Wilderness Survival 101: The Most Epic Episode I've Ever Produced! (IT'S MY BDAY)

0:00 Mark Sing, this is the terrorist organization Jihad Jamboree, and we have a special message for you. As we speak, we are sitting outside your home in a Volkswagen Taliban. Here is our message for you, Mr. Sing. We are going to blow you up. Some balloons for your birthday. Welcome to the Unapologetic Man Podcast, the only podcast that's all about self-improvement, confidence, success, women, and being a man without making any apologies for it. What is up, gentlemen? Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the UMP.

0:48 I really do appreciate you clicking on this one. As I mentioned in my previous podcast, as well as in the title, today is my birthday. That's right. I shot out of that womb on February 3rd, 1977. Damn, dude, 70s, man. Seems like ancient history. I'm 45 today, but I feel like, honestly, I'm 32, and I still attract girls in their 20s. So if you're an older gentleman such as myself, not only do you have wisdom, but you also have to know that women often appreciate when a man is a little bit older.

1:19 So don't think that your age will ever hold you back from getting the hottest of the hot. In fact, you get more attractive the older you get, particularly if you're working on yourself. So in today's episode, as I spoke about in the previous episode, I want to talk about what the fuck I want to talk about, and that is wilderness survival. I absolutely love the wilderness. It's why I moved to Colorado. It's also why I moved to Arizona before Colorado. And you guys, particularly for you living in the United States, do you understand how much opportunity there is to get into the wilderness?

1:51 I don't care what state you live in, from the eastern seaboard to the Pine Barrens, down to Florida, the Everglades. Then we get into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada. You got the desert, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana. Beautiful, absolutely spectacular pine forests. Then we get into the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming, Colorado, some of Idaho, down into New Mexico. And even in the Midwest, you have beautiful deciduous forests, which means trees that look over their leaves. All the way down into Kentucky, the south, Alabama, Tennessee.

2:26 You get down into Louisiana, you got them alligators down there. There's so much forest, so much opportunity. And Theodore Roosevelt, my boy Theodore Roosevelt, created the national forest systems. This means in the United States that we can go into the forest. It's called public land. You could pretty much do whatever the hell you want to do, provided you keep it safe and you don't light the fucking thing on fire, which of course happened last summer with all the fires after COVID, all those idiots going into the woods, not knowing what they were doing, lighting the whole goddamn forest on fire.

2:59 But when it comes to national forest, you can have a fire. You can hike off trail and get deep into the woods, hundreds of thousands of square acres that, in my opinion, have never been explored by human beings before. Even in Colorado, I know there's areas that no one's ever touched before, but particularly places like Alaska, deep in the wilderness, and places like Washington, Montana. I mean, there's so much unexplored territory. And even over there on the East Coast, there's tons of forest to get into.

3:29 So today's episode is all about bushcraft. Bushcraft means wilderness survival skills, those Native American ancient man skill set of living with the forest, living in nature. And there's so much wisdom that's been lost, and that's what I'm really interested in. So I moved to Colorado about 10 years ago from Arizona. And one of my big objectives was to just get really good at being a woodsman. I was always fascinated with woodsmen. I read about Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Jim Bridger, all these amazing woodsmen from the past who went west in order to get into the mountains to get beaver, because beavers were really popular on the East Coast for making hats.

4:10 I don't know if you guys knew that. But a big reason for mountain men was because of the expansion of fashion, which is really interesting. And young aspiring men went west into the Rocky Mountains, into Canada, and they started getting beavers to ship back to the East Coast. And that's where we get like woodsmen. That's where they became familiar with bushcraft, Native American-based survival skills. And I'm going to go over a lot of those today. So here's what I want to do. I'm going to break this down into several different sections.

4:41 And I want you to stick around until the end, because I'm going to give some really cool facts kind of about wilderness survival, why things happen the way they happen. It's going to be really interesting. I'm going to give like 10 really interesting things that will even help you in your day-to-day life. So stick around. And what I'm going to do is go over what I call the five C's of survival. This is from a survivalist named Dave Canterbury. He was on the show Dual Survival, if you've ever seen it.

