Man and Woman vs. Wild in Marin

The first lesson I learned from survival camp is to look at your map.

After wandering around  for 45 minutes, when I eventually arrived at Adventure Out’s Wilderness Skills and Survival Class at Camp Arequipa in Fairfax, San Anselmo native Jack Harrison is teaching a group of 25 couples, 20-somethings, families and two large hunters to build a debris hut out of leaves and sticks.

The group hopes to learn not just survival skills that might someday, possibly be useful, but also to enjoy the outdoors that so many in Marin hike, run and bike through.

“There’s nothing greater than the beauty of nature,” said Alan Rosenthal, who brought his daughter from San Francisco to teach her about the outdoors.

Harrison, a 2007  grad prone to mentioning off-handedly the time he built a shelter as night fell in a Montana snowstorm or when he spent a year living in the woods of Washington, is Adventure Out’s Operations Manager. That means he teaches people how to find edible plants, how to kill animals with throwing sticks, and – like he is when I arrive – how to build a debris hut.

Being late, I missed the four keys to survival, but they are order of importance: shelter, fire, water, and food.

Shelter

When I arrived at survival camp this past Saturday in the misting rain, Harrison is regaling the group with his own survival parables – proof that sleeping in a pile of leaves can keep you alive, even in a snowstorm.

“I’m still here,” he said.

“That’s the goal: to not die,” said his co-instructor Dan Baird.

Constructing a debris hut is not nearly as hard as it sounds – as I quickly learn when we build our own.

“It’s a sleeping bag of leaves,” said Harrison.

The idea is to insulate yourself with leaves, plants and debris by first piling them nice and thick on the ground and then building on top.

Pick a high and dry safe place for your hut. You want to be out of the flow of water, but also out of the elements. Using a large log, tree or rock as one side of your shelter is always a good idea, but be sure you’re not at risk for being wiped out by a rock or mud slide.

After picking a spot, pile on leaves and debris. More insulation from the ground means you’ll stay warmer. Roll around to pat it down, then pile on more. This is the base of your hut.

Build the top and sides using large branches that will hold up against anything that might fall on you and smaller branches to create a latticework to dump more leaves on and block up all the holes.

One of Harrison’s stories is a lesson about building his first hut when he was just 12 years old. He worked on it all day until his teacher came and asked if it was strong enough? Yeah, said 12-year-old Harrison. The teacher stepped on it, breaking half the branches.

“I was very cold that night,” said Harrison, who slept in the broken hut as a lesson about building debris huts – a lesson he passes on to the class.

“You’ll learn more by sleeping in your debris hut than by taking 100 classes,” said Baird.

Harrison echoed the sentiment. “Consider it for your next family vacation,” he said.

Fire

If you can build yourself a shelter, you will survive nearly any night you might get lost in the wilds of the Bay Area. But, if you’re planning on being lost for more than one night or in a less temperate climate, then building a fire is step number two.

We spent two hours practicing building fire, but wasn't nearly enough time for more than five or six people to create flames. Many outdoor classes spend a week learning to create fire, said Harrison.

“There are about 30 different ways to rub sticks together,” said Harrison. Of those 30, he teaches “the bow drill” – a video of which can be seen at right, as well as a video of Harrison performing the bow drill successfully Saturday afternoon.

The steps to the bow drill are:

• Cut two pointed ends into a cylinder shaft of wood no thicker than a magic marker.

• Get a flat piece of wood for your base and a small handhold piece of word to hold onto. Cut small holes/notches in each of these where the pointed ends of your cylinder will dig into.

• Find a slightly bent stick about the length of your arm and tie a string (use your shoelace if you need to) like a bow.

• Twist the string of your “bow” around your cylinder with the bottom stuck in the hole of your base and the top in your handhold. Saw back and forth with your bow to burn a small circular indent in the base.

• Once you have a burned indent, cut a notch in your base (about an eighth of a circle) into the hole.

• Put a dry leaf underneath your notch/indent and saw with your bow again applying pressure from the top until you get smoke and a small ash on your leaf.

• Set the ash inside a prepared tinder bundle, letting it breath, and blow on it until it catches fire.

• Oh yeah, and have your fire pit prepared for this moment.

Complicated? Yes.

Although Harrison does the whole thing in just a few minutes, he revealed that he practices every day and also that he’s not at his peak right now.

Despite the fact that the bow drill is supposedly the easiest method of creating fire and the quickest to learn, I had no success. I managed to bow and drill my hand, but not to successfully bow drill a fire. I eventually lost interest and figured I would operate off of Baird’s words of wisdom when another camper asked if they should bring these tools with them when hiking or camping?

“No,” he said. “Bring a lighter.”

Water and Food

The highlight of the survival camp are the hands-on lessons, but Harrison also offers some insight into the issues of water and food – starting with: unless you know you’re going to get rescued and don’t care about giardia, don’t drink just any water you find.

Look for water moving to low points, find natural caches such as ditches or holes in rocks, and if there are no other sources of water wipe your cotton t-shirt on a the leaves round you in the morning to gather dew.

Most people don’t have trouble finding water, but they do have trouble purifying it.

The easiest way to bring water to a boil, thus purifying it, is to pull burning rocks out of the fire you lit using the bow drill and stick them in the bowl of water. Put in enough rocks (not with your hands, with sticks like chopsticks) until it brings the water to a boiling temperature, then pull the rocks back out.

You don’t have a bowl to gather water in? Set burning coals on a log, let it burn away and then dig out the ash.

When it comes to food, though, “it’s a whole different game,” said Harrison.

“You’re going to have to kill something if you’re going to stay alive,” he said, so pick up a stick and start trying.

He encourages people to learn for themselves what plants are poisonous and which aren’t, otherwise we won’t retain what he tells us. Stay away from mushrooms unless you’re an expert and stick to simple things like acorns (which you need to let wash out the toxins in running water), the inside bark on trees and grubs.

The four major things to eat are: grasses, pine trees, oaks, and cat tails.

To learn about bringing down birds with just a stick, though, you’ll have to take the advanced class.

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Adventure Out is a Santa Cruz-based company founded by Cliff Hodges in 2002 that specializes in extreme outdoor adventure classes. It started as a company offering trips and clinics just to women, but these days Adventure Out offers everything from five-day surfing camps to animal tracking classes to a Half Dome backpacking trip.

The most popular of these is the beginning Wilderness Skills and Survival Class, which the company has branched out to offer to the weekend warriors of Marin.

The new Fairfax-based classes are largely the brainchild of Harrison, who wants to inspire people like he was inspired as a kid starting with Mrs. Terwilliger.

If you ask Harrison, he was an odd kid, spending a lot of time learning “primitive skills” after his family moved to the East Coast when he was in middle school. Did he know a lot of kids at Drake when he came back? “Not really. I hung out in the woods a lot,” he said.

But, he went to class often enough to meet and impress Hodges when Adventure Out did a clinic for the SEA-DISC environmental academy at Drake. And now, he’s teaching kids those same skills.

Natalie Franzini, who graduated from Terra Linda last year, came with her older sister to survival class, because she loves camping and was inspired by outdoor activists.

Will she need the skills she learned?

“Need them? No. Use them for fun? Yes,” she said.