3 Days SOLO SURVIVAL..with ONLY a Hatchet and NOTHING ELSE

Welcome to the Bare Essentials. I'm DJ and for the next few days, we're surviving with only a hatchet. No. Tastes exactly like chicken. This survival challenge is inspired by my favorite childhood book called Hatchet, where after a plane crash, a kid gets stranded in the wilderness with just his trusty hatchet. It's been a childhood dream to do this and I finally think I have the skills to pull it off. So thanks for coming along with me on this crazy adventure. Okay, so I dropped off the truck somewhere back here and I'm just headed in the forest and trying to get to this pond here and try to find a good shelter location along the way. If this is filled with cattails, I got a good idea for a shelter. If not, maybe we'll go to this one or just see what we find. But I need the source of fresh water so I need to camp somewhere along one of these two. So I've got my axe and then on my back, I've got my camera gear. Natural spot. Wow, that could be really nice. I will need to find a water source though. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight babies. Oh my gosh. Wow. You do that pattern step and you slowly approach them with a bit of cover. Pause for a second. Okay, so we've reached the pond and there's not really anything to make a shelter out of here. I was hoping there would be cattails. Lots of bullfrogs. I could grab some water here but I really need to find, one, a way to make a fire, two, a way to make a shelter fast. Ah, I'm just getting eaten by these ants. Let's keep going. Whoa. Oh my gosh. Look at these. As old as time. Check this out. This is a perfectly flat shelf with an overhang over top and I can move some of these rocks off and have a flat place to stay. This is a great natural shelter for my first night. I'll show you what it looks like here. Right on the edge of a hill. You can see it's a perfectly, perfect little spot under there. Definitely not gonna have a fire inside this because I don't wanna heat up these rocks and possibly disturb them. I'm just gonna really lay flat on here. So I firstly need to find a good bedding and then secondly, get a good fire going. Then once I have that fire, I've gotta find a way somehow to boil water. So those are my priorities tonight. At least I've got a shelter already pre-made. Basically, I got this waterproof bag. We've just got some things like a little first aid kit, a bear spray, tripod, camera, and what else? Another tripod. And a sweater and pants. And that's it. First things first, let's just get these rocks out of here. That'll be nice. There's a bit of debris here. What I wanna do is pack it now with a ton of foliage. Lots of dead leaves from last year. Reason I'm doing this is to just give me some insulation over those rocks. So the sun is going down. That's why I'm hustling here. My main tasks after this is to get a friction fire going of some sort. And then I somehow have to process some water because that pond looked like it had a beaver lodge in it. And beavers are some of the most dangerous things out here, surprisingly, because they poop in the water. And if you drink that and it's not purified, you'll get giardia, which is basically you just get the runs, you throw up, you're very, very sick. And that's gonna dehydrate you and take you out. And if you've ever seen the survival show alone, giardia takes out a ton of people. You basically can't recover while you're doing survival. It's near impossible. Here's the view from underneath. The mosquitoes are gonna be a big, big issue tonight too. So this isn't gonna be a glorious time. Let's get our pack and we're gonna go to the water source and see if we could drum up a friction fire somehow. I think bow drill is gonna be the best bet. And with an ax, that's gonna be tough to do. I gotta somehow make cord. I probably have two hours, so this is gonna take me into the nighttime. I guess if I have to, I'm just gonna work all night as much as I can. I do have a headlamp. I guess that technically counts as another item, but you guys won't have much of a video if I didn't have that. So I'm still only considering my ax as the one item. No way. Yes. Check that out. Chaga. See this? That right there might be able to save me for tonight. We could start a fire with that. Hopefully. It's a mushroom. It's called tinder fungus, actually. And it could start a fire pretty well. We could either use it as the floor to a bow drill, or we could use it to do a chaga fire plow. We don't have much time. You could see the sun right there. If you put your hands like this and you count each finger, two, three, four, five, each one is roughly 15 minutes, 15, 30, 45, one hour, and a little bit until sun sets. It's a little bit moist. So this might be actually a little bit hard to do the chaga fire plow. Okay, this one here is a dead maple. See, when I slice it off, it has this nice sharp edge. I'm gonna try to keep that split going all the way down and keep this nice sharp edge for our friction fire. This stuff will make really good tinder. Okay, the theory behind this is rubbing it along this edge here will create enough friction to start a fire. But first, I gotta take all this wet stuff off the chaga and get into the inner core, which is a bit drier. Let's give it a go. Yeah, it's got some nice heat, but I think I