5:06 And it's the five things you should carry with you every time you go into the forest. So I want to start this by talking about a situation where I got myself, as well as Marissa, my current girlfriend, lost in the woods for about four hours. And I found my way out by using some of the skills that I'm going to talk about today. And I'm going to tell the first part of the story right now. And then I'm going to finish up the story at the end.

5:27 So I moved to Colorado because, again, I wanted to be in the Rocky Mountains. And I made a wiki up in the middle of the national forest by a city called Red Feather, Colorado. It's deep in the pine forest of Colorado. And I went out in the middle of fucking nowhere, way off a fire road, couple miles into the forest and found a place where nobody would ever find it. And I built a wiki up. A wiki up is basically like a teepee. And I put two beds in it.

5:54 And each of the beds are raised slightly off the ground so that there's a fireplace in the middle. And what we do is we heat up rocks and we roll the rocks under the bed to heat up the beds. The beds have leaves on them as well as some pine on them. And they're pretty comfortable. It's like a spring mattress. And the entire wiki up is covered with tons of pine. Now, it's not completely waterproof. In fact, waterproofing anything in the Colorado Rockies as well as any pine forest is extremely difficult.

6:24 The best place to get any waterproofing whatsoever is with leaves in what I mentioned before, deciduous forest. Forests where they drop their leaves every season. So places like Wisconsin, down into Tennessee, Ohio, that kind of area is really good to create a shelter that's completely waterproof. But the wiki up is somewhat waterproof. And it's cool because, as I said, we have a fire in the middle. I sleep in one bed. Marissa can sleep in the other. And that's what's really cool about Marissa, too. She's super adventurous.

6:53 She actually helped me build it. We took 50 hours to build this thing completely by hand. And it's still there. It's been there for about six years now. I go up there all the time when it snows. It gets, like, buried halfway up in snow. And we snowshoe up to it. We have to dig our way into it. It's just really cool. So one day, Marissa and I went to go visit the wiki up. But what I wanted to do is I wanted to park off a different fire road and try to hike in just using my natural navigation.

7:20 Now, on this day, it was hailing. It was completely dark. You couldn't see the sun. And I just started walking. And I was like, okay, I generally know that the wiki up is west. I didn't have a compass with me. I was just going off of total instinct, right? Which is pretty stupid, as we're going to find out. So long story short, and I'm going to sum up the story at the end here, we get completely lost. We run into this road I've never seen before.

7:43 It was like this really small dirt path. It was like a trail or something. I've never seen it before. Just the whole area we were in, I had no idea where the fuck we were. And it was funny because I told Marissa, I was like, look, I got a lighter on me. Worst case scenario, we're going to build a little shelter, build a fire. We're going to ride it out until the storm stops. And then we'll figure our way out of here. And she's like, I have a really important meeting tomorrow at my work.

8:07 We really need to get out of here because I could be fired if I missed this meeting. And I was like, all right, dude, I'm going to figure out how to get us out of here. And it was scary, man. For some of you guys who are listening, maybe you've been lost in the woods before. It fucking sucks. And one thing I heard from one of the millions of survival shows I watched was, you're not lost. You are where you are, right? You're here. You're healthy.

8:28 We had, if we needed it, warmth by way of a fire. I had a knife on me. I felt pretty comfortable because I've been studying this stuff. But it's like you train for years and years for this situation. And when it happens, you're not prepared for just how scary it is. Like, I have no idea where the car is. I don't know how to get out of here. And we are literally in probably 100 square miles of national forest. And I knew from my experience that it could be days before we get the hell out of here.

8:56 And really, nobody else knows where we're at. Which is my first tip is, I want you guys to go into the woods. Now, I know it's February. There's snow everywhere. But, man, the woods are so cleansing. It's like a goddamn bath for your soul. And in my opinion, getting out and practicing woodsman skills, chopping wood, building fires, practicing bushcraft, building traps, building a wiki up like I did, hiking for miles and getting your own water, knowing how you can survive with just a knife, in my opinion, that's a fucking man skill right there.

