#AskPaulKirtley Episode 53 - LIVE at the Bushcaft Show 2017

Description

Welcome to Episode 53 of #AskPaulKirtley, which was recorded live at the 2017 Bushcraft Show, Derbyshire, UK. The questions came directly from the sizeable audience who were in the room.

TIMESTAMPS:

03:11 When did you start travelling around the world?

04:56 How do you manage to produce so many blogs, videos and podcasts?

08:40 Occasions when I’ve had to "tap out" and return to civilisation?

16:48 What axe would I recommend as a general purpose bushcraft/campcraft axe?

18:55 Advice for those with limited mobility who want to get out to do more bushcraft?

22:40 Preferred grind on a general purpose camp knife

25:18 How to find places to go to practise skills or wild camping?

32:46 How do you make decent coffee on expedition?

38:13 What from nature can we use to neutralise the taste of chlorine water purification tablets?

42:45 What got me into bushcraft in the first place?

51:52 How do you keep a group of people in a positive frame of mind on an expedition with difficult weather conditions or terrain?

58:54 How to maintain tree health when stripping bark?

WHAT IS #ASKPAULKIRTLEY?

#askpaulkirtley is your chance to ask Paul Kirtley questions about wilderness bushcraft, survival skills and outdoor life.

Ask Paul Kirtley is a regular Q&A show (also available as a podcast) with leading bushcraft instructor Paul Kirtley, founder of Frontier Bushcraft and author of Paul Kirtley's Blog.

ASK PAUL A QUESTION:

Ask a question here: http://paulkirtley.co.uk/ask-paul-kirtley/

Or tweet your questions with hashtag #askpaulkirtley to @pkirt

SHOW NOTES & PREVIOUS EPISODES:

http://paulkirtley.co.uk/Topics/askpaulkirtley/

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Tags: bushcraft,survival,wilderness,camping,hiking,outdoors,question and answer,advice,questions,answers,bushcrafting,nature,self reliance,self sufficiency,outdoor skills,outdoor knowledge,Paul Kirtley,askpaulkirtley,bushcraft show,the bushcraft show,live ask paul kirtley,live askpaulkirtley,askpaulkirtley bushcraft show,bushcraft show 2017

Video Transcription

morning everyone morning morning how we doing third day in for some of you yeah good well thank you for turning up and this is a question and answer session and it is being recorded yet so if you've got questions great but otherwise it's going to be a short session but what I'll do is I'll repeat the question the best I can once you've answered it yes so everybody can hear it clearly we've got it on camera and then I'll do my best to answer it so for those of you that don't know my a sport currently series it's a video series and it's a podcast series so basically I got to a point where people were sending me lots of questions by email Facebook in particular and I just wasn't having time to answer them and a lot of the questions were the same questions week in week out about arts about fires about bow drill that cordage all sorts of things and rather than me writing sort of several paragraphs to somebody occasionally I thought well it will be valuable for me to put this out for more people to consume it so I started experimenting with doing a question and answer show and I've been doing it for more than two years now and on average put one out about every two weeks so this is episode 53 all that sport currently that you are part of so thank you for being part of that I'm just going to show the usual little intro and there's a little bit more information there as a few little there's a few little flashbacks to some of the episodes from and where I'm where I've been and I tend to just stop and record them wherever I am around the world or around the country see if we can get this to work [Music]

[Music]