need to break this in half. Shove this into the ground. A lot of heat there. This chaga's a bit wet, pretty wet on the inside. All right, guys, the friction fire's a no-go. That chaga's wet. There's no way that's gonna work. The chaga this time of year, it has moisture in it. As you can see, the log was getting soaked there. So I'm just heading back over to where I found that other chaga, and hopefully there's a dead tree or something with some chaga on it. That's my only option right now, or else I'll just be having a fire and drinking water tomorrow. I'm really thirsty. I don't wanna do that. But one last Hail Mary, let's go for it. At this monstrosity of a chaga on this dead birch. What a unit! Oh my gosh. Yes! The day is saved. Holy, what are the odds? What in the world? There's gotta be something dry in this. Let's go try it out. Oh, it's wet. No. There's one section. That's not bad. Come on. Don't glow. No. It went out. We had something. Smoke. Oh my God, yes. Holy, yes. Yes. Holy cow. All right, we're not done just yet. This is a standing dead birch. The top has fallen completely off. What I'm gonna do is take the ax and score it like so. Never wanna do this on a live tree, but this guy's dead. So it is a lot of work to get water if you don't have a pot. And it is a lot of work to get fire and water. I'll tell ya, the ax, the trick is to pull it all as one piece. Next thing we do, we got these rocks and we're just gonna put them in the fire and heat them up. If there's moisture trapped inside, it could expand and pop. So we'll stay away while we do this. Now time to make our bowl. And we'll heat this over the fire just a little and it makes it more pliable. You have to be careful it doesn't catch. See how it could bend a lot more now without breaking? Pinch this corner out like that and fold it on itself. Take a stick that has a split in it. We'll use that like a safety pin on there to hold the corner. Okay, there we go. That's our bowl. Let's go fill it up. I'm hearing a lot of bullfrogs. Check it out. So bowl this size, don't hold too much water. Got a little bug in there. Oh well, extra protein. Okay, now let's fish these rocks out of the fire. That's a good one right there. This one's red hot. Look at that water boiling. Oh no. Uh-oh. Oh no. Catastrophe. Ha ha ha. That's boiling good. It is so much work to get water. Now ideally I'd have a way to purify this because of all that soot and dirt that got in there, but at least it's boiled and that means there's no parasites. Ideally, I'd have another bowl to sift this, all the good water into and that's my storage, but tonight we just need some water. So this is what we have. Oh, holy. That's a lot of work for this water. I'm gonna go do this again. Do one more boil, get hydrated and then we'll go to the bullfrog pond and try to catch some frog. I'm gonna put that chaga into the fire so it dries out and that's my way of banking the fire. Hopefully it's dry enough to hold that ember till I get back. Optimistically, it holds the ember till the morning so we can get a fire going without having to go through that whole process again because I think I just got lucky there to be honest. So we just gotta watch out for snapping turtles. I feel like he's over there, but it's deep. I'm gonna try to get to him. Over here somewhere. Juicy frog legs. No, I'm not giving up until I catch one of these guys. No, I gotta be faster. I see you. See you frogger. How? Ah, how? It was right here the whole time. You just honked at me. Oh, you're mine. Oh! I had him. Guys, I'm not going home empty-handed here. I refuse. Look at this thing. Mayfly or something. Just waiting to be eaten. If I wasn't here, these frogs would be having a field day with that. But I am here. An apex predator. Oh, there's one. He thinks he's slick. Sly. Yes! I got him. Oh, no. Got him. No! I believe I lost him. Got him. Let's patch him. I apologize for this. All right, here we have four frog legs. It's not a crazy amount of meat, but it's a little bit of protein. Every little bit helps. I think these frog legs are done. There is not much meat on them at all after they cook down, but it's like having four shrimp, I guess. Not much meat on them at all. I'll look up and put on the screen how much protein is actually in these things, in calories, but I figure I'd have to get like 10 frogs to get a good meal. Anyways, let's give it a taste. Tastes exactly like chicken. Oh, this is nice after a big day of work, even if it is just only a few little pieces. This is nice. It's like one o'clock. I think I've been just delaying going to bed under that cliff. It's a completely full moon. Really creepy walking over to my cliff's edge. Feels like something out of Blair Witch. We hiking like this. Luckily, there's absolutely no bugs now. It's chilled down a bit. I got my sweater and my pants on and I got that shelter with all those leaves. I'll use this as a pillow. It's not bad. I'm exhausted. It's one o'clock in the morning. I think tomorrow we'll head to a new spot. Maybe try to do some fishing if I can weave together a fishing line. All right. It's like a bird alarm. Snooze. Oh. Horse is a bit wet this morning with dew. Okay, so we're down here at this pond and we wanna hike up and try to get to this river here. That's our goal for today if we could do that. So straight up. Try to find