Dave Holladay, Phillip Liebel, Jacks Genega, and Jonathan Burton have all spent many years perfecting their survival skills, learning how to do everything the hard way without electricity, running water, modern medicine, or most any other convenience. In late February, these primitive living experts met up with a handful of students on a family-owned-and-operated ranch (in the same family since the 1870s!) tucked into the eastern foothills of Arizona’s Galiuro Mountains for a full-immersion five-day, five-night primitive desert living experience.
From making shelters out of sticks and leaves to starting fires with nothing but a stick and the friction of your hands to processing wild game from field to table to orienteering without the help of a GPS, Holladay, Liebel, Genega, and Burton taught their students everything they need to know to survive in the great outdoors. On the fourth day of the five-day expedition, each student went out on his or her own into the desert to sleep out with only the bare minimum amount of equipment and the knowledge he or she had picked up during the week.
While the instructors took plenty of safety precautions (an EMT was on site at all times, one of the staff members was a search-and-rescue coordinator for the local county, and a retired surgeon was just a radio call away), the lessons learned were deadly serious, as in the wild, one degree of body temperature can be the difference between life and death.
Ego is the Enemy
The biggest hazard in the wilderness is neither weather nor wildlife, dehydration nor falling victim to a random act of nature.
Your biggest hazard is your ego.
That’s the lesson one instructor imparts on the first day of a wilderness skills course, warning participants about the dangers they may face out in the wild from inclement weather and rising water to injuries and dehydration.
To illustrate the point, she tells the group about a time she ignored her own better judgement and nearly paid for it with her life.
“I was hiking the Kungsleden trail in Sweden, by myself,” she says. “It goes through the Arctic Circle. I was trying to beat the 21 days to complete the hike.”
The weather turned and her ego pushed her to press on.
“Rain started coming in sideways and the hail was literally cutting my cheeks. My ego said, ‘You can do this. Keep going.’”
The consequences were dire.
“I became so cold I couldn’t hold my hiking poles,” she says. “I couldn’t put stakes in the ground for my tent. I was shaking uncontrollably.”
Fortunately, she regained her common sense, stripped off her wet clothes, crawled into her sleeping bag and slowly warmed herself up with a small camp stove. When she crawled out the next morning, she was within 50 feet of the trail.
Fear is not weakness. Fear is the protective mechanism that tells you that you have something to lose.
The Ash and Callus Curriculum
Desert survival training included topics on fire, shelter, water and food, but rather than learning the basics of building one fire or shelter, students repeated each task to truly understand the material.
When deciding where to build a shelter, students used the “Five W’s Framework,” which consisted of the following:
- Wood: Is there an adequate supply of deadfall to construct a shelter and fire without expending too much energy to gather materials?
- Water: Is there a source of water nearby, but not too close, so as not to waste energy traveling to retrieve water, be flooded out or attract unwanted critters?
- Widowmakers: Are there any dead limbs above that could fall and kill you? (Cottonwoods, aspens and poplars are notorious for dropping dead limbs.)
- Wildlife and “wigglies”: Texas is home to fire ants that can take over a shelter in a matter of hours, as well as hog trails that could attract unwanted wildlife to your shelter.
- Wind and weather: Is the shelter located to provide protection from prevailing winds, and is it located above drainage so that you won’t be flooded out?
When building a shelter, students were taught to think “in, on, under.” “In” referred to the clothing you were wearing, “on” referred to insulation on the ground (ground temperature was a chilly 57 degrees, and students should build up leaves/debris to insulate themselves from heat loss from conduction; instructors suggested a foot and a half to two feet of material), and “under” referred to protection from the elements above (rain and sun).
Friction Fire
Probably the most popular (and physically demanding) survival skill demonstrated at the event was making fire with a hand drill.
The concept behind this primitive fire-making method is beautifully simple: Rub a straight wooden spindle stick between your hands atop a flat hearth board, rotating it quickly while also applying downward pressure. The friction causes the wood to heat up, and soon an ember will form in a small notch in the hearth board. The concept is simple, but actually making fire this way is devilishly difficult.
Instructors demonstrated how a person’s center of gravity (lower in women, usually over the hips, and higher in men, usually over the chest) affects how easily they can apply downward pressure, and how certain hand positions can cause knuckle pads to become “speed bumps” on the drill (and potentially get badly bruised). To avoid developing blisters, instructors advised stopping periodically to slap your hands together to get the blood circulating and pushing fluid to the surface of the skin.
Perhaps most interesting, though, was the instructors’ assertion that hand-drilling for fire was never meant to be a solo activity. They pointed to an example among the Hadza people of Africa, where the spindle stick is very tall, allowing people to take turns standing and drilling for fire. In this way, no one person gets tired and several people can stand around and chat casually as they make fire. The moral of the story: There’s strength in numbers, and no one person has to expend all of the energy.
Hooting Through the Canyons
The brain uses a significant amount of the body’s energy (calories and water), so it’s important to conserve brain power as much as possible when attempting to survive in the wilderness, according to instructors. And yelling full sentences back and forth across canyons requires a significant amount of energy.
So instead, wilderness survival courses often teach hoots and honks as an efficient, low-energy, analog communication system.
