Surviving a Fierce Desert Storm With Only Primitive Skills

More than a year had passed since the last time I visited my adobe hut in the desert. I thought I chose a good time to come back, but nature had other plans. Before the sun rose, lightning was already flashing across the sky. The morning came, the clouds thickened, the landscape darkened. The hut stood alone, frozen in time. I was almost there, I could see it in the distance. Then, thick dark clouds rolled over the mountain like an advanced bombardment. Raindrops pelted the earth like bullets, while thunder roared from the heavens. I had just one option available. I had to get to the rock shelter. It's hailing! Hail, lightning, thunder, wind, cold! Getting everything! Completely just getting pounded out here! Water from a fresh rain that forms into puddles and rocks like this is an excellent water source. You just have to make sure that there aren't any feces, old feces that might be left by rodents lying at the bottom. This one doesn't appear to have any. It just has some little tiny oak leaves and just some other debris. I think it's totally safe though. The fact that the surface of this rock is baking under the summer sun most of the time, and then it just occasionally rains, and this water will not be here long at all either. So I think it's totally safe. More thunder. Looks like round two might be coming. This might be a good time to show what I brought with me for this adventure. Buckskin clothes, poverty sandals, a little buckskin cloak I can use that as a blanket to sleep on. I brought my hammock, yucca hammock, 100% yucca made. This is my calabash bottle gourd with a netting, carrying net, and I recently made this leather strap, shoulder strap for additional comfort. Looks cool too. I have two atlatls which I may use for fishing if that's even a possibility. With all this rain the water is going to be high and it's going to be probably very muddy and so I probably won't be able to fish anyways. Also have here fire kit. This is for a hand drill. Two pieces of mule fat, trying to keep that dry. This is my very basic atlatl. Extremely simple, not the greatest, but it will throw the spear. Collected some prickly pears on my way here, not very many. Prickly pear harvest in these mountains is dismal this year, but I got some. The ants are going after them so I have to keep moving the basket, and I have a couple other things. This is very interesting. This is a cecum of a bison and inside I have acorn flour. This acorn flour is already processed. It's been leached, all the tannins have been leached out. It's good to eat. Okay, so I'm using this as a bag. I have to be careful though. I've got to protect this so that no sharp objects, no thorns brush against it because then it'll just tear it. It's like a plastic, it's like a kind of a heavy duty plastic bag. And then I also have this bag, just a little over-the-shoulder bag to carry some miscellaneous items. Inside I have a coconut cup. This would be for heating water if necessary. If it keeps raining like this then I'm not going to have to even cook any water, so that would be nice. A bone knife made from a rib of a cow, and I also have some pieces of dry beef. Got a little damp in the rain and I should leave it out, let them dry better. And what else is in here? Oh, I got some yucca cordage. This could be used as fishing string if I so desire. And just some extra straps, leather straps for whatever. I may need to fix these laces. Actually, I have plenty of lace. I think the lace will be fine. They've broken and been tied back together many, many times as you can clearly see. Of course, my burden basket, everything, most of these items can go in the burden basket. So I'm just going to wait here a little longer, see what happens with the weather, and just relax. I feel a little nervous about revisiting the hut after all this time. It's had to withstand a lot of elemental abuse in the past year. It's been over a year. It's rained, it snowed, it rained again. Just now it rained really hard. I never know when I come back, is the hut going to still be standing? Is the roof going to be intact? Will it be dry inside? So, after more than a year of full exposure to the rain, snow, wind, the kiln is still standing. It's badly eroded on the top, but this layer of bricks could be replaced with new ones. If I just packed mud all over it, then that would be fine. That's amazing. Two of the oyas are still here, and this one has water. It's filled with water. This one has a little bit of water. Full exposure to the elements, these have been here for about three years. Two or three, I don't remember exactly. Old broken pottery, all the mud for all the bricks that built the adobe hut, and all the clay for the pottery, it all came from this hole. I started digging with a stick right here in the middle. Little by little over the years, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. Right now, there's a lot of debris, a lot of topsoil that has washed in from the rains. This place is a mess. A lot of cleaning up to do. The roof is not working. This part is staying dry, but the rest of it has leaks. Moisture gets in. There's rat feces all over. Over here, behind these clay mud plates, these are weightlifting plates, there's a creature that has built a shelter, a home inside this. All this debris that's been covered, there's all these little items, sticks. What is this? From a bow drill. Friction fire. This is something I made. I weaved together, and it's now got holes in it. Friction fire kit. Yeah, that's been chewed through. That probably was eaten by mice. They eat cordage. I've seen them do that before. They chewed through this net, apparently. It's falling apart now, but if you listen very carefully, if you're super quiet, you can hear a little thump-thump happening all the time here. It sounds like this. About every one and a half seconds, listen carefully. Now, my suspicions are that this is a badger. Two or three years ago, I saw a badger in the dead tree that's out