a spot along there. Maybe the bend will be nice over here but I'm just gonna beeline it to this general area I'm thinking. So right behind me here is a patch of bunch berries. You might think it's strange that there's all these leaves behind me and no berries on them and there's good reason for that. They are in season but this whole patch is out in the open so birds feel very comfortable eating here because they can't get ambushed but when you get into the thicker stuff, the spots where they're not as comfortable because they could get ambushed, this is where you'll find all the berries and you could just grab bunches of bunch berries. And look at that. Just a couple little handfuls there and you could eat all these. Just like that. Now, they don't really have a taste and they're not that high in calories but I know I'm not really selling these. They're still a good survival food to munch on as you're going. I'm sure there's vitamins and such in there. I don't really know the exact amounts but you could also eat these leaves. The smaller ones I find taste the best but they all taste very mediocre anyways. You could cook these up. You could have them like a salad. I always put a few into my mouth and chew on them as I go because they're said to give an uplifting feeling and it's very important to keep your spirits up when you're out here. So I always love when I find bunch berries and don't be discouraged. If you're only finding the leaves, look in the thick places that birds won't usually go and you'll find them. Wow, check this out. So this was one of the pieces of tinder fungus, the chaga, that we had left in the fire overnight. Look at that. It's still going. It's still even smoking. Wow. And we could use this to start a fire again super easily. So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna boil some more water before I get the day started. Have another drink. Whoa! Holy cow. The chipmunk. Scared the sheepers out of me. Oh my God. So on my way to the river, I decided to stop and I'm gonna harvest a bit of lunch, a bit of food to eat, and then also this cordage or roof for the shelter or even a bed to lie on. This taproot here, this is edible. Tastes like cucumber. It's really good. One of my favorite edibles out here. So the roots on this go down about a foot and then they spread out horizontally, but they're very thick. Like an inch thick, pretty much. And there's a whole bunch of other dead things just on top, like rotted out trees and branches. And you wanna be able to pull them out because they're good eating. This one right here. Perfect. Look at that. So I could eat this right here. That tastes like cucumber and it's really good. Lots of starches in there. Great survival food. Here's a prime example of how the roots look underwater. So you have the one cattail and it sends out this rhizome here and it spreads out and other cattails grow right off of it. And then here is a little taproot and this guy's searching and growing. And it's the end of this that you could eat and it tastes like cucumber. And then in here, what we're gonna do is cut that off and then cook this in the coals and then you could eat the inner stuff. When you open that up, there's like a little gel here. It's basically like an aloe vera. So I've got a cut right there and this stuff is really good for that. And even this thin material here could act as a bandage over if you need. Separate these roots, keep them in one pile. My shelter material, which is gonna be this stuff, we'll keep in another pile. We've got a decent haul here, not a bad amount of cattails for the roof or for bedding. And we got lots of food, good starches, good carbohydrates. When I cook these up, it'll be really, really good. I do wanna get some proteins. So I'm hoping to get to the shelter as quick as possible, but I'm gonna harvest a little bit more first and then we'll take off and see if we can get to that river. All right, we made it to the river at last. And it's a beauty. I'm just looking for a shelter spot now. As you can see, I got the cattails on my back. Hard to tell if this is worth the calories, but they're not too heavy and it's been fun regardless. And it'll save me from having to build a roof tonight. So that's good. Nice, perfect. I'll lay down right here. So here's how it's all tied up. Basically, we just lay one across, fold it over like that, tighten that first wrap. And now we're gonna continue wrapping four or five times. And that is called the timber hitch. And these handles will hold strong. I got two of them here and two of them here. And now we just grab a bundle like so. You fold it like that. I just held them in my hand so I could put this bundle down if I want. Now we're gonna lay them down on the rock just to make sure that the shelter is looking good. Likely something like that. So we'll have to build a frame over here. All right. The nice thing about camping around cedars is some of them have really wonky shapes like this. Put this guy around. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have enough. Check this out. Grab some pieces of bark here. Here we go. We definitely won't have enough cattails for the floor. And we just barely have enough for the roof. Honestly, not fully. So I'm augmenting with some shingles. There's lots of cedar trees here with loose shingles so I could just pull these right off. Well, it looks good on the outside. You can see there's lots of holes on the inside. So what I'm gonna have to do is shingle the whole thing over top. Wow. Nice. So we'll overlap it here and any water will just flow down that way. Right off. Most of the holes are covered up. You can see at the sides here, I got a little venting. I got my cattail bed. Looks nice. Let's check out the roof. All nice cedar all the way. Sure looks like a beauty. I love my little entrance. All right, guys, check it out. What do you think? Maybe someone in the comments who has some good experience with prints can let me know what this is. I think it's coyote. Although the wolves around here are pretty small. There's also some moose tracks here. Right there. Keep in mind, we are not really on any paths. It's just forest. So there's no chance of it being dog. Look how it's splayed here in the mud. Splayed out more. But you could definitely see the claws. Very cool. Yeah, someone in the comments, let me know what you think that is. My guess is coyote, but I know there's a lot of really knowledgeable people that follow and watch. So let me know. One of the plants I forage for as I'm hiking around is this one. It's called wild sarsaparilla. Three leaves, each with five leaflets on it. Sometimes it'll only have three on here. Sometimes it'll look, well, like that. So I don't mess around with the ones with three leaves just in case it's poison ivy. What you really want is the root goes down into the ground and then spreads sideways. And if you just peel this bark off, and what's exposed underneath, you could chew on this. It tastes a bit spicy, like root beer. And I'm pretty sure this was used in the original root beer. I'm not sure if it's still used today. But it's got a whole bunch of benefits and I'll list them on the screen because I'm not super familiar with them. But what I am interested in is it gives you energy. So while it doesn't give you a ton of calories, it gives you some energy to keep going. And it's a nice little snack. So this plant here is called dogbane. It's got some of the best fibers for weaving fishing line. So how I usually tell, don't quote me on this, this is just to pique your interest, but see this white liquid coming out? When you break one of these stems, you'll see that dripping out. It's important not to ingest this because it's toxic, but it does make some great fishing line. You can see just this little piece peeling off, perfectly straight, just like that. And it's very strong. See on the stems here, as soon as you break them off, that white liquid comes out. All right, so now we're gonna break these down, thin, medium ones there. Just peel down, perfect. And it's gonna take a lot of these to make a good fishing line. So this is gonna take a little bit of work. Other good plants to use like this are stinging nettle. I believe dogbane and definitely stinging nettle have been used for bow strings as well. So if you need to make a bow string, it's the same process as this pretty much. Okay, here's the process of how to turn this into fishing line. So just keep twisting and eventually you'll see it kind of twist on its own and make its own loop. There, see how that loop is formed? Now that we have the loop, what we could do is twist the clockwise and wrap in a counterclockwise. Twist clockwise, wrap counter. Twist, wrap. And then you have a line that doesn't come loose because the counter twists are holding it together. So in a few seconds, we have an inch and a bit of line. So our line's looking pretty good, but you could see we're getting to the end. This one's getting a little bit thin. So now we need to splice in another piece. You wanna try to match the same size. So we'll just put it a little bit past and we'll twist it right in. So twist just like we've been doing. And now if you've matched the size properly, it should splice perfectly. Now we have this shorter end, so again, we'll take another piece, place it here, and start splicing it in. All right, we're getting somewhere. It's gonna take time. But very strong. Now you can see why cordage is so important to bring. In terms of priorities, fire takes a long time. A pot to boil water or a water bottle is huge. Something to filter water is massive. And rope, when you think about what you'd really do in a survival situation, if you didn't have just one of these things, if you didn't have cordage, it'd be very tough, but now you know at least how to make some. If you didn't have a pot to boil water, the strategy of heating up rocks and putting it in some kind of container, and then of course you have fire, so being practiced in different methods of friction fire is really important. These trips are just really good for my mind. I find when I'm back at home, I'm constantly just busy, busy, busy doing one thing or another. And as soon as I free up a little bit of time, I fill it with something else. So even though out here I'm busy trying to survive, I'm very focused on one task at a time. It's a really nice break for me, so I thoroughly enjoy this. The break from technology is nice too. I mean, I still have the camera gear here, but I'm not getting bombarded by distractions. I've recently also been getting into watching more long form survival and bushcraft videos. It just kind of relaxes my mind and