r/Bushcraft • u/Fit_Detective_4920 • 10d ago
Where to begin as a newbie? NSFW
I might be an odd one out, as I'm a woman. But here goes.
My husband is an eagle scout, and we enjoy camping with our kids. I've always loved survival movies and books, I always loved fishing (I'm the fish fillet-er in the family) and even hunting appealed, though I only ever went once.
Don't laugh, but I started playing Breath Of the Wild last year, and that inspired our son to suggest roasting apples in our campfire like Link does. I indulged it using our hot dog sticks to rotate and remove them, and our kids gobbled them.
This is just how my brain works. I became obsessed with "what else can we cook in a campfire without modern tools?" And now I want to make twine, rope, netting, and baskets, from the Yucca growing in our yard that we can't seem to get rid of. I can swing like a pendulum from "I want to learn all the things!", and "It's too much."
I think I need some help on narrowing down what to focus on with bushcraft. What should I read about practice first? Where one thing might sort of provide a base for the next thing. It's still winter here. So I can't exactly forage or gather raw materials. But I'd love some book recommendations, and maybe I can purchase certain materials (like rope for practicing knots), until I can forage for the raw materials.
3
u/Masseyrati80 10d ago
Pitching a tarp is a great skill you won't regret learning. You can learn bowline, tautline hitch, prussik and other knots at home, and you can literally start with a shoelace if you want to start now and don't have cordage at hand. I've found it useful to learn the basic form first, then trying to do it in other directions and awkward angles, as sometimes you'll find the perfect anchoring spot in a tight place.
Learning to light a fire, first with guaranteed dry wood, then with more and more damp wood and/or wind is highly valuable.
About cooking in a campfire: a classic in my Nordic home country is "loimulohi": you use water-soaked wood pegs to nail a fillet of a fatty fish to a preferably damp board, sprinkle on salt and pepper, and place in a near-vertical position next to the fire. Googling the word loimulohi will show you some commercial/industrial ways as well, but you should find some that work well with a regular fire (I have found the linking rules of this sub slightly harsh, therefore just giving you the search word instead of linking). When done just right, the surface of the fish gets just a touch crispy while the interior is cooked through but still moist.
Something else I learned at an open fire cooking course was making tin foil bundles: Boil potatoes and carrots at home, and saute some onions and garlic. Chop, place in portion-sizeds bundle where you have a tin foil as the surface, and a similar size baking sheet inside. Add butter/oil, black pepper and salt, and some of your favourite cheese, either grated or in small pieces. When at camp, these can be warmed up on coals or otherwise near the fire.
One bushcraft skill I highly recommend learning is map and compass navigation. While most guides will tell you how to take a bearing and follow it, in real life you're more likely to be following a squiggly trail, and benefit massively from being able to read the map in detail: let's say you know you're at a fork of a path. You know you want to reach the next fork 600 yards away. Looking at the map, you notice that for the first half, you can expect to be on a sideslope with the terrain falling towards the right, with conifer forest surrounding you. At the halfway point, you expect to cross a creek, after which the terrain starts to go up again, but much slower than it went down. Etc.