there we go so it's an open for us and open floor for questions and I'm going to try and get as many done as I can what time's the finish time on this one got 50 minutes of Li raised on next anyway is my colleague on next I just squeezed some of this time out because half 11 Wow hope you got a lot of questions right first question here when I first start traveling around the world and I didn't do a huge amount of traveling until I was about 18 I went to Canada for the first time when I was 18 after I did my a-levels and that was a real experience I went to British Columbia which the Rockies travel around a bit that was fantastic and that made me want to go back to once go back to Canada and then yeah I've done a lot of traveling since then and sort of shorter trips and Europe and Scandinavia and then longer trips further afield Australia Africa North America and yeah I still only feel like I've seen a tiny tiny proportion of the world so I was what I would say is you're you're young I'd encourage you to soon as you can start going out and seeing different places and there's already been a few presentations around different aspects of bush prep this weekend and one of the themes that came out of Jason's yesterday was it changes your perspective it gives your broader view of the world and I think at the moment not to get too political I think having a broader view of the world and being a bit more accepting of different cultures might be a good thing we're sort of getting a little bit more inch and I'm not just talking about brexit I'm just talking up people in general it would be soon to be shrinking back and personally from having traveled around the world a lot it gives you different views of different cultures and you appreciate the fact that people are coming at the same thing from different angles so I'd encourage you to travel as much as possible it's been a very valuable part go as soon as you can earlier than I do next question so question is I put apparently I put a lot of stuff out on the Internet how do I find the time how does it how do I manage it how long does it take and I don't feel I put as much out as I would like to frankly and if you could have a look in my secret notebook of blog ideas and article ideas and things I'd like to make videos about you see there's a big backlog there and so I have a lot more ideas about things that I'd like to do than I can do and one of the reasons why ask for curtly has been successful is I hit upon a formula that people enjoy and that they like that they can interact with but also isn't massively onerous on me to to produce and producing a you know I've played around with producing sort of video blogs of things but the editing process takes a long time and it also cuts into what you're doing so you have to have a real clear vision of what you're trying to do if you say filming a trip and because you're not just doing the trip then you're doing the trip and trying to get shots and you know it is that time consuming it does change things so I tend not to film stuff when I'm with customers because the focus is on on the student on the client the person who's been guided the person who's been taught so we tend to just post a few snapshots Instagram Facebook that type of thing the videos tend to come more from what I'm doing but even so I do a lot more things on my own hikes canoe trips and more not than I ever managed to put out anything about and that's just lack of time frankly and so there's there's some really good hikes I've done in Scotland in the last few years that I've got half of written articles about all eight drafts or notes but I've never put them out into anything and so it's difficult is what I'm trying to say but the reason this one of the this works is it's not formulaic but there is a there's a workflow and and there isn't a lot of editing required and basically sitting front of a camera talk export the audio as a podcast put the video online and that works but even so I go through periods I just don't get them done and but also I work hard that you know I work long hours and you know I'll be away for a bit and then I'll come back and I'll I'll do a 90 hour a week writing editing getting stuff online getting stuff ready to go online for when I'm away again and anybody who does do stuff online whether it's within Bush arrest or for their business have a look at the automation tools that you can use you know there's a few neat little timing tools that you can use some of them built-in like YouTube for example you can post a video on YouTube and then you can say publish this in two weeks time and then you can go off and do a canoe trip while people are still getting your content so that is part of how we managed to do it is that we batch it and then we'd feed it out but I don't put anywhere near as much as well as I'd like to yes so if the question is about putting your own stuff out that just just work at it work at it keep going find stuff that works find stuff that resonates at Peter as well you know you monitor what you know you can post certain types of things and papers just like some tumbleweed nobody's responding to it you can post other things and people are commenting liking sending you in more questions and then you know that you've hit on something that works so a part of this experimentation finding what works cool thank you good question next question hand up there yep so question is have I had any memorable occasions where I've had to tap out where I've been in a wild place or being on the trip and had to come back to civilization as uncivilized as it consumed sometimes well when you make when you when you're making journeys you're always making an assessment of what what the conditions are versus what the plan is and it's you're probably after like horror story survival story I don't know that I can't really give you much in that vein but you know simple things like and spoons Paul Nichols who works with me we did a trip on the River Tay recently and we planned to go and do this trip for a year and said we'll go and do the cases then we'll start high as high up as we can to higher up them the locked a we'll start up at the top of the docket and huddle down the dockets into into the loft a a long locked a down the whole tale river system to Perth where it becomes tidal and then there's 42 kilometers of estuary with some of the strongest tidal waters in the UK some of the fastest tidal waters in the UK but the idea was to once we got there leave Perth that high tide get to brought a ferry which is where we're going to get out at low tide it's 42 kilometers between the two high tide of Perth at 3 and low tide at broader failure at 8 with five hours to do 42k to paddle 5k an hour on the flat and then get a bit of the tide you'll cover that distance yep so that was the plan but in the UK the the the prevailing wind tends to be westerly south westerly westerly northwesterly so we start this journey up a Korean Larrick which anybody walked the west island way here I've been up that way yet you know you know we're Korean Larrick is it's quite far west and we should have had really a tailwind on average in the UK but we had this lovely fine weather that we had in early May had an easterly or what wind attached to it so we had a headwind right at the start and then there wasn't much snow in Scotland this this winter and it's been quite dry in April so there wasn't a lot of water in the docket so we were really slow to start off with red not much water quite a lot of headwind and by the end of day two we were where we should have been really at the end of day one where we hope so we lost the day in the first two days because we'd had to get out of our boat and drag it along and just it wasn't enough water to float the boat in some places and that's not a her anything oh it wasn't a survival situation it wasn't horrendous beautiful sunny weather it wasn't a nice sign and we camped in a lovely place that we wouldn't have camped otherwise but the point was we were then behind time where you're now plan you know that we wanted to be on we had some flexibility but then you're having to sort of reassess all the time what's the weather conditions today can I make up the time kind of make up the distance etc etc etc so to cut a long story short we had a headwinds most of the way because you're going eat a little bit southeast and most most of the lateral travel is west to east when we had a headwind so we get to Perth and we're still pretty much a day behind and we've made the assessment before we got there that we were going to get off at her because there was still that headwind and there is no way we were going to go onto the estuary 42 kilometers of strong tidal estuary with a headwind fighting against the headwind when we really need is no wind or wind behind us so that's that's an occasion where we just said lift to fight and we'll come back to fight another day because we could have tried it we could have been matching but yeah let's dig in and do it but we probably would have ended up having to get off somewhere you know random and then work out you know we would have not made the distance and then you're in a world of difficulty so often you're trying to preempt getting into those situations where it is a tap out it's just you're avoiding it in the first place but that would be an occasion where it didn't go to plan but there was no harm done no foul another situation against Scotland I'll keep it to the UK keep it local and a few years ago we were doing a war in Scotland and it was the idea of Matt who's not here with us at the moment the guy who works as sometimes sort of his stag do yet and most people want to go to Prague or something for their stag - and Matt wanted to walk all the mountains in Scotland over 4000 feet yep so the red the Monroe's the mountains over 3,000 feet is about 280 of those were the ones over 4000 feet there's nine of those and there's a cluster in the can dorms and there's a cluster around Ben Nevis on the west near Fort William and the idea was to start near a beam or walk up into the Cairngorms through the Cairngorm group while camping all the way carrying all that food walk right across it was a stag so we did stop him down Winnie go to the distillery have a bit of a tasting carried on along Lockett Eric Cantona been older over the top out towards the gray quarries along the gray quarries and we were coming down of anethe more so we've done about 10 Monroe's at this point we've done all but two of the two of the peaks that we needed to do we needed to get on the car Lord Li arrest and go on to the back of there nervous and then down the tourist path and we've done we're coming down anethe more and that's me when basically and he's had a problem with it in the past it went and so we're at the saddle between anethe mall and Kanwar Derek and we're making a decision and it's starting to rain Matt's like I can probably get up the hill up onto the and Rhett were 800 meters we need to get to about 1,300 meters or we could escape into the top of Glen nervously we could escape down to the ski centre and the Anakim or ski centre and I've done been nervous before Matt a bit nervous before Henry hadn't been at been nervous before and he was keen to get up there and it was a really difficult decision particularly from that because it was his idea to do the hike in the first place and we wanted to complete the 4,000 in one go and Matt thought he could get up and along the arete which was a technically difficult bit but then it was just the thirteen hundred and fifty metres of the same diameter