9:27 And that builds testosterone so high because we're built for that. And it feels so natural when you're sleeping under the stars and you open your eyes and you just see this starscape above you. And there's the fire crackling next to you. And you've built everything yourself. And you brought almost nothing except for like a knife and not even a lighter sometimes, as I'm going to talk about in a second. But it's such a man skill. And it's cleansing for your soul. I'm telling you, for you guys who suffer with depression, get into the woods.

9:54 And I don't care where you live. You can be in New York City. The Pine Barrens are just a few hours away from there. You can be anywhere in the United States and get into the woods. So when the weather clears up and you're able, I strongly suggest you just gather up a tent, a sleeping pad, a backpack, water purification, grab a knife and get out there, man. I suggest finding a national forest. You can Google it and go right into the national forest off trail.

10:19 Of course, tell people where you're at, but go explore, man. Get out into it. There's so much to see. I've had so many experiences with different types of wildlife and things that I've seen and things I've experienced, and it cleanses your soul. So before you get into the wilderness, I want you to listen to this episode, the only episode you'll ever need. I'm just kidding, of course. I could do 50 episodes on wilderness survival. But I want you to kind of take these things in consideration and consider what I call the five C's of survival.

10:47 Actually, it's not my thing. As I said, it's Dave Canterbury's, but it's a really good general lesson for what you should bring. So what I want you guys to do is get out into the woods and always have these things on you, okay? So there are five C's of survival. The first C is combustion. Okay, you absolutely, without argument, have to have a way to make fire. Most people think that the way people die in the wilderness is from thirst or hunger, which is completely stupid.

11:14 But actually, the number one way people die in the wilderness is through hypothermia. Hypo, meaning lack of. Thermia, meaning thermal, not being hot enough. We have to maintain that all-important 98.5 degrees. And if it goes below that, you're getting into a possibility of death because the human body obviously has to stay quite warm and the temperature absolutely plummets at night in the forest. So the first thing I suggest is just carry a goddamn lighter with you. Anytime I go into the woods, I have a lighter, I have backup matches, I have a flint as well as my knife.

11:48 I have like three different ways to make fire. And when Marissa and I got lost, we were just going to go on a day hike to the wiki up, spend some time there, do what we do, and then we're going to come back. I still had those three different ways of making fire on me. So when we were lost, even when it was raining and hailing, I was like, look, I can keep us safe until we find our way out, so we're going to be fine.

12:09 So combustion is absolutely extremely important. I would say it's the most important thing because you can survive three weeks without food. You can survive three days without water. You can survive three minutes without oxygen, but you cannot survive if your temperature falls too far below 98.5 for too long of a period. It is the number one cause of death in the wilderness. So if you have a fire, there's a myriad of different things fires can do. Man, I could record 10 episodes about fire alone. Keeps you warm, cooks your food, keeps predators away, purifies water, provides a gigantic morality boost.

12:46 It's called bush television. There's something so meditative and intoxicating about just sitting around a fire and staring into it. I know probably 80% of you guys have done that. It's just amazing. It's bush television. So there's tons of things that fire can do, and even if you have no shelter, and even in our case where it was hailing and raining, I could have built a fire. We could have found a little rock overhang. I would have gotten some wood by curating it with my knife, getting into the inside of it where it was still dry, and I would have built a fire, reflected it off a wall, for example, and kept us warm throughout the night.

13:18 You can also build a fire on each side of you as you sleep in the middle. It's called a smoke blanket by the Native Americans. You could build a fire, heat rocks in it, bury the rocks under where you sleep, build a big-ass pad of leaves and sleep on that. Watch out for what's called conduction, which is the ground making you cold. If you guys go out and do this for the first time, I suggest a very thick and warm sleeping pad because the ground is what's going to make you cold.

13:45 But fire is so important. There's so many uses for it. Some of the stranger uses are that Native Americans used to take what they called smoke baths because the smoke from the fire actually kills bacteria. So they would undress and put their armpits over the smoke in the fire, and it would actually kind of work as a deodorant to keep the BO out, and that's the way they would clean their clothes too. And they understood that when you smell of smoke, and I've practiced this myself, animals can't really pick up your scent because smoke is a natural smell in the forest, so it's a great way to hunt.

