Prepping – Shelter

There are lots of different types of shelter that we have access to. As with most things “prepper” related, everyone has a couple of opinions, and many of them clash. Basically, the idea is that you should have access to some kind of shelter in the first three hours of an emergency. It’s a good target to aim for, but it requires a lot of forethought and/or skill to pull it off.

The first kind of shelter that most of us have is our home. If you can stay at home, you probably should. Your home has all your food, your beds, your comfort items, and you know it. If you’re the type of person who’s been prepping a while, you probably have a plan in place for how to keep your home safe from raiders or marauders, and so that makes it one of the safest places you can be. A roof with four walls and a stout door really does trump most other types of shelter.

What if your home isn’t available, though? Whether it’s because you’ve been caught out when the emergency occurred, or a flash flood has washed away your home, or a tornado has ripped it into shreds, or any other reason, home is no longer safe. Your next easiest (and possibly safest, in many cases) form of shelter is your vehicle. You can cover the windows for privacy, you can lock the doors, and it’s mobile so you can move it to a safer place if things get hairy wherever you are. Your car also has the ability to hump more goods than you can by yourself. Again, it’s a fairly warm place (at least in comparison with outside), the doors lock, and it’s yours. You can formulate a plan around your vehicle long before you ever need it.

With your home and vehicle out of the picture, what else can you do? Well, that depends a lot on your strength, ingenuity, where you are, the time of year/weather/temperature, and lots of other things.

I love bushcraft shelters, I really do. I love making “forts” out of whatever I have laying around. It’s fun, and it’s good practice. Chris made his “adult blanket fort” out back of his place at the beginning of the pandemic, so there was a place outside the house it was safe to disappear into for a while. It worked, but lots of failure points were learned, too.

The first thing any shelter needs to do for you is keep off the sun, wind, rain, and/or snow. You have to be warm enough not to lose core heat, and not so hot that you become dehydrated or sun stroked. That can be achieved by using landscape features (fallen trees with spaces under them, natural caves and overhangs, bamboo poles covered with leaves), or by using man-made items like tarps, panels, or military ponchos. This is when your imagination comes in.

The simplest shelter that I keep on hand (other than my clothing) is my military sleep system. It has a light inner bag, a heavy outer bag, and a waterproof and wind proof bivy that goes over everything. In very cold weather, you can get into it with the bivy on top, put all of you but your face inside the sleeping bags, and let your face be exposed inside the bivy but not to the outside air. This keeps some of your heat inside, but the moisture in your breath doesn’t dampen your bag (which is important). The bivy keeps wet from seeping in from the ground below you, and is rain proof as well. It also keeps out the bugs, for the most part, as you can velcro it closed over your head. During moments when I had an especially irritating mosquito in my tent, I slept inside my bivy and awoke bite free.

When you’re thinking about shelter, you need to consider all the local variables, like weather, temperature, humidity, insect menace, and even general safety. If you want to get some idea of what kind of shelters you can make on the sly, check out Steve Wallis on YouTube. He does a stealth camping series, and I find a lot of his stuff to be both fascinating and educational.

Making a lean-to is likely the simplest version of a quick made shelter. Use some kind of uprights (branches, logs, leftover bits of building material, spare pipes, PVC tubing, you name it) to lean against either a branch or a building or even a vehicle, and then cover it over with natural materials (leaves, moss, bracken, etc.) to make it less obvious. Crawl in, and you have a shelter to keep you out of sight and out of the wind and rain. Some people like to build a half A-frame lean-to, with a fire pit that reflects into the shelter, for warmth. A full A-frame is probably the simplest constructed shelter you can make, and you can leave one end open to a fire if you like.

In very deep, packable snow, you can build a snow trench and cover it with a tarp or other material. A fire can generally be made inside a snow trench, provided you have the fire area open to the sky (don’t set your cover on fire!). Tipis are also relatively easy to build, with a number of stacked uprights, a central hole open to allow smoke out from a fire in the center of the sheltered area, and the whole thing covered with tarps, blankets, or hides. Wikiups and wigwams, such as the Native Americans made, are durable and yet easy to put together, as are Bender Tents.

Here in New England, I need to be mindful of heat and bugs in summer. This means that any shelter I make has to have ways to repel or keep out bugs, AND it needs to have air flow to keep the inside from over-heating. In winter, I have to worry more about the cold, snow, occasional rain (which is very dangerous in winter), and falling branches. Any shelter I construct has to be safe to sleep in, and that means I can’t be under any tree that might fall, or broken branches, and I need to police my shelter area on a regular basis to make certain I’m safe. Wind storms can be severe where I am, and that means that branches are routinely knocked down. My shelter has to be able to withstand that. I tend to lean towards A-frame and Bender tents because of those needs, as both types can be opened at the ends to allow air flow, and are not too difficult to keep bug free.

If you want to learn more about bushcraft and bushcraft shelters, I highly recommend Dan at Coalcracker Bushcraft. He’s intelligent, his videos are entertaining, and his shelters are fun and educational!

Let me know if you’re interested in any more in-depth information about any of the shelters mentioned here, or elsewhere!