and roll over and warm the other side of my body. This root ball behind me is, it's kind of warming up. I feel like it's warm to the touch, but it's not getting hot like I thought it would. So I'm really just relying on the fire. It's fine. It's comfortable. It certainly would be a lot more enjoyable if I had. For what it is, it's a lot better of an experience than I thought it was going to be. Now that I got the fire nice and livened up though, it feels real good. So I'm going to try and get some more sleep and hope that my wood supply lasts until the morning. Well, good morning. I managed to make it through the night. Thermometer's reading minus 36 degrees this morning. It just got colder and colder throughout the night. And it is, it's a chilly morning. The night wasn't too bad. Kept my fire burning hot all night. Managed to stay plenty warm. I did run out of wood about an hour ago. I had to go and scavenge up a few extra pieces just to hold me over until sunrise. My sleep wasn't the greatest, which is to be expected when you don't have any type of a sleep system. Definitely could have used my wool blankets last night. But that was part of the challenge. I did still manage to get a fair amount of sleep. I probably slept for maybe 20, 30 minutes every hour. So I probably ended up getting four or five hours of sleep total. Obviously not a great sleep, but sleep nonetheless. And all in all, I'll call it a success. A minimalist camp out and minus 30 degrees. You can check that one off the bucket list. Thank you for watching. I'll be back right away with another video. I hope to see you there. Until then, God bless and happy trails.