14:17 Other things fire can do is create coals, which can purify water. You can also mix ash with the sap of pine trees to make glue. If you add white ash to your water and drink it, it acts as a laxative. In case you can't poop, it'll help you poop. And if you add dark ash to your water and drink it, it actually works as like a pepto-bismol, which will get rid of stomach aches and kind of clog you up. So there's so many things. Like I said, one time I think I wrote down like 50 different things fire can do, but combustion, the first C, is absolutely essential.

14:49 Carry a lighter, preferably one that's windproof and it'll survive if it gets wet. Carry emergency matches and also carry what's called a ferro rod. You can get sparks off of it with your knife to create a fire. The second C of survival is a cutting tool. Absolutely essential. I will never go into the woods without a knife. Now, when it comes to knives, you got to process wood. You can build shelters with it. You can build traps with it. You can process food with it. Say if you kill a squirrel or something, you can open up the squirrel, get the guts out and cook it.

15:19 There's just so many great things about a knife and people who are really good in the wilderness, they choose a knife over a lighter if they had the choice because they can make what's called a bow drill set, which is a way to make fire. You guys have seen it before where you're basically rubbing sticks together or more accurately, you're spinning a spindle into a hearth board, which basically creates a coal that you dump into a dried ball of grass and then blow it into flame.

15:45 So guys who are really good in the wilderness, if they had to choose one thing, it would be a cutting tool. Don't go into the woods without a knife. The knife that I suggest, and I've had freaking 20 knives over the years, is the Benchmade Bushcrafter. Benchmade Bushcrafter. This is by far the best survival knife in my opinion. So if you guys want to pick that up, I personally have the one with the brown handle. It comes also with the blue handle. Thing is fucking absolutely gangster.

16:09 Works super well. You can process wood all day with that thing. It's like such a good knife, such a good knife. All right. The third C of survival is container. This is for your water because as I said previously, you can only survive three days without water. Now, when it comes to gathering water in the wilderness, you have to be extremely careful for rivers and streams because animals crap in it. And when animals crap in the river and streams, it creates two dangerous bacteria called Giardia and Cryptosporidium.

16:40 So the way to get past those is to bring a water filter with you. I suggest the Sawyer water filter. You can find it pretty much anywhere. They even sell it at Walmart right now. It connects to a bag and then you basically squeeze it and purified water comes out. They've tested it. It works really well. But if you're in a survival situation, the best thing to do is go to the corner of a river, dig about six feet back from the corner until you get water that comes into what is essentially a well and you can drink somewhat safely from that.

17:10 Now, one quick side note, my brother is a massive outdoorsman. He's actually walked from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, and he did the Appalachian Trail. He's been in the wilderness probably a year straight if you count all the months he's been on the trails. He never once filtered his water. And a couple times when him and I were backpacking, my filter broke and I had to drink water straight from the stream. He says he can tell it's so stupid.

17:36 I don't argue with him because I don't want to piss him off, but he says I can tell just by looking at the water if it's okay to drink. He's drunk from literally a year straight from streams and stuff and never got anything. I think just his gut bacteria has handled it, but you would be wise to bring some kind of filtration. I would stay away from the iodine drops. They have lights that you can put into the water that basically kill everything. I just hate the way that shit tastes with the iodine.

18:04 I don't really know if that light thing works. Actually, that's the thing that broke on me one time we were backpacking, so I go with the Sawyer Squeeze. And the reason the third C is container is because you have to carry water with you. What you're going to do if you're ever lost, and this is probably the most important point of this entire episode, is find a river and follow it out. Okay? So your objective is to walk and walk and walk, preferably downhill and into what looks like a confluence of where water would be, and find yourself a stream.

18:34 If you find yourself a little trickle, follow that thing to a little creek. Follow that thing down to a river. Follow the river to civilization. Not only will you have water immediately accessible at all times, to which you can build little water wells on the side by digging up, letting it fill in, filter it through the crotch of your underwear, and then drink it. It's a joke, of course. But not only will you have that, but most times civilization is built off the side of rivers.