One hoot means “Where are you?” or, if you’re answering someone else’s honk, “I heard you.” Two honks mean, “Come together,” or, depending on the context, “class is about to begin.” And honking three times means there’s an imminent, life-threatening situation.
Participants learn to modulate honks with different pitches to reach farther afield and to differentiate honks from, say, birds. Honking can also become an individual’s “voice print,” instructors said. With enough honking practice, your honk can become distinguishable from other honks.
One instructor recalled a survival course near Blanding, Utah, in 1974. He was 18, visibility was limited to a few hundred feet in a sideways blizzard and he was fairly certain of his compass heading. He confidently headed toward what he thought was the correct direction for the course’s van, parked just 100 yards away. Luckily, he soon heard a double honk coming from the van, which was in the opposite direction.
Processing Game
Another hands-on portion of the workshop involved processing game. Using a large animal as a teaching specimen, attendees learned how to field dress game properly, from opening up the body cavity without piercing the animal’s gut (thus avoiding contaminating the meat), to harvesting the organ meats (the liver, heart, etc.), to breaking down the animal for quarters (to make transport and/or storage easier), to harvesting the tenderloins.
Nutritionally speaking, instructors explained, organ meats are the most nutrient dense part of any animal. Attendees learned how to determine the health of an animal by inspecting its liver, where a healthy liver should be uniform in color, and a mottled or grayish coloration could indicate a sickly animal. They also learned to carefully remove the gall bladder (which contains bile, and renders any meat it comes into contact with virtually inedible) and the importance of not puncturing it during the removal process.
For those that want to tan their own hides, attendees learned the proper way to skin an animal by using as little knife work as possible (to avoid punctures that weaken the finished product), and pulling with the fist where possible to separate the membrane between the skin and the muscle. If tanning can’t occur immediately, hides can be preserved by salting, which involves a healthy application of salt, folded flesh-side in, rolled and stood on end to drain. Done properly, hides can keep for years.
One Night Solo with What You’ve Learned
By the final day of training, the group has covered pretty much everything you can imagine on living off the land in a hostile environment, making fire, building a shelter, purifying water, maintaining proper hygiene, staying aware of your surroundings and more. So now it’s time to put it all to the ultimate test: an overnight in the wilds of the Sonoran desert without modern equipment.
This solo overnight kit includes: a bandana, a sharpened rock, a chunk of salt, and a water bottle (plus some fence wire found on the landscape). It is enough to sustain well beyond 24 hours with a minimal amount of desert knowledge.
The instructors have some fail safes in place, though. Staff members will be keeping fires going at various locations, everyone knows where everybody else is roughly set up camp, and students can bring a full modern gear kit, pack it up and hang it in a tree for an easy out if necessary (though most refer to theirs as “the kit they don’t intend to use”). Some people opt to spend the night in twosomes, especially couples, in order to split up chores, combine resources and share body heat.
During a last get together before heading out, people chat about their goals for the evening. Some want to focus on using natural materials to make themselves a comfy bed on which to sleep. Others want to try starting fires with a bow drill, which is similar to a hand drill but uses a bow to rapidly spin the drill spindle, making it easier to start a fire by offering a sort of mechanical advantage. Still others want to learn more about foraging, since the region’s bounty is foreign to folks hailing from elsewhere. The instructors remind everyone that they’re not going to die out there, that this isn’t about suffering, but about getting out there and figuring out what works for you. As people file out to begin their overnight solo expeditions, the rest of the group cheers each person on, one at a time.
Finding Your Tribe
For some students, the most important thing they learn this week has nothing to do with survival skills, and everything to do with finding community. Liebel, whose ancestors participated in the Trail of Tears, has spent years perfecting primitive living skills on his own, from building shelters to stone tool use to fashioning bows from Osage orange.
“When you go out and do this stuff, and you’re having an amazing time, and then you go home and nobody knows what you’re talking about,” he says. Being around like-minded people has changed things for him. “Being here with you guys, running around on this playground, everybody happy and passionate about it, it gets me so juiced up I have to pretend to contain it.”
Camp evenings include visits from musicians, artists and storytellers. Veterans in primitive skills hold themselves back to allow neophytes to make their own decisions, but offer tips if asked. Instructors refer to leadership as “event-contingent,” meaning whoever has the most pertinent knowledge takes the lead in any given situation, and defers to others when needed.
Final Thoughts
In some ways, wilderness desert survival training is the antidote to modern living. Students arrive with smartphones in their back pockets capable of contacting virtually anyone, anywhere, and spend the next week learning how to live without them. They enter a world of instant gratification, then learn that starting a fire with two sticks could take 20 minutes of continuous effort, or it could take all day, depending on technique.
But the point of primitive skills classes isn’t suffering, it is empowerment, gaining the self-assurance that comes with knowing you could survive a freezing night, could navigate using creeks and other landmarks, could put food on the table if it came down to it. As one instructor points out, no one’s trying to make you suffer, but rather trying to help you explore your potential.
Perhaps most of all, primitive skills remind us that, from hoot calls bouncing off desert canyons to the Hadza lighting communal fires, survival was never meant to be a solitary endeavor. In an era of isolation and distraction, that may be the most important survival skill of all.
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