on the far side of my notice which was going to be a problem it was a difficult decision to make because you come so far you've been walking for a week and you've had a great adventure but we made this grown-up decision to take the less steep roof the least steep route down to the sea center and then call the taxi to take us to Fort Williams so we failed at the kind of last step and that sounds like an easy decision to make but it really isn't you've invested time you bought kit you've sorted you food you take the time out of work and you've had a great adventure it's been going well and then right on the last afternoon of the last day of the trip somebody has an injury they it's not something where you have to pull mountain rescue but you have to make a grown-up decision so there's lots of things like that I could tell you about where you just have to be mature about it and one of the best pieces of advice it's the same with the estuary it's the same of the mountains they will be there tomorrow yet so just make sure you are just met but it's very easy to kind of push and push and push and get into a situation where you then do need external help so lots and lots of situations like that but I can think of that's another article about that walk that I've still not finished so but you've got the story Thanks the question next question here Danny I'm looking to what I write okay so Danny said he's looking to buy an axe today what she look for well my question to you would be what do you want it to do so an all-around act so I here is a shameless that you could come and watch my accident at one o'clock or whenever it is just after 1:00 and I'll talk through different sizes of actors but as a general purpose bushcraft camp craft axe it's difficult to go wrong with what grandpa's call their small forest axe and wrestling's have a similarly named act similarly sized that called the fours make a similarly sized back so depending exactly what your budget is the quality finish that you want and one of those that's a half-length handle so basically if I hold my hand out fingertips to sternum would be full-length handle or held on an axe to about my elbows about half half length that one and a half pound head start 750 grammes on those quite wieldy you can use it one-handed and one hand is at the end of the handle you can strangle it right up near the head for carving it's long enough just to use two-handed as well so you can do some felling it's do some limbing splitting etc but it's small enough and compact enough to go on the side of rucksack inside a rucksack it's not so heavy that you leave it at home and you really needed it so that's that would be my starting point as a general purpose outdoor axe for camp for journeys whatever you want to do gives you a lot of flexibility but then you could make a decision or if that wasn't big enough and had enough chop you could throw up the size or if it was a bit too heavy for what you wanted if you wanted more just for splitting and light work you could make it go down a bit for science but that would be the starting point and you can see why they're so popular because they're so they're so portable and they're very flexible in their applications well so that'd be where I would start looking cool next question can't see red t-shirt yeah well so the question is and you do a lot of walking Mountain walking going up and down hills both have limited mobility now what advice would I give for getting out for people with limited mobility for people who want to do bush press in particular and well one of the nice things about bush press were you at Cerritos talk yesterday No okay one of the nice things about bushcraft is it the benefits of getting out into the woods the benefits of in terms of taking on the skills don't actually require you to go too far yeah you can you can go to a local woods you don't have to travel too far into the woods to be surrounded by trees to have the resources that you need and it's not like you're doing a backpacking trip where you have to make you know you walk in the west highland way and you've got an 820 miles that day you know you can go into the woods you can relax in the woods and then you can work on particular skills so you can get a lot of those benefits from just going to the woods and working on things so what I was talking about yesterday was working on skills that really will boost your outdoor life so focus on the things that allow you to do the things that you want to do and really work on those rather than trying to be what I said yesterday bushcraft butterfly lay you you flit around from one skill to the other without really owning any of them just think about okay we're going to go to the woods quite a lot most of what we're going to do is relatively static you know maybe they walks just okay go and have a base camp walk out from there do a bit of foraging whatever it is that floats your boat but then what skills do we need around that okay well we need to be quite efficient we put in our camp up we need to be good with our fires we're always going to need a fire we can be we can still work very hard on you know set of sticks and etc etc you know all those skills that allow you to get a fire going easy whatever the weather you know you can really work on your camp craft to make really good pot hangers you can do all of those things by collecting through