19:00 So that was my plan. When Marissa and I were lost, I was like, look, I'm just going to fucking find a river, follow it out. I know the rivers flow right into Redfeather Lakes, so I'll eventually find civilization. But fortunately, I found my way out in a different way, which I'm going to explain. So container is really effective. And one thing I do is I carry a little Altoids box with me in a little leather pouch that I have off my belt. I always have it right on my person as I do my knife, as I do a ferro rod in case I need to make fire.

19:29 If I lose my backpack, something should happen. Bigfoot attacks me and rips out my backpack because he wants to get to my granola bars. I have that stuff on me. In that little Altoids tin, I have these five C's of survival, okay? I have combustion in the way of matches. I have a little cutting tool in there. It's like a little razor blade. And I actually carry a condom because that can be used as a container to carry water in a worst case scenario. Now, in my opinion, it's kind of unnecessary, particularly in the Rocky Mountains.

19:57 But perhaps if you're in a desert environment, you'd be wise to have something where you're you can carry water because water is so scarce. And that actually happened to my brother and I, too. We got lost in the desert and we were running out of water and we eventually found a river, thank God, and were able to drink from it. The fourth C of survival is cordage. Cordage is used for putting up shelters. Cordage is used for making traps. Cordage is used for repairing things. There's all kinds of uses for it.

20:23 You can even use it as fishing string to catch fish out of streams, which I've actually done before. I challenged myself. I went in with all these five C's and I built a little makeshift fishing rig and I caught a fish out of this tiny little creek and then I cooked it over a fire with my knife and cleaned it and made fire from a bow drill set. Like I did the whole caveman thing, right? To challenge myself, slept outside next to a fire. And what's really cool is if you buy paracord, which is used for parachuting, they actually have seven really small strands inside the paracord that you can pull out and use for like smaller components of your cordage.

21:00 And I actually made a fishing rig out of that, which was pretty cool. And I caught a fish and I was pretty pumped. All right. And the fifth and final C of survival is cover, cover. This means basically a tarp. This means a tent. This means something to keep the elements off of you. If you guys have ever watched that show alone, where basically they go out into the wilderness alone and they have to take a certain number of things, all these things are considered and all these things are brought with them, what a lot of people bring is a huge tarp.

21:28 And that is so goddamn effective because you can basically waterproof anything. When it comes to my wiki up in the middle of the woods, it doesn't have a tarp around it. Although I kind of sometimes wish I did put a tarp around it because like I said, it's extremely difficult to gather up enough pine to make anything waterproof. You could do it with leaves, but there's not a lot of leaves in Colorado. It's mostly pine trees and then by the rivers, you have some cottonwood trees, some aspen and stuff that do drop their leaves, but to accumulate enough to make shelter is really difficult.

21:58 So when it comes to cover, man, don't go into the wilderness. Don't go camping with at least a tarp. My brother and I, when we long distance hike together, we don't bring a tent. All we bring is a tarp and we basically sleep out under the stars unless it's raining to which we make a little A-frame tarp with cordage in our cover. And then that's going to keep the rain off of us. But if I had the choice, I like a little two-man tent. And that's what I suggest for you guys.

22:23 If you do want to go into the wilderness, get yourself a little two-man tent, a backpack, definitely a pretty thick, warm sleeping pad. And I highly suggest a goose down sleeping bag. Those things work the best. Don't get them wet though, because once they're wet, they're incapacitated, but I've never gotten it wet. I just lined my backpack with a trash bag so it keeps everything dry inside. Totally different podcast episode. All right, so we have the five C's of survival. God, this is fun to talk about.

22:48 I never talk about this shit. This is really, really cool. So first C is combustion. In my opinion, the most important. Next C, knife cutting tool. So those two C's are, in my opinion, by far the most important. Then we have container for water. More specifically, water purification is really important and just being accessible to water because you can only go three days without water. The next C is cordage. Also extremely important to build things, to build traps. It just has so many damn uses, fishing string.

23:17 And then the final C is cover, which if you go hiking alone off the beaten trail, as I highly suggest, you should definitely bring a tent or at the very least a tarp to make a little to shelter from, to keep the elements off of you because Mother Nature is super unpredictable. All right. So if you get lost, the first thing to do is to calm the fuck down, even sit down on a log and say, look, I am where I am. I don't know where that is, but we're safe.

