I was considering spending the night in my Hawks Nest Hammock (not an affiliate link), but in the end, I decided to come back into the house because of user error. They don’t know I exist, and they haven’t paid me or given me anything for this review. Right now, as I type this, I have just come in from a couple of hours lying in the hammock. It’s snowing pretty heavily outside, and it’s around -7 Celsius.

Right now, my brain isn’t letting me sleep. I am scrolling through so many videos about survival shelters, how to pack a bug-out-bag, what kinds of food you should be storing, and damn if I don’t want to get back to experimenting with shelter building and overall bushcraft and survival. It’s February, and I’m in Nova Scotia, Canada — not exactly winter survival on easy mode. There are colder parts of Canada, but it’s wet here, and we get storms. In fact, we are due for one tomorrow. A pretty major snowfall that’s going to shut down the province for a day or two, in all likelihood.

Now that I’m not as fully in crisis mode (the last two days were pretty scary, and I’m not out of the woods, but I have breathing room), it’s time to get back to some fundamentals. I’ve talked a bit about the rule of threes before, but to boil it down:

I guess I’m doing a rule of three thing right now. I did shelter last week; now I’m tackling water. It wasn’t really intentional, but I was inspired to do this piece today, so I’m going with it. You need water. You can survive around three days without it (technically hydration, in my day to day life I get most of my hydration from coffee), but after a day or so you are not going to be a happy camper. I’m going to go over some of the ways you can make water safe to drink.

Edit: After I posted this piece here, I linked it to /r/survival and asked people to tear me apart. As of this moment, only one person has, but damn did he ever do a good job of it. He pointed out several issues of both content and style. I don’t know if I can fix the style issues, but I addressed the content issues — hopefully adequately, but at least I improved them. This is an update to a piece I wrote years ago for Survivalblog.com. A few people disagreed with some of my points — but survivalblog isn’t much of a forum and responding to them didn’t wasn’t possible (in truth I didn’t even know about their comments until now). This is a complete rewrite, using only the base ideas from that article.

The rule of threes is famous in survival circles — I’ve written about it before — but now I want to narrow in on what is usually the top priority. You can go three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food. Talking about air would be silly, so this article is about shelter. I’m not going to teach you how to build a shelter in this lesson. Instead, I’m going to talk about what qualifies as a shelter.

This story crosses into territory a couple of my publications cover, but since I have been neglecting Dollar Survival it is going to live here. The World in Turmoil Right now we are in trouble as a species. We are doing some things that are long-term unsustainable and have a strong probability of creating some pretty extreme climate feedback loops. Those loops will create conditions that are chaotic. Chaotic is bad for us. Our environment being in chaos makes it hard to prepare, hard to maintain infrastructure, hard to survive.

A long time ago I lived in a place where it was hot and humid all the time. The medical was a bit behind the western world as well. In fact, most of the country was still operating with stone-age technology. Most of the country was jungle, or at least most of the land areas… although since it was a series of small to medium islands most of the country was actually water.