that aren't that far away from you in an average broadleaf piece of woodland in the UK you can find hazel you can find all the confined willow you can do those big birch you know those common widespread species learn to recognize and learn how to use them you can and you get the benefits of being in that it being in nature getting the green you know there is so much research that says just looking at green is beneficial for your health looking at pictures of the woods you know even if you put pictures of the woods on here on the screen it's beneficial speaking of putting green things on the screen there we go and it's not true unfortunately and but yet there's plenty of research that suggests that just being in nature is very very good for you and then so while I was asking about Sarita as well that she was reinforcing that there's more research being done now specifically about benefits of taking young people out into the woods and doing things with them there in terms of their mental health and so it's very clear I think that you get you know the benefits in terms of much of what it can give you just by going to the woods and doing the activity so that that would be one thing that I would say don't be discouraged by the fact that you can't necessarily walk up and down been there this or and snow no matter anymore in terms of getting into the woods and doing it you'll you'll get will get the benefits next question what would be my preferred grind on the general-purpose count knife just a fine flat bevel just what you get on the mora something like that I don't get too obsessive about knives to be honest review and and I come at it from a couple of perspectives I've used the fair few different bonds and what you generally find is that what you use you get used to and as long as it's sharp you can ultimately you can do the things that you want to do with it and I'll give you an example and I typically grew up learning bushcraft skills using Morris you know more a clipper or the the previous versions flat grind on it for making something like feather sticks we'll stick with that example carving making photo sticks I then used to work with Lars fault a bit in the north of Sweden he had a knife that was basically a thousand even s one with it but it had a wooden handle and whenever I tried to make feather sticks with his knife and I struggled because I wasn't used to the grind yeah it had quite a pronounced convex grind and I couldn't do it but he could because he was used to it so I would take I would have to practice with that to get as good as he was with his knife but then he would have to practice with my knife to get as good as I was mine I said the important thing is that it's sharp I would say generally for most people a flat a flatter grind just a single straight flat barrel down to the cutting edge is easier for a lot of what we do there's a reason a lot the scandinavian carving knives have that similar grind because they're good for wood carving and a lot a big part of what we do in bushcraft and whether it's making pop hangers feather sticks bow drill sets or what have you it's carving wood so that style of grind works very well for wood carving it's not the most ideal crying for butchery but as long as your knife sharp enough you can do the butchery jobs a bit as well fish billeting it's not the ideal grind but again II will do so again going back to the general-purpose ax question it's a very flexible knife is good for wood craft and as long as it's sharp you'll be able to do the other thing so that that's my personal choice generally to have that fine flat line not to convex certainly not hollow ground because you end up with weakness in my experience towards the edge because you have a lot of metal there so if you're battening in things you tend to take chunks out of it so that's that's the answer next question here okay so a question is he's got the kit and the willingness to go wild camping but he's struggling to find permissions places to go what would be my advice well that's a common common question this was the things one of the questions that I've had a lot over the years and it's a tough one because in England in Wales the access laws are such that it's actually quite difficult to go onto land and just camp without permission strictly speaking even in places where it's tolerated like you know upland areas the lake district Peak District etcetera strictly speaking you should still have landowners permission Scotland the laws different yeah so um if you want to just start going wild camping and journeying you could displayed you've upland areas in the UK where you can go and nobody's really going to say anything other than if you start wandering across LOD ranges you know and there are some big areas you know Northumberland and over into the Eden Valley in places like that and up into Northumberland up and they're keeled over there's some big military ranges up there and you don't be wandering around on there for your own safety as much as anything where the filing tank children but and generally any upland area in England and Wales is a good starting point in terms of thinking I can probably go there without anybody objecting if you want somewhere what you know a piece of woodland where you're going to go to regularly to use you know to practice still tricks so if you're talking about while camping in that sense rather than going to a campsite then I would suggest trying to form a relation ship with a landowner because then and you can go when you want you don't have to worry you know we can all go and go stealth camping we've probably all done it at some stage or thought about it but you you're always really closing down what you're doing you can't be very expansive about what you're doing you're always looking over your shoulder keeping your fires smaller and using a little burner or what have you and it's like almost like you're on your own little mini escape-and-evasion weekend which could be fun but equally if you want to work on you you want to work on your skills you want to be able to go and relax and just as we've been talking about going to the woods find the resources set up camp work on skills so I would say form trying to form a relationship and it's the same sort of question as if say you wanted to go air rifle shooting you want to go and you know when I was a lad I was quite I didn't do a lot of shooting of live things but I was you know used to read the airgun magazines and stuff and one of the common questions and there was always how do I find somewhere to go and shoot and the answer is the same now as it was then go and knock on some doors speak to some farmers try and work out who owns the woodland and I can give you a couple of examples big and small and one guy I know was just walking in some woodland they had a public footpath through it and he was collecting a few resources and not not sort of damaging the area I think he was collecting some Holly for a wreath or something and the landowner happened to be walking through there he got into a conversation with her about nature bushcraft etc and she said well if you want to come down and stay over that's fine and just don't bring too many people with that one too because what she didn't want was for other people to think that you could just go down there and counter she was just like go it go into the woods away from the path don't bring too many people don't leave a mess that's fine so that's one example where he had a conversation you know he was lucky right time right place right attitude from the landowner but that worked for him he had a conversation with the landowner showed her that he had an interest in nature he wasn't just a Yahoo that was going to throw beer bottles around and like set fire to stuff and you know and that's what the landowners concerned about you know and the other thing landowners tend to be concerned about as if there's some sort of shooting going on and it could be that they don't want any disturbing what's going on in terms of they might have specimens down and whether you're not you agree with pheasant shooting the fact that matter is a lot of small woodlands in the UK have got pheasant shooting going on them and so they don't the gamekeeper all the person who manages the shoot doesn't want you in there scaring the birds around that's one and they'll just say no and you just have to accept that there's also quite a lot of deer stalking goes on in the UK we just don't notice it so much because we don't have to wear blaze orange nose pretty much any significant piece of woodland in the UK there will be some deer management going on there and so again there may be just an issue of people going in there with centerfire deal eiffel's and not knowing you're there and that's another reason why the self camping can be a little bit iffy sometimes because people do shoot in woodlands and you just do need to be careful of that and so again they they tend to be at set times they tend to be kind of coming in early on a weekend or something and not doing - not not in there all the time so there'll be a time where nobody's doing anything you could go in for a couple of days or couple of nights or something so again it's about having a conversation with the landowner and finding out who owns the land another example I could give you is a guy that I know come and he'd come and done a couple of courses with us over the years was interested in getting his own piece of wood learned to practice his own skills initially maybe do a few things with his family there was a corner of woodland that he drove backwards and forwards passed on his way to work every day and it's like that looks like a nice piece of woodland looked at the map worked out it was part of a large estate spoke to the estate manager eventually got a meeting with him they went up there he was the estate manager was ex-military they got up talking a little bit about survival skills and bushcraft skills and Mark just showed him it says well this is how I have a fire this is the sort of size fire I'm going to have this is how I clear the space this is how I'll have a fire this is what I'll do to clear up afterwards and showed him how respectfully he would be of the place and the estate manager said well you're going to be you're going to leave the place tidy then you found it and you have a lot tidier than a lot of people who work on the estate so no problem so he had he formed that relationship then and

