In this episode of Primitive Camping & Bushcraft Podcast, Chris Speir shares the joy of welcoming his first grandchild, Hudson, and the incredible experience of dedicating him to the Lord. Transitioning to practical survival skills, Chris discusses essential natural water filtration methods, including tripod water filters, Gypsy wells, and bottle filters. Drawing from years of hands-on experience and survival guides, he provides step-by-step instructions and personal insights to help you stay hydrated in the great outdoors. Don’t miss his thoughts on the new Primitive Camping & Bushcraft coffee blend and exciting plans for the podcast in the new year.
Introduction:
Natural Water Filtration Techniques:
Primitive Camping and Bushcraft Blend Coffee:
Closing Remarks:
(upbeat music)
Welcome back to the Primitive
Camping at Bushcraft Podcast.
My name's Chris Speir
and I'm gonna be your guide
to the great outdoors.
And this has been a very awesome week
and I have a lot to be thankful for.
Last week as y'all know was Thanksgiving
and my first grand baby was
born Friday morning at 7.30,
a little Hudson.
And I'm so excited to see
him come into the world.
It's been a huge blessing.
I got to hold him in
my hands and lift him up
and pray over him and just
dedicate him to the Lord.
And I just found that to
be an amazing experience.
And I cried my eyes out
just for the first time
holding my little grandson.
And it was just
amazing little experience.
But anyway, yeah,
we're gonna do this today.
We're gonna do
natural filtration systems.
We're gonna cover the
tripod water filter.
We're gonna cover the
gypsy well and our coyote well,
and then the bottle filter.
And then after that, we got one more.
We're gonna do the
commercial water filters.
And then after that,
we're gonna get into the fire.
So what we're gonna do for
this Christmas season, guys,
is we're gonna do this week's.
We're gonna do next week's.
And then after that,
we're gonna take a break
until the new year.
And then we'll start off season two
of the Primitive
Camping in Bushcraft podcast.
So we got two more episodes.
We got this one today.
We got next week, next Monday.
And then after that, we're
going to put a pause on it
until the end of the
year, until the beginning
of the new year, and give
everybody some time to relax
and enjoy their family, especially me.
You know, I got the little
new grandbaby just showing up
and getting to spend some
time with him and my son
and my daughter-in-law.
So, but anyway, without further ado,
let's get right into it.
So last week, we
discussed chemical disinfection,
where we used some
iodine, we used some bleach,
and we went out into the woods
and we killed all the biological
contaminants in there.
And as we discussed, this
method is not gonna get rid
of any kind of chemical contaminants.
And one of the things about
this is that you're adding
a chemical, you're
putting a chemical in to get rid
of chemicals and it's
not gonna work that way.
Now, hopefully y'all
did go and look at some
of the other stuff.
I'll put some links into the
show notes, stuff like that,
for you guys to go out and check out,
especially for the guy from Battlebox
and a couple of the others.
And then, let's see what
they had to offer, you know.
Otherwise, you're not
gonna beat the grill.
Grill is the way to go.
And when you're out in the woods.
Now, I will be testing out a
new water filtration system,
going to pretty much, I'm
gonna be doing it this week.
I'm gonna be shooting a
bunch of videos on that.
It's called the ITEL, I-T-E-H-I-L.
And it is a, you charge the unit up
and it has two filtration cartridges
and it's sort of like a refrigerator
and it does reverse osmosis
and it pretty much
sucks the nasty water up,
filtrates it, spits out the good stuff.
So, I'm gonna demonstrate
that unit in the next one.
We'll talk about IT
along with the other stuff
in the book here.
But for today, we're gonna go over
the natural filtration systems
and we're gonna discuss
the tripod water filter.
Now, one of the most
remarkable or recalled
or the most common kind
of water filtration systems
that people visualize when
they go into the great outdoors,
they've seen it in
all the survival books,
is the tripod water filter.
And this dude is pretty cool
and the filtration system there
is not meant to actually get rid
of all your biological contaminants.
It is meant to rid all the soot,
but the sediment and all the turbidity
and everything out of the water
takes all the tea stain out of the water
and it makes it just crystal clear
and it actually helps
improve some of the flavor
but you still have to boil this water
or you have to run it through some kind
of commercial water filtration system
or chemical disinfection.
So, that's why we went
through all the different aspects
of what we did.
So, he sent me a
picture of the little one.
Right now they just got
home today from the hospital.
But it's gonna be the
water filtration systems
are going to really substantially improve
that quality of the water that you have
when you're out on an
extended camping trip
or whenever you're out in the field
and you have no other
way to filtrate your water.
So now I wanna show you something besides
the Primitive Camping and Bushcraft book
that we've been going over
through this whole process.
I wanna show you the book that really is
this particular book
right here, Survival,
Wisdom and Know-How.
It is a ginormous book.
It is, I wanna say almost 12 by 14,
something like that.
It's a big book and it's slam packed full
of all kinds of stuff in here.
But this is what gave me
the reading through here
is what gave me the idea to
do the tripod water filter
whenever I was out on a camping trip
and then all my water filters clogged up.
I remember reading about
this and it telling me,
hey, you can make this.
So the water filter,
the tripod water filter
is exactly what it states is a tripod
and let's see here, there it is.
It's talking about water purification
and if you can see on the
video right here in my hand,
you'll see the tripod and the water
filtration system there.
So, and that's what gave me
the idea to actually do this
whenever I was out in the field.
And it's also, I
believe, I want to see it is.
Let's see here.
You think I've done some
a little bit of research
before I started this, but no, I did not.
Is in the SAS Survival Handbook as well.
I have to look it up,
but it is actually gonna be
in a couple of other Survival Manuals.
I know it's in the Army Survival Manual
and that's pretty much
where the Survival Wisdom
and Know-How Book has
a lot of stuff in there
from the Army Survival Manual.
So we did the tripod
water filter in the book
and the reason I did
that is because I have first
had experience using it, I
did use it, I had to use it.
My life straw clogged up and actually,
I keep saying life straw,
but I mean my Sawyer Squeeze,
our little Sawyer
water filters clogged up.
So this water filtration
system is frequently found
in standard survival handbooks.
I know it's in the Army Survival Book
and I know it's in the
Survival Wisdom and Know-How,
but I went out on a trip and
we were out there for two days
and all of a sudden our filters clogged
and we couldn't get no water out of them.
And it was a very
weird feeling to know that,
hey, we ain't got no way
to make some clean water
and it takes a while
to go ahead, boil water,
set it aside, let it cool, then drink it.
And I'm the kind of guy to
where if I want some water,
I'm gonna get it right down in there.
I don't like waiting, I'm impatient.
I know a lot of you listening are,
but the idea behind this
filter is to create layers
for your water filtration system.
And if you watch anything,
even a couple episodes ago,
where I was talking
about having handkerchiefs
and using the
handkerchiefs as the different layers
for this system and using a handkerchief
to be the first layer
of filtering your water
to make it drinkable.
If you're gonna use a
commercial water filter,
then I have three of
them with mere three or four
handkerchiefs, they
don't take up no weight,
they don't take up no space
and they're always useful for something,
whether it be a rag to take a bath with,
whether it be just having a rag to pick
up hot objects with,
stuff like that.
And the handkerchiefs are so useful,
they're multi-use items when
you get out into the woods.
You can get them on
various neon red, orange,
or blaze orange or hot pink,
some kind of color
that's not available in nature
to where you could do signaling for help
or something to that effect.
So step one with this natural filtration,
the tripod water filtration system
is that you're going to build a tripod
for your water filter.
The first thing you need
to build is the tripod.
And so we're gonna cut
three equal length sticks,
straight as possible,
and approximately at least six feet long.
You're gonna lay the sticks down
and loosely tie some
bank line or paracord
or something, some kind of
cordage around the end of it.
It could be vines,
it could be natural
cordage that you made.
It could be, if you found a waste,
a disposed plastic bottle
and made some cordage
out of that, whatever,
it does not matter what kind of cordage
you tie this thing together with.
So what I like to do is tie
it loosely around the three
and then take the middle
one and flip it out and over.
And it, when it cinches down,
it will clamp down on
all three of those sticks.
And you don't have to sit there
and tie lashings and stuff like that.
And then you just flip it
over and it's good to go.
You know, you just do a real loose loop
around those three sticks.
And when you flip that one over,
it automatically tightens up.
So that's step two,
flip the middle stick over 180 degrees
and this will tighten up
the cordage around the tripod
and you will have it all lashed together.
Now step three is you're
gonna tie your first handkerchief
to each leg near the tripod's top.
All right, so the first one,
you're gonna put one
handkerchief up at the top.
Now I know a handkerchief has four sides,
so you're gonna make it
where it's going to tie
in three areas.
You're gonna turn that
square into a triangle
and you're gonna tie that.
And what I typically do is
I will take the corner edge
of the handkerchief that I want to use
and I will add a acorn, a
small rock, a piece of dirt,
a piece of stick or something like that
into the handkerchief, fold it over
and then put a slipknot on
the string on the outside
and that way it'll be secured.
The same way you could
put any kind of guidelines
or tie outs on a tarp
that doesn't have grommets.
You could do the same
thing using an acorn or rock
or marble or whatever.
So you're gonna do
that and then the tripod.
So with the tripod,
you're gonna drop down
about 16 inches and
secure your next handkerchief.
And then you keep doing that
until you have three tiers.
Now, a lot of people will
tell me you don't need this
but you're gonna fill
the top one with grass.
You can fill it with grass.
And that's just to
catch some of the nastiness
or whatever and it's gonna filter.
It really has no
purpose other than to catch
the large, large debris, the large stuff,
filter out the large stuff
through that handkerchief.
Next, we're going to pull
out the logs from a fire
and we're gonna scrape
the black charcoal off.
We're not gonna scrape the white ashes.
We don't need the lie and
all that in the white ashes
but what we need is the
charcoal that is on the wood.
It doesn't matter if it is
a resin, this wood or not,
the charcoal is completely burnt wood.
And so you want to go
ahead and scrape that charcoal
off of this wood.
Now, you want to get as much as you can.
You want a lot of charcoal.
So you might be
sitting there for a while.
Your hands are gonna be black.
Your equipment's gonna be black.
You can scrape them
right into a handkerchief
or some sort or some kind of container.
And then you're gonna take that
and pour it into the center handkerchief.
Now, you have two levels.
The top level you have
grass, the middle level,
the middle level you have charcoal.
Now, we're gonna get
to the last one, sand.
Typically by some sort of
water source, you can find sand
and find pulverized
rocks, sand, some fine dirt,
something like that.
And typically around water sources,
you should be able to
find some variation of sand.
I know that's not gonna
be typical of all places.
I realize that some places
you can have rock, shell,
some kind of medium that can filter out
the charcoal from the water.
And that's all the sand's gonna do
is just take that charcoal dust back out
and take all the nasty out
because the charcoal is gonna absorb
some of the nasty flavor and
stuff like that of this water.
Now, here in the South,
sand is extremely plentiful.
We have sand everywhere.
Matter of fact, South
Mississippi does a lot of sand
that they ship off
for these fracking jobs.
They'll put it on rail cars
and send it all over the world.
And so, especially for beaches,
Mississippi has one of the longest,
all of Mississippi's beachfront,
I think it's about 80
miles, something like that,
is manmade beaches.
And it's all sand
that they have produced,
dug up or dredged or whatever.
And then when you get into the woods,
the beach, the sand, I'm sorry,
is typically by the
streams, lakes, rivers,
you can find sand everywhere.
Now, I know this is not gonna be typical
for all places everywhere,
but sand can be found if
you look for it hard enough.
All right, so now we got our sand,
we got our charcoal, we got our grass.
Now, what we're going to do
is we're gonna go collect us some water
and we're gonna take that water
and we're gonna pour it into
the top of where the grass is
very slowly and you pour it in
and that water is gonna come down
and it is going to go into the charcoal.
And then once you go into the charcoal,
it's gonna pour down into the sand.
And once you pour down from the sand,
it's gonna pour into a container
that you're going to
have set under the bottom
to collect your water.
Now, the first time, maybe
the first couple of times,
it is going to be,
it's gonna be milky
colored, grayish white.
And so you just run that
back through a couple of times,
you can discard it if
you want or whatnot,
go collect you some more water
from somewhere, another water source.
But what's happening there is you gotta
get the charcoal wet
activated to get it to work correctly.
You gotta get the sand wet
to get the filtration
system there to work.
And so all that milky,
nasty stuff is coming
from the charcoal on the sand layers.
Now, once the water
starts coming through there,
it's gonna be like,
you'll pour it in at the top,
it'll be kind of
clear, it doesn't matter.
Whatever water you
collect from everywhere
in small portions when you
pour it out is somewhat clear.
And it might have tea stains to it,
it might have yellow or
turbidity or whatever,
might have some gunk in there.
But once you pour it through
and it gets through that sand layer,
that sand is gonna
filter out all that nasty
and it's gonna leave you
with crystal clear water.
Now, this is the same
concept that they use
for swimming pools.
That big swimming pool pump or filter
that you got on there
is slam full of sand.
And that sand is
constantly scrubbing all that water
out of that pool to keep the water clear,
keep the water clean.
You have to add some
chemicals and stuff to it
in the swimming pool to keep
it clean and clear for longer.
But it's the same concept,
it's forcing water through the sand to
clean the water out,
to force it out to
have crystal clear water.
Now, the bottom layer tends to raise
the most questions in this is
because in the survival books,
the sand is the middle layer.
Well, in my real life experiences
using this water filtration method,
I found that it didn't work too well.
With the sand in the middle,
all the water was charcoal.
It was complete black water
by the time it got down to the container.
And so what we did is we swapped it.
All we're trying to do is
clean it out of the nastiness.
We're not trying to kill
any biological contaminants
or any kind of contaminants.
We're just trying to filter
out all the grit, the grime,
the nasty, the tadpoles,
all the extra curricular
activities out of this water.
And then we're gonna boil this water,
we're gonna use a commercial
filter to actually drink it.
So now you have to run it
through a couple of times
and it will work.
I promise you, this will work.
I've done it several times
and this method will clean your water,
but you have to boil the water.
And a lot of times people are like,
why would you even do this
if you still have to boil the water?
Well, to clean the water.
Charcoal actually helps improve the taste
and the water will actually last,
help your water filter last longer
by doing this method, cleaning it
and it gets all the nasty out of it.
It will actually prolong the life
of any one of your
water filtration methods,
water filtration filters,
any of your commercial water filters.
So it will actually
prolong the life of it.
So next we got the Coyote Water Well
or the Gypsy Water Well.
I had somebody get on
to me and they're like,
hey, you can't see Gypsy.
I'm like, dude, I can
say whatever I want.
This is my show.
See ya.
I'm like, I'm so sick
and tired of the wokeness
and the politically correct bull crap.
I mean, come on, give me a break.
If you don't like the term I use,
go somewhere else, watch somebody else,
listen to somebody else.
I don't care.
I'm sick of your garbage.
So it's called a Gypsy Well.
That's what I've always had it called.
That's what I'm gonna
continue to call it.
I had a friend of mine tell me that
in Exodus, I believe it was, or Genesis,
I put it in the last
one, I can't remember.
He said, hey, during the
plagues of Moses, Genesis.
So during the plagues of Moses,
where they turned the
Nile River into blood,
the Egyptians would go
up and down the river
and dig holes to
collect water to drink out of
that would filter the water to drink it.
And so he said, instead of a Gypsy Well,
would it be called an Egyptian Well?
And he said, yeah, it could be.
But water wells are water wells.
It doesn't matter.
Jacob's Well,
everybody heard of Jacob's Well
from the Bible, he dug a well.
And all these water wells were dug
and they dug them down deep.
They lined them with
something and they let the water
naturally filtrate into these wells
and they put buckets down in there,
pulled the buckets up and drank.
And those are common throughout history,
throughout the world,
throughout every continent
on the planet as a water well.
90%, I don't know if it's actually 90%,
but we're gonna say 90%,
90% of the United States
population gets their water from a well.
And people may not realize
that when you're drinking
some of the community waters out there,
you're drinking from a well.
They have wells dug that
they pump this water up
into these towers and then they add
chemicals to the water
and then it comes out to the houses.
And it's a pretty interesting thing,
but water wells have been around since
the beginning of time.
And this method right
here, the coyote water well,
the gypsy water well,
Egyptian water well,
whatever you wanna call it,
has been around since the
beginning of time, seriously.
So first what you wanna
do is you wanna identify
your water source.
It doesn't matter, it
could be a cesspool somewhere,
it could be a creek river,
it could be a mud puddle,
it could be some water source.
Then you're gonna dig a
hole about three feet away
from your water source.
Now, if it is clayed in dirt,
you're gonna dig about three feet away.
If it's sand, you're gonna dig about,
let's say eight feet away.
And the reason why is because the sand
is a little bit looser,
but it eventually will filtrate
everything through it.
Now, Clay Hayes did a video where,
I think we posted
this on a recent episode
where we were talking about this,
but if you take this
method and you dig it
and you let it settle
and you scoop it out
and you drink straight from it there,
you have less likely,
you are less likely to be
contaminated with E. coli,
then drinking straight out of
the Creek River stream lake,
bog or whatever.
And so that's what makes
this method so effective.
And I've used this
method thousands of times
in my 50 plus years of being here.
I have used this
method thousands of times
and I have drunk water this
way so many times, it's crazy.
And this is the way that I do recommend
to actually filtrate your water.
If you have no water filter way,
you have no metal
container to boil water,
I do recommend you
get your water this way
because it is the safest of the methods
to drink in the wild.
And once you've dug
your hole three feet away
and you dig it till it
starts filling up with water,
and then you just let it sit.
And you let it sit until
all the sediment goes away.
Now you can take and you
scoop all that sediment out
and then let it fill up again.
And once it's undisturbed,
you let it fill up again,
then you're good to go.
And so you have a way to drink water.
Now, everybody's seen the water bottle
or the water bottle filter,
where somebody takes a
two liter water bottle
and they got this guy on TikTok,
Instagram, all these,
he's a rushing guy,
Demetri of