23:43 And this is what I did with Marissa. It's hailing right now. It's pretty cold, but we have warm clothes on. We were both wearing rain suits. We had her dog with us. Everything was fine. I knew I could get us out of there eventually. And if we had to spend several days in there, what was I going to do? Keep us warm with fire, find shelter. We had plenty of water. It was falling from the sky. The main thing you're looking to do is just keep warm and get yourself hydrated, which is why you go find a river or a little trickle.

24:10 If you find anything, even a tiny little trickle, follow that fucker because it will probably eventually get to more bigger water flows, which will eventually get to a real river to where eventually you'll find civilization or at the very least somebody camping off the side of the river. You follow that thing down as you keep yourself hydrated, as you keep yourself warm, and eventually you'll make your way back to civilization and be a fucking hero for the rest of your life because you're a goddamn man and you survived.

24:37 I actually want to train my daughter on all this stuff and I plan to put her through a crucible where I drop her out in the middle of the woods with nothing more than her knife and she's got to get out. And of course, I'll be monitoring her the whole time and it's going to be really badass. But I think wilderness survival, so goddamn important. You guys, even if you live in Australia, England's a little more difficult because I don't think they have national forest. It's all kind of privately owned.

25:00 But no matter where you are, where you're listening, there's always wilderness out there. Get into it. It's absolutely fascinating and it'll completely cleanse your soul. And if you're depressed, it's going to make you feel a lot better. All right. Now I want to talk a little bit about those interesting things. This is turning into a long one. I knew it would. I knew this would probably be my longest one, but I want to talk about some really cool facts that are going to hopefully blow your mind because they blew my mind when I first heard them.

25:24 All right. So the next time you look at the sun in the sky, here's what I want you to do. I want you to put your hand out and put your pinky finger just underneath the bottom rim of the sun. Okay. Each finger down is 15 minutes of time that that sun will still be in the sky. Okay. So you put your pinky finger to the bottom rim, got one, two, three, four fingers, and it hasn't even hit the horizon yet. Your hand hasn't. Then stick your other hand under that and there's another four fingers or three fingers or however many fingers, that's how much time left there is in the day.

25:57 So we often say in bushcraft, there's three fingers left of time before the sun goes down. And when that sun goes down, that temperature is going to drop like a motherfucker. So get yourself ready. When it comes to picking a camping spot, cold air settles, cold air acts just like water. If you camp down in a basin where it's basically a bowl and you're right next to a river, that's going to be the coldest freaking camping spot you've ever experienced. So what I often do is I try to get a little bit higher, a couple hundred feet over any kind of basin, and I try to camp off the side of a mountain on a slope, but on a slope that has a flat spot on it, because then the cold air is going to pass by me on the way down and I won't get blown with cold air on the top of the ridge.

26:40 I don't like to sleep on ridges and I definitely don't like to sleep next to what's called widow makers, which are dead trees that could get blown over and fall on you in the middle of the night. You want to sleep on a place where if it rains, the water will drain not into your camp, but around it. And once again, watch out for that cold air sinks, man. It's literally could be like 20 degrees difference with 20 feet of difference. You could be down at the bottom of a basin where it's absolutely freezing cold and just go 20 feet higher up on a little ridge up on the side of a hill, sleep on that thing.

27:14 They're literally like 20 to 30 degrees difference. It's insane. When you're in the wilderness, you really experience this. There's like thermal clines where some areas are much colder than others. So I like to camp on a very flat spot. That's preferably kind of up higher off of basins and somewhat on the side of like a mountain, kind of, if that makes sense. All right. This next fact is really interesting. It fascinated me the first time I heard it is, have you ever wondered why there's so many deer and wildlife on the side of the highways?

27:43 Do you ever wonder why we always see deer standing off to the side of the highways? Like you can go into the woods as I always do and never see one deer. And then on the drive home, you see like 20 of them. Why is that? Well, first of all, deer do understand private and public land and they do understand hunting seasons. So they'll often hide out on people's properties. But more importantly, what happens to sunshine when you have a cleared out road with no trees on it?