been going there ever since and he's actually got his own little he actually teaches kids there now as well so yeah those are just some ideas yet and going to you know if you live in the country air just going to the local pub and finding out who owns which bit of woodland and there's a pub that I stay in when I go canoeing canoe training in Wales a great Goodwin and every time I go in that pub the guys who run the local shoot are in there and I chat with them every time yeah there's a couple of old guys that normally had about seven pints by the time I get in there and they're very friendly and they always come over and sort of try and tell me bad jokes and do crack coin tricks and things and but they're really good blokes and those sorts of guys are the guys you kind of need to get to know sometimes because they're like do you know any woodland and it's like well you can't come and use ours but we've got presence in it but Dave Jones down the road he's got a piece of woodland on his farm he's not doing anything with so that it's still doing the legwork at the end of the day but hopefully that gives you a you and everybody else a few ideas it's cool yes or just go to Scotland next question yeah how did you make these in coffee kind of expeditions right I can't give you a practical demonstration but there is a technique that we've come upon and so you need fresh ground coffee the sort of thing you put in a cat's ear so if you like you coffee

cafeteria coffee Taylor's rich Italian is always a good one but what you need is a standard Billy can and it works better with a tall narrow cylindrical Billy can than a wide flat sort of Coleman eagle their products tight pan you need a bail on it and basically boil some water up in the kettle or another pot put the about two centimetres of coffee in the bottom pour water into it do it Bedouin style to do it from a great height get some oxygen into it and then let it put the lid on let it stew for a couple of minutes like you would attach the air before dropping there or French press if you use that language before you drop there drop the filter and do that and then basically you've got a liquid with all these all these things suspended all these coffee grounds suspended in there and if you just drink it you're going to get a mouth for the ground and there's all sorts of tricks which I've been told about over the years and you should drop a stone in it and it shocks it and put put cold water in the top and it will take as it drops it will take all of the grounds with it and take a hot stick from your fire and stick it in the top and that will shock it and create a convection current and take the grounds to the bottom all that does is put ash in your coffee that's that last one I've tried it doesn't work so the best method is if you think about you're driving your car along the road and you hit something you haven't got your seat belt on car stops and you keep moving inside the car yeah and you hit the hit steering wheel or what have you and it's the same principle with the coffee grounds inside the liquid if you drop not literally just throw it on the floor but the method at where spoons and expands to limber up to do this here but basically you drop the pot and as you stop at the bottom the liquid can't go anywhere but the grounds can move within the liquid so it just encourages them to keep going till you drop it a few times so quite gentle on the way up drop at the bottom and the grounds are go to the bottom and then you just line the cups up and then you just pour rather than sloshing it backwards and forwards and you put and I learnt that and where I learn that from was I was doing a ski tour in Norway and there's a couple of funny bits to this I did a Skeeter in Norway and we started off at a place called how Kelly sector and which is just at the south end of the card hanger video and when you're going to south from there into the mountains that are south of the Hardanger video and we were going to a fuss and it's about 28 kilometres out and we're full packs and were out for five days and we're skiing and we stopped for a brew break mid morning and we noticed there a group of four or five guys behind us and concisely dark spots on behind us and being Brits the Norwegians tend to catch up with you after a while since I they're probably passes at lunchtime so you know we speed off we stop for lunch and they were still quite a long way this is a little bit closer they're quite slim so noises maybe they're not we didn't know we just maybe they're Germans yet they're quite slow maybe they're Germans now you get a lot of German skiing in Norway as well and so afternoon again they're a little bit closer and they on our afternoon brew break they kind of caught up with us it was the top of the hill we were quite tired they caught up with us and they weren't passed and they had big packs as well me so they got the cabin before us they got in the cab so they were there when we got there we had a bit of a chat when we got to little spin in the same cabin had a bit of a chat with him in the evening there were nice guy that we're just having a lads weekend out you know sort of they all had young families but this they're all old school friends this was there this was their sort of weekend away that they did every year in the spring to go out and have a little weekend ski to her and they had steaks they had beers they had all this food and that's why they'd been so slow yeah because they had they're only out for two nights but they had like these backpacks full of all this fresh food and that coffee and so the next morning having had a beer with them they were generous enough to even though they loved dolly stuff out with Anna generous enough to give us a beer and the two of us that were skiing together and next morning one of them was in the kitchen and his little cabin with a little careful and he looks like he's doing some kind of exercises with the kettle and I said well do you mind me asking if you're doing and it's like well they're making the coffee and that's where I learnt the technique this coffee dropping technique and I've used it ever since with Billy cans in the woods and it's the best technique of all the different ones that I've tried that's the best technique and I know I've rambled on about coffee for quite a while there but for those of us that coffee in the woods is important that it's important to have all the details good question next question somewhere over here if maybe you've got place the Puri Pat yes and now they discovered that we don't include with new Dacia

