What Shelter Materials You Should Acquire

I have gotten a little bit of experience with building a shelter from going to Girl Scout camp so I understand the whole concept on what basic materials that you need. To me personally, I think the first thing that you have to consider is what flooring you should have in your shelter because you don’t want to be laying on a really cold or hot surface that can take away your natural body heat. You can use dead dry leaves, seat cushions, basically anything that is not wet, cold, or hot, and can elevate you from the ground.

 Building a shelter also depends on the inclement weather and temperatures in the area you are surviving in. If you are in a cold climate area and you have other people with you then you can use each other’s body heat to keep everyone warm. That could be a very useful way to keep warm in urgent situations if it means life or death.  If you are in moist hot climates you can create a lean-to so that if it rains you can be protected, and this shelter can also keep you cool. The desert for example, everyone looks at a desert as a very hot place. That fact is true during the day, but at night it can drop to 40 or below in freezing temperatures. Knowing that, you should put energy into working on anything for survival at night or in the morning when it is cool and then rest during the day when it is extremely warm. In cold climates a trash bag can be a good source of warmth as well. You can’t obviously put yourself in a trash bag without any way of getting oxygen, so you would need to cut a hole on the bottom of the trash bag just big enough to be able to receive oxygen to breathe.

 The only thing you have to be extremely aware of is little visitors (insects) that can come with the natural supplies that you use like leafs, sticks, etc. because you do not want to have a medical incident where you have been bitten by an insect and now you have to aid to an additional problem. To prevent that from happening, my tip is to search your supplies for any insects on them by brushing anything off your supplies or banging your material (not to hard for it to break!) so some bugs can fall off. My family has a wood stove and what I have simply learned is that when you bring wood logs from the outside is to drop the log from a reasonable height or bang the log on the ground so spiders and bugs would fall off.

 Before you take out what man made supplies you have in your day pack to build a shelter try to look around the area to use natural resources before you go to the supplies that you have right away. My group in Girl Scout camp used very simple materials to build our shelter. We used two trees as posts, twine, sticks, and trash bags. As you can tell we used a little bit of natural resources and a little bit of manmade resources. So those are my tips and materials that I think you should use for a shelter.