28:09 What happens is that sunshine can actually reach the ground. And when the sunshine can reach the ground, small grasses can grow and small grasses have tons of nutrients. So the reason why deer are often off the side of the road is because it's clear of any trees. Therefore, the sun can hit it. Small grasses grow that are high in nutrients and they like to eat those grasses. So that's what they're doing, man. They're eating the grasses along the side of the road because they have more nutrients in them and they're new shoots.

28:36 Just like when a fire comes through. This huge fire came through Colorado. Everybody's crying about it. I literally hiked into this fire like two months after it happened. There was so much new growth, man. All these bright green sprouts coming up, butterflies everywhere, birds everywhere. It was absolutely vibrant with life. So sometimes fire is a good purifier. It puts nutrients into the ground to where new sprouts can come up. So when people were crying about it, I was like, yeah, but you know, it's actually good for the environment.

29:04 And that's why it's natural for that to happen. All right, the next fascinating fact is about tracking. I could do freaking three episodes on tracking footprints in the snow or in the dirt. But here's a quick, really interesting fact. If you ever look at dog footprints and you see that the back feet are outside the front feet, do you think that's a male or a female? That's right. It's a female. The reason is, is because females have wider hips to which makes their back feet wider than their front feet.

29:33 So if you're ever looking at tracks of a four-legged animal, if the back foot is outside the front foot, that's a female. If the front feet are outside the back feet, that's a male because males have wider chest. Pretty interesting, right? I always found that really cool. All right, here's a really easy way to find out where south is. If you're in the United States, this would be different in Australia where you basically just reverse this. What you do if you're wearing a watch that has hands on it is you point the hour hand at the sun and halfway between the hour hand and 12 on your watch is south.

30:07 Okay, so once again, you point the hour hand of your watch at the sun, halfway between your hour hand and 12 on your watch is south. Think about it and you'll see that it's true. Pretty fun, cool, right? All right, there's 50,000 of these facts that I could go through, but I'm just going to pick my favorite ones because I wanted to end this at 40 minutes. Over 40 minutes is too long in my opinion. So another interesting fact is that wind changes directions through mountains during the daytime and during the nighttime.

30:34 So generally speaking, wind goes down because it's cold air sinking and wind goes up during the daytime because it's hot air rising. So what elk do is they strategically position themselves on the side of mountains while they're resting or bedding down as we call it. And what they do is they actually put their backs to the wind, whichever way the wind is flowing at that particular time so that they can look up the mountain. Let's say it's during the day, right? We understand that wind is coming up the mountain because it's hot and it's rising.

31:07 So what elk will do is they'll position themselves to be facing up the mountain so they can watch up the mountain for any predators coming and they can smell from behind themselves because the wind is pushing and they smells up. When it comes to elk particularly, and this is also mostly true for deer, is they can see you and you can kind of be okay sometimes. They can hear you and you can kind of be okay sometimes. But if they smell you, you are fucked and they're running away.

31:34 So the most important thing when you're hunting deer as well as more specifically elk is you have to keep the wind in your direction. If they wind you, they're fucking gone. And it's happened to me many times. So what they do is they position themselves so the wind is actually coming up from their backside so they can smell because their smell is like better than a bloodhound. And they watch up the hill to see if any predators are coming down. Isn't that cool? Man, I found it so fascinating.

31:58 God, wilderness survival is so cool. And the knowledge that has been lost ever since we've done what we did to the Native Americans, it's absolutely sad. But there's a lot being preserved and it's really interesting stuff. All right, I'm going to end it with one of my favorite facts, which is pine pitch is extremely flammable. And what you can do is if you ever want to make a torch, you can go to a pine tree, find a branch that's towards the bottom and particularly a standing dead pine tree is the best place to get it.

32:28 Saw off the branch. Then what you do is you look for kind of a red tint in that branch and you smell it. And if it smells like pine saw, then you know you got pitch, which is extremely flammable. Then what you do is you hold it vertically, kind of as you would a candle, and you saw into it a plus sign. So you're basically sawing straight down the branch, a plus sign. One cut going straight down into it about six inches. And then you switch 90 degrees and you put another cut going down six inches.