we're wondering what natural products I can use that they can be pointy hmm good question so question is Puri tabs which chlorine-based tablets have a nasty aftertaste a bit like sterling bats and not a nice taste there are neutralizing tablets that you can get for them some of you may have used them and so the question is what natural products could you use instead the pure tabs chlorine based water purification one of the halide disinfectants the other ones iodine and chlorine works well under some circumstances sort of narrower circumstances than some other water purification chemicals but it does work well and one of the benefits is that it's inexpensive which is important particular if you're out for a long time and it's easy to use and you can use it for prolonged period of time whereas iodine for example is contraindicated after about 28 days you shouldn't use it for more than about 28 days in one go and so the question is what do we do if we don't like the taste of chlorine and one answer is to buy the neutralizing tablets but they make a fortune on those neutralizing tablets because all they are is ascorbic acid and ascorbic acid is vitamin C and so that gives us two pieces of information which we should be aware of if we're using chlorine for neutralizing the taste so neutralizing the pathogens and first one is that ascorbic acid vitamin C doesn't just get rid of the taste it doesn't just neutralize the taste of the chlorine actually stops it working properly so you don't want to be mixing them from the start you need to let the chlorine work and then you put the neutralizing agent whatever it is in and secondly is that your best stop doing that in say a mug rather than in the bottle where you're putting the tab that's because if there's residue of vitamin C in the container that you're then treating more water later on it may reduce the effectiveness of the chlorine so that's one thing to be aware of and you can use drinks powders so I know it's not the answer to the question but just to give the overview you can use drinks powders you know these little powdered drinks that for for rehydration that type of thing and sports the sports ones they work pretty well the type of things that you get in the used to getting the mo D ration packs those sports dream state or vitamin C in them that will get rid of the taste of chlorine and but it will also stop clogging working properly so what can we use out in the woods well stuff with vitamin C so your suggestion would be a possible one so pine needle tea is rich in vitamin C so not only will the pine mask the flavor but the vitamin C content would work against the chlorine and neutralize it so anything with vitamin C and rose hips are very high in vitamin C so I would look at maybe using rose hips as a potential Rosetti's quite pleasant just take the year take the fibers out the middle the HCC's out the middle and any lads here who put rose hip seeds down the back of their mates at school back in the day quite a good natural pitching powder as well yeah so what open-open out the rose hips wash out their hairy seeds from the middle chop up the rosette pop them in stick them in hot water that's quite a pleasant tea in the autumn so anything like that that has good amounts of vitamin C in would work in the same way as the neutralizing tablets for sure for sure and so we can look at we can you know I don't know how much vitamin C there is in wood sorrel but I would solve a nice flavor that would mask it as well and so in flavors and stuff elderberries any of the fruits you could make a simple cordial and we've done this in the woods so you get blackberries or elderberries or make a mix of the two reduce them down strain them a bit add a bit of sugar if you've got it and then you've got basically a homemade cordial which you can add to water and again that's got and actual vitamin C content such as lots of stuff that's a good question what got me into bushcraft in the first place so um kind of has to give you a potted life story but when I was a kid so I grew up I was born in Yorkshire and then when I was five we moved to North Wales and it was fantastic and we had a big garden that were on a hillside my parents were kind of in a bit of a sort of good life phase now this is in the late 70s so now I think they'd watch too much your Felicity Kendal and Richard Briers and they were like we're going to make dandelion wine and you know great potatoes and you know that type of thing so there's a little bit of that going on and sort of lifestyle choice and the part my parents and but we backed onto a big Forestry Commission forest literally there was a barbed wire fence at the back of our garden and over it and I was in the forest big Forestry Commission forest which basically went for miles and miles and miles so I grew up between the ages of five and ten playing in the garden and making dens in the Leilani either in the bottom of the garden and going up progressively exploring the woods we used to know all the drainage ditch we used to play trenches in the drainage ditches and all sorts of stuff and we knew all the little trails and back trails and stuff and I think that's one of the reasons why I developed quite a love for the woods but also an ability to sort of find my way organically build up mental maps etc and that was a real key thing and my parents were keen walkers then so we go walking up smoking they talking of snow when I was seven and we do a lot of walking and so there was that kind of formative years but it wasn't bushcraft per se but I had a lot of my childhood was outdoors in that sense and then we moved to the Northeast County Durham into T cells just north of the otter dales again rural nowhere near as forested as well be wearing whales but rural and there were a few lads the same age as me and we used to play in the backwoods and we said go again what boys used to do back in the 80s at least go and build bends going and try and set fire to things and you know and whatnot and and it was clear to my parents at least that I was very interested in that sort of thing you know

once the penknife had a penknife Wiest going you know Whittle things and honor so I got a copy of lofty Weisman survival handbook when I was 13 not long after it came out and my mates and I used to try and do stuff from this you know that try and make some traps or build a shelter or make a fish trap out of a water bottle or whatever all these different things we used to try so that there was that we know we used to actually try it not very well but you know we used to try things make things we made little tobacco survival tins and and all of that and all that stuff and we were always out and about you know there's only I had I was born a to ZX Spectrum 48k in about I don't know whenever it was an 87 or something but we only ever used to play on it when it was raining

you know we're outside the rest of the time and so I I had a childhood you know where I was outdoors a lot and I was interested in those survival skills I didn't know the word bushcraft at that point and then I got into mountain biking I got into hiking you know my later teens I then went to Edinburgh University and got into hiking in the Highland and my real love of that landscape as well used to be quite a lot of mountain bike racing back then and so I had this you know how door stuff and then I am to cut forward a little bit into my 20s I'd sort of become a little you know I was working I was working in London I did a math degree I was working in finance and I was I was still in my holidays going to Scotland doing hiking trips and whatnot going back to my parents weekend's mountain biking around the Northeast but there was something and what it was was the hiking trips so I was going and I had an MSR stove I had the tent I had everything I needed in my backpack and then I was going to do trips and places like the Pyrenees and I something at the back of my mind was like I should probably have some of those skills we played around with as kids I should probably have some of those that work now because I'm going to more and more remote spot a lot of its on my own I'm not very good at lighting fires really as well as I could be I don't really know much about what I can eat if I don't have enough food and all of these things and there was another real polarizing thing for me I was doing a trip in the Pyrenees with a friend of mine from university and we're camping in this lovely meadow and there was an old derelict barn at the back and I had a wander around and with a slate to slid off the roof for the back it was like a little rocker II and in amongst this with growing all these wild strawberries lovely little tiny wild strawberries if you had well strawberries yet and the super packed with flavor so much more flavor some than the sort of mushy big strawberries you get from the store and so I was super excited and I went and got my mug and I filled up probably about half a liter of these wild strawberries and I went back to my mate Mike I said Mike Michael family's family strawberries yes fantastic