it feels like I'm there and you learn some stuff along the way. That's why I always like to try to teach, but also make it entertaining and cinematic and just a good experience to get immersed in. This is what we got, about six feet of cordage. You can see at the end I'm going real thin. It's still very strong. I'm gonna tie this around a gorge hook. I'm gonna show you how to make that and try to find some bait. Looking good. All right, so we got our fishing line. We're going with about six feet of cordage. At the end of it, it's going real thin. We'll try to find some bait and put a gorge hook on here and I'll show you exactly how to make that and then we'll put on a fishing pole and get fishing. So here we have our gorge hook. In the center there's a little divot and that's where I'll tie my line and on each side it's sharp and we'll just tie a constrictor knot onto here. So with some bait on here, a fish comes, grabs it this way and when you pull, it turns sideways like that because it's pulling from the middle. Our goal now is to find some bait for the gorge hook and I'm just looking under all the dead logs and rocks trying to find some sort of larvae or grub. Hmm, can't find anything. All right, I can't find anything in this forest here. Looked under a dozen logs, absolutely nothing. I'm gonna keep searching but if I can't find anything then we'll look in the water and start looking under there for some insects or crayfish maybe. Anything I could find really that a bass or trout would go after. And if all else fails, I'll have to tie something that looks like some sort of fly and skim it across the top maybe. Well, maybe we go in the water there and try to catch crayfish or something. All right guys, we're going crayfishing. These rocks are very slippery. I can't believe this. I've been looking for 10, 15 minutes and can't find a single cray. The crayfish claw here, a little guy. So I know some kind of bird had been eating those. So they gotta be here. Usually you flip over a few rocks and they're just there. I hope that means that this whole area is just filled with fish that have eaten all the crayfish out of here and they wanna eat more. I must not give up. I will not give up. Well, that's good to know that they're hard to find because I was kind of chalking them up as maybe a food source in my mind. But if they're this hard to get, maybe it's not a viable one. Oh, we're on the right track. Guys, I found something. It's like a crayfish in a nest. It looks disgusting. Dead? Just a dead crayfish. It's a dead one. That's all we got. Let's use it. We're gonna use it. That's all we got. Okay, we're gonna tie this on with the constrictor hitch again. And this is basically a, more secure version of the clove hitch. And there we go. Got our fishing pole. We got our bait. Let's go do some fishing. We got our camera recording from shore over here. Yes. Gosh, no way. Wow. Our efforts paid off. We got a rock bass. Yes. We're gonna eat tonight. Dispatch this guy and get another line in there. We still have the top of our crayfish. I'm drilling a tiny little hole in the top. I'm gonna pass the line through. Put our gorge hook back on. So we can assemble it like this. Number two, let's go. Got a nice one. All right. Nice smallmouth. That's two. Yes. Ah, there we go. All right, the fish are on and I'm putting these tubers in the coals. Let's see how these cook up. Wow, here's been a long day. Very excited to have some of this bass. It smells delicious actually. It's hard to do with one hand. So I'm gonna put the camera down for a second. Here we go. That's a bit better. Finally enjoy some of this bass. Mm, mm. Thank you. Thank you, bass. Solid sustenance. Now I wanted to show you also this cattail tuber. So what you do with this is just peel this part off. Actually smells like asparagus. It's hard to eat so I'm just gonna. Mm, starchy. It's like, it's kind of stringy but inside it tastes like potato actually and a little bit of asparagus. It's got the texture of potato. What does that taste? I think it's asparagus. I burned a lot of calories today. So this and the fish is just nice. I've got to get my tongs to take the rocks out of the fire. Boil up some more water. More water is boiled. Definitely not hydrating enough. That's the hardest thing out here is keeping hydrated. Each fire I do a few of these boils and then before the trek today, I just pounded as many as I could but each time you're only getting probably a glass or two of water. So digging out a bowl would be a good idea or if you're stationary, you could do it into like a fallen log. All right, I'm gonna have a few more waters. Hydrate up and then crawl into that shelter. Thanks for bearing with me on today. It's been a grueling one but a huge success. So we'll see what tomorrow holds. Good morning. This shelter certainly worked out well. I got a decent night's rest. All right, let's get the day started. Well, it's late morning now and I've been thinking a lot about what to do. Just sitting here hydrating up pretty much all day. I think we're gonna end the adventure here. I'll deconstruct the shelter in an effort to leave no trace and then just put away my camera gear and enjoy the hike back. I just wanna thank you for joining me on this adventure. I'm your friend DJ from the Bare Essentials and we'll see you on the next one.