32:56 Then what you do is you get a bunch of pine sap and you stick the sap in the middle of that cross that you just made. And then you light that fucker on fire. It'll stay lit. I've tested this. We had one light for three hours by doing that three hours. And it was a torch. And we had that night and I was walking through the forest with a fucking torch looking for different things, checking my traps. It was so gangster, man. You can make torches out of this stuff.

33:18 And pine pitch is extremely flammable. And one kind of interesting fact is remember they used to tar and feather people? Well, you think if they pour tar on you, you die because it's so hot. But you're thinking about tar like concrete tar. What tar actually is, is it's pine pitch. And when they would tar people, they would get melted pine sap basically poured over them. It doesn't get hot enough to burn you. It just kind of makes your skin like bubble sometimes. It's like a really superficial burn.

33:47 And then they'd toss feathers on the fucker. And the reason they do that is because pine pitch was super available because that's how they'd fix boats. It's literally a glue. Like I said earlier, you mix it with some coal. You mix it with some ash from your fire and it makes glue. And I've actually repaired my shoe with it. And that's how they make canoes. That's how they would make containers. Native Americans would use it all the time as glue. And the shit is just as strong as super glue from my experience.

34:11 All right, gentlemen, now that we are well over 40 minutes, I am going to go ahead and tell you the end of that story of when Marissa and I were lost. So we're kind of walking in circles. We're completely lost. I'm super embarrassed because I'm trying to get her to the wiki up. I was super confident in my navigation skills. But there was absolutely no sun in the sky. At least if there was a sun in the sky, I could tell where the sun was and I could get a general idea of where south was because I did have my watch on me.

34:39 Once again, you point your hour hand at the sun halfway between that and 12 o'clock is south. So I would have been able to figure it out. But here's the weird thing is the sun looked like it was in a different area because it was so dark with clouds. And I actually did point my watch at it, did that whole trick. So I thought south was actually north. So I was completely twisting around and Marissa was pretty scared. And frankly, so was I. And I was like, fuck, dude, what the hell am I going to do?

35:05 So one thing that I remembered from all my training over the years of watching Bear Grawls, me and versus what? Right. Me name is Bear Grawls. Me game is survival. Oh my God. My fucking English accent is so bad, man. Always comes out as an Australian accent. And even that, as you Australians are confirming, is absolutely horrible. But I remember him saying once to get up really high, to try to find some landmarks. So we're kind of hiking around and I finally come upon this big ass tower of rocks.

35:33 So I climb up on that thing. And mind you, it's hailing and thundering and lightning. And it was just absolutely horrible. But I was like, yo, I got to find out where the hell we are. So I climb up on the thing and I'm looking what I thought would be south. And I was actually north. And I turn around and I see Redfeather Lakes. There are these four lakes in the city of Redfeather here in Colorado. And I knew then exactly where our car was. I was like, holy shit, dude.

35:57 I am completely turned around. I think north is south. East is west. I think up is down. I'm totally fucked up in the head here. And I was like, all right. Now that I know where that is, I'm going to set a cardinal bearing. And what I did is I basically put the sun over my right shoulder. Because the sun was actually, it was really weird. The sun was actually, should have been in the left-hand side of the sky. But it looked like it was in the right.

36:19 It was really weird. But it was a little brighter on that side. So I kind of put that over my shoulder. And I got us right to our car. Like right to it. We came out of the forest and the car was right there. And Marissa was like, damn, that was pretty good. And I was like, yeah. The first four hours weren't very good. But that final sum up was pretty cool. And it was cool to put my skills to the test. See how it felt.

36:39 So once again, boys, if you are lost in the wilderness, just calm down. You are where you are and you have the skill set to get out. Find a river, follow it out, keep yourself hydrated. And most importantly, keep yourself warm. Carry those five C's with you and you will be safe. All right, gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed this one. I know I certainly did. I have another episode dropping on Monday, which is going to get back to the basis of this podcast, which is masculinity, confidence, women, and being a fucking man without making any apologies for it.

37:09 So please stay tuned for that one. I appreciate all you guys listening on my birthday. And if you want to leave me a review, please email me at coachmarksing at gmail.com. And I will send you a bunch of cool shit. Have a great weekend, boys. And I will see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode.

This transcript was made automatically, so a few words may be off.