you know there's tetanus like you should their strawberries they look really to look a bit smaller for strawberries I'm like no though well strawberries and I knew they were a wild strawberries for absolute sure because we had wild strawberries in the garden in North Wales they grew in the area so again my parents were keen gardeners so this is why I'm telling the story because I realized I knew stuff because of of that and then Mike didn't want to eat them I didn't twist his arm because I'm like fine if you don't know eat them mate I'm going to eat them all because I know how good they are so I ate the strawberries but it got me thinking what else is there around here but I don't know about that I could also be nibbling on foraging along along the way so that was one spur for me to learn a lot more about trees and plants and foraging that was a really key moment where I thought on that trip I need to know more about what I can eat in this environment and the environment in general and then also the survival skills backdrop was another thing that was blowing around in my mind if I need more fallback skills for when I'm doing these trips so that or just so that I can light a campfire efficiently etc so I actually then had some old survival magazines when I was a kid and there was an old musty Wiseman used to have a school in Devon and there was a little small ad in the back of this and I wrote off to the clear box and I said do you still do this and I got a little letter back saying no Lotte's who's written as their person lost he doesn't do this anymore but because I was a nerd and I used to buy that used to get the survival aids catalog one of the few survival suppliers back in the day and it had all the different knives in and it had the Wilkinson Sword knife designed by Ray Mears even though he doesn't like people knowing that and it had the lofty Wiseman survival knife that was like the big machete in it and it had his signature on it and I was like that's lost his writing you know I recognize the writing from the signature from looking at pictures of the knife and I was like that love these reply to me but you're right didn't lofty doesn't do this anymore but so anyway so I was searching for someone to teach me the skills of the plight that loffley could teach and in the end and just by chance I found and would laws website and back in the day and it was literally just a page that said these are the sorts of things we do right off to this P o box will send you a brochure so I got a brochure this was in like 97 but these look these look quite nice courses and but I had trips planned they already had trip hiking trips and other things planned so it wasn't till about 99 or 2000 I started doing some bushcraft courses and I'd already started doing some reading around trees and plant ID and all sorts of things around bush dress I've got a hold of Mears with books as well I got some other wood crafts and camping books and now start to do my own study and then I started doing some courses and so it was a sort of gradual progression to that point and then in 2003 I did an Arctic course with Mears and false and rayon lars up in north of Sweden and on that on the way back from that they asked me if I would go and assist him on UK courses so I start assisting on UK courses and then a couple of years down the line they offered me a full-time job is course director which I did until 2010 so it's it's kind of been a very organic thing you know what point along that line did I get into bushcraft like I don't know was it when my parents showed me wild strawberries when I was five or six was it when I was with my mates when I was 13 doing stuff I love this book I don't know it's been a Const it's been this single constant interest in my life if I look back on it the thread right through lots of other things around it but that's that's how I've got to where I am in terms of what instigated and there were a few key moments there which I wish I've shared but hopefully that wasn't too dull we've all got our own pasts into these things that's that's the thing nobody's going to be the same question Martin repeated tough conditions and okay so the question is how do you keep people in a positive frame of mind on an extended journey particularly if it's tough conditions and tough terrain and 18 sometimes be difficult because everybody has their own highs and lows at different points but as a leader you have to be you have to try and exuse positivity anyway and I'm as well as teaching bushcraft I'm also qualified on UK Mountain leader I'm qualified to leave canoes as well canoe trips which you do need pieces of paper for unlike the bushcraft stuff and so in any of these fields keeping people motivated in difficult weather sometimes you have to lead by example and sometimes bad weather closes people down they kind of become demotivated psychologically it has effect has an effect but also physiologically it definitely has an effect even if you're wearing a decent waterproof and you're well-fed you're going to become hypoglycemic in less time than if it was the same temperature in a dry day we had just the evaporative heat loss from the outside of your clothing it's going to require more heat from your body which means you're going to burn through your food more quickly so making sure people are fed well recognizing that people are different for starters what the triggers that get people down often it's not being able to see how they can get to the end of something and it's often related to food and being and having low blood sugar it's often related to being cold it's often related to being tired so it's recognizing where people are at for starters being positive yourself even if you're feeling the same sort of thing making sure people and understand what it is that you're trying to do involve them in the process of what you're trying to do right from the start so if you come on a trip with me and I just go right now and follow me for two weeks going this way follow me up this hill down this Dale cap there you don't feel like you kind of engaged with it we're not we're not working together to do that trip yet you're just following me around you know bedraggled and tires and blister of foot for two weeks and not really knowing why we're making any decisions that we're making as opposed to okay Martin we're going to do this trip okay let's get the maps out before we set off and look at where we're going let's look at what the type of terrain we're going to cover and the type of distances we can expect what are the real sticking points on this what are the real things that we're going to be concerned about what are the escape routes and actually you're involved I may have already thought I will have already thought about all of those things but you're involved in understanding the overall scope of the journey right from the start you know we need to get from here to here we're going to cover this ground this should be relatively straightforward we're concerned about this this is going to be a hard day we're going to chunk it up and in any situation whether you're in making a journey voluntarily if you've studied survival psychology and if you studied efficiency at work one of the key strategies that's massively underrated is chunking just chunking stuff up into pieces yet so rather than going right we're going to do this massive task is to say like today we're going to write 500 words today we're going to walk from here to that hill over there in sitting and having manageable goals in people's minds so people can understand that it's not just a relentless endless when is this going to end things like we just need to get over there and then we can can there's less pressure then there's less stress than work more in control so that's part of it that keeps them motivated understanding the overall scope of the journey and then also just managing people when they are looking a bit cold they are looking a bit hungry and making sure that they're getting another layer on that they are that you're putting a shelter up at lunch time so they're not feeling like they're just completely out of their comfort zone then because at a certain point if people are completely out the comfortable comfort zone they want they want to go home they've had and the problem is with remote trips is that you can't go home and then that that causes a sort of dissonance in the sense that I don't want to be doing this anymore but I've got to do it and then it's and so you've just got to break it up

