If and when you face a man-made or natural survival situation you may have to deal with the destruction or abandonment of your home. Your decision to move out of that home may be forced on you or you may make a rational decision to leave it and find a safer place to survive. Either way, you will start on a survival journey that will require you to secure or build some type of new shelter.
PRINCIPLES OF SHELTER: Why is shelter so important? First, some kind of cover will protect you from all of the dangers of living in a changed world. It provides cover from weather, cold, heat, rain. It gives you some protection potentially from human or critter dangers. Second, shelter provides you a place where you can rest, sleep, think, do minor tasks, and get out of sight. Third, temporary shelters are a place where you can recover your strength, physically and mentally, so you can continue your journey tomorrow. Fourth, more permanent shelters provide you with a sense of normalcy, with security, a place where you can remove yourself from all the stressors that exist outside the shelter’s entrance.
THE BASICS OF SHELTER: Depending on the environment around you, weather patterns, availability of materials to build a shelter, the variety of possible shelters is only as small as your imagination. You will likely not have traditional building materials available to you. With that as a given you will have to use what you find in the area you are planning on sheltering. You can use snow, leaves, fallen trees, logs, man-made materials such as tarps, ponchos, space blankets, even your own clothing.
Esthetics are not important in building your shelter. Some typical forms of shelter are a lean-to, a wiki-up, an A-frame, a quanzi hut, a hole in the ground or snow, under low hanging limbs on trees, a platform built up in a tree with some kind of covering over it, a cave, an abandoned car, an abandoned existing building. A pile of leaves which you can burrow into will keep you warm. Don’t worry about how it looks. Be more concerned that it will do as much as possible to keep you safe, dry, warm, and able to get some rest.
Building shelters takes time. If you are in dire straits, before you do anything else, build or find some kind of shelter. In the first 24 hours of your survival situation you need to get safe, get dry if necessary, and get some sleep. Water and food can be found tomorrow after you have had a chance to sit down, calm yourself, and think. Get out of the weather, get away from dangers, get somewhere that allows you to take stock of your situation and to begin planning your next steps.
What good will it do you if you start moving on your journey and within 24 to 48 hours you find yourself unable to continue. Make the right decision. Your initial shelter will determine if you are able to make it to day 2. Choose to Survive!