here. He had burrowed a hole in the middle of the tree in the trunk, and it was at night, and I shined a light on him, and I saw his face. Cute little, super cute creature. And then soon after that, after I was away from the hut for a long time, I came back, and all this debris was placed over these clay weights. Whatever creature built this gathered materials from all over inside the hut and placed them as like a debris shelter. He's been inhabiting this for at least two years. It's time to do some renovations on the hut. Whoever or whatever family is in there, they're going to have to move out, at least temporarily. So, I hate to do this. I don't like to disrupt people's lives, but hey, my life has been disrupted many times before. So, we get through it, right? We're survivors. Let's get to it. Let's finish cleaning this up. This was my water filter. It actually worked pretty good, but it looks like rats probably ate the rope, or did they eat it? Yeah, one of the, this part of the rope was chewed through. That's why it fell. Rat feces inside. This, my very first cooking pot, I ever made, is a very first successful pottery experiment. This was made in 2018. I used it to boil water. I cooked rabbit soup. I cooked wild Palo Verde beans. Cooked a lot of meals in this. It fell. It was up on the shelf. I found it down here. Landed on top of a piece of pottery, a little plate, but this doesn't seem to have completely broken. It's a little cracked on the bottom. Test it out. This is like an ancient artifact to me. Now's the moment. Four more plates. All right, just these two and these two. When I pull these out, this debris is going to collapse, and some creature should come scurrying out. Maybe not on this pole. I'm going to pull two right now. There's only, there's an opening here, there's an opening here, and an opening right on that side. There he goes. It's a big rat. Beautiful. No more rats. That was the only one in here. In all this time, I was believing that a badger had built this shelter. I thought it was a badger. I can't believe it was these rats. Or maybe, maybe a badger occupied this at first, the badger left, he moved somewhere else, got a bigger house, and then the rats moved in. That could be, that could be a logical explanation as well. All right, well now I know, and I have my hut returned to me. After being evicted by rodents, now I'm coming back. This place is so dirty, but it's looking better now. Got everything cleared out, just got to sweep the floor, get all the rat feces out. There's only a few more hours of light, so I'm going to have to prepare for the night. So what I want to do is start a fire, and try to make a little bit of a mattress, something to sleep on. I can use the palm leaves. Speaking of palm leaves, you're probably wondering where this came from. Actually, they have been here for over a year. I was slowly bringing them little by little when I was coming here before, because I wanted to use palm leaves for the roof. I think it's a better material than juniper bark. I think it'll last longer, and it's also cleaner. Juniper bark drops a lot of dust. Well, not right now, because it's kind of wet, but when it's dry, if you touch it, little bits of dust fall, and it's also not as good as palm leaves. Palm leaves will repel the water a lot better. So that's what I want to do. I want to make... I don't think I have enough palm leaves for the entire roof, so what I will do is use a combination of both juniper bark and palm leaves. And that's the plan for the next couple days. There should be water in the spring, and I have some food rations. Not much, but enough to get through. Keep on working. So that was disappointing. Couldn't make a fire. I made a mistake when I brought the sticks. I didn't test them first. I just grabbed two sticks. They looked good. I made a divot. I made a notch, and that was it. But here I could not make an ember. Made a lot of smoke, but no ember. It's getting dark, and as it gets darker, it's harder and harder to make a fire. And so my main priority is bedding. I need a mattress. I want some kind of cushion to sleep on. So I'm going to be on that rock floor, and that's not very comfortable throughout the night. So what I'm going to do is just strip a few of these palm leaves that I have here, and I'm going to weave them together in bundles, the same way that I make tule mats. And that will give me a nice little cushion, at least for my upper body. That's all that I'm really concerned about. If I have cushion for my upper body, then I'll be fine. That way I'll be able to sleep a little bit better through the night. It's not going to be cold, so I'm not worried about that. It's actually very warm inside. That's the beautiful thing about adobe. It absorbs the heat of the day, and then it releases that throughout the night. And so it stays warm throughout the night inside. It would be nice to have a fire because I'm sure the rodents are going to come looking for stuff inside, and the fire helps to deter them. But, oh well, that's just the way it is. Things don't always go as planned. In fact, things never go as planned. In here, this pot's been sitting in the hut for all these years, and has a whole bunch of cordage inside. Whenever I had extra cordage, I'd just stuff it in here. When I had free time and I was making cordage, like this one is a combination of my hair and yucca fibers. So I would always just make cordage and then stuff it in here for when I need it. So now, today I'm going to use it to weave this mat. All right, I got enough of this mat finished so that I can actually lie on it tonight. This will be enough for my upper body to lie on. It is very dark out, and there's nothing to see. I have no light. That's the disappointment of not being able to get a fire. I have no light tonight. That's okay. Tomorrow, we'll fix that problem. Good night. Sign up for my primal newsletter to learn about my current projects, future plans, and health and fitness from a primal perspective. The link is in the description below.