let look after them in the sense of making sure they don't succumb to the environment in a bad way make sure people are well fed makes you people are involved in decision-making make sure people involved in the navigation make sure people are involved in the decision of where to camp but with an overall view that you need to cover the distance as well and then it's their trip that they're motivated to complete more than then just traipsing after you sir for two weeks so those are some things but other times you maybe you just have to have a sit-down with somebody and say you know can we you know what's the problem can we work through this what what can we do to help make this better for you

and then at other times where you just have to be very directive like you there now don't do that you know if you're in the middle of some difficult situation where it isn't about having a debate you have to take more of a commando style of leadership to get people through a difficult piece of terrain but then you can debrief afterwards as to why you made the decisions that you do so that those those are some some thoughts on that and having a laugh as well of course so one of the reasons we're always laughing and joking sense of humor on trips is even when ray goodwill is rated when here yet even when ray Goodwin throws your tea away you see even when somebody throws your tea away on a trip at the end of the day because you've been watching the Northern Lights and you have left your tea by the fire and he throws it away because he wants to pack the barrels so that we can put them out of camp because of the Bears and because he wants to go to bed at 8 o'clock and

you can still have a laugh about it rather than punching them in the mouth yeah those are some thoughts on that we've got time for one more probably message yes so there again how can you maintain tree health after you start stripping bark from a deer particular species in mind okay well I would say the general point don't strip bart from like trees yet because it's a little bit like like if I don't got a knife on me now flourishing if I came down there and I got a couple of my guys to hold your arm and we took the skin off your forearm you wouldn't be very pleased about it

the trees not going to feel it in the same way but what it is going to have exactly the same as you is going to be open to infection for starters yeah and that's an issue of fungal infection bacterial infection also most of the nutrients who trees go up through the bark so if you ring back a tree you quite possibly kill it just because the nutrients don't get you throw that up and you see that happening with trees of a certain size gray squirrels will take the bark off tops of trees and there's various theories as to why they do it one of its the possible frustration with certain things that they go in tear bark off both extremes I've seen them do it I've been walking through the woods and there's all this birch bark on the floor I'm like wow this is great I use that for my fire later on but you ask the question why is it there hasn't just fallen off the tree you look up and you can see it's been torn off the trees and then you can see some of the trees in the area where it's been done a while ago the tops of the trees are dead because the nutrients don't get me further up speaking to a ranger in the new forest and they've given up trying to control the grade-school specifically well that point they had that unless it is a few years ago but they had a real problem with schools ring barking beech trees young beech trees and so it will potentially kill the tree the live tree if you take bark off if you want to take lots of birchbark for fire lighting for example some of the bark will be naturally shedding you know so it's in a sense if it's already starting to peel off a little bit you can pull those little thin strands away but soon as you start cutting into the tree you're potentially doing it damage you're you're leaving it open to infection and if you're in a woodland even if you take the little square off I saw I saw a video on YouTube a while ago this guy kind of say I'm going to show you how to take off some birch bark from a live tree without damaging it and then he cuts the square off about that side but he's damaging the tree yeah how can you say that's not damaging tree probably not going to kill it because it was a small but the other consideration in doing that is the scar that that leaves and with a birch tree you've got a silver birch color on the outside and then once that silver bath is taken off you get this sort of burgundy brown ready Brown scarlet forms underneath but is visible so far away if you go into a woodland where that's been done quite a lot it's almost like going into a street that's full of graffiti it you know even though if it isn't you know it doesn't have to be initials on the trees but it's just like people have damaged the trees if people have been here we live in a very crowded island in the UK and 60 million of us trying to do different things here and one of the things you should always think about is other users as well so it's not just about the trees it's you know the aesthetic of the woods the way that you leave and how do how other people going to view this as dry after I'd less than other people come now there are circumstances where you might want to harvest bark for making containers and for making so ash sweet chestnut make very good containers and birch yes you can get thick enough in the UK but you can't always and you might want larger strips of bark birch bark for fire lighting with birch bark I would say generally look for dead stuff that's come down because the wood rots away much more quickly than the bark so unless the wood is massively managed and tidied up you can remove the bark and from a dead log and it's still got the oils in it that make very good fire lighters so I always collect my birch bark from dead wood on the ground because it's a pioneer species it doesn't live very long they tend to fall down quite quickly and you normally going to and they're common and widespread so you'll find that on the ground in terms of making baskets and from things like containers or things like ash and and sweet chestnut yeah you're going to have to take something down but I would try and coincide that so you're going to if you just take the bark of the tree you'll kill it yeah so what you want to do is think of a think of what else you can do with the wood you know so fell that fell the tree and have a perhaps some projects you know and it doesn't want to be too big because it gets to nollie you want a smooth back so it's a small tree resort now you're going to take the wood and use it for something else you take the bark and use it and you use the whole thing yeah and that that's that's the responsible way of doing it and maybe you don't have access to somewhere where you can go and fill stuff try and find a woodsman or a good contacts to get our tree surgeons even in towns because they're taking down all sorts of stuff all the time and a lot of it just goes in wood chippers but if you if you can become friendly with a tree surgeon and say if you get any cherry or ash or you know can I have some please and I want to carve some nice cherry spoons or I want to make some ash Park containers then you could get some of those materials for free so that would that be something else I would think about rather than just going hacking be cool I think that brings us to the end of the session and potted little potted little set of questions that a good set of questions thank you very very much for the questions thanks for your attention I can just about see all of you these lights are very very bright and it has been recorded we will see what we turn it into when we put it online but it won't look that different so thank you very much next up the inimitable mr. Goodwin in five minutes safer safer ray Goodwin I'm going to steal his teeth now in this feel something thank you very much guys and girls much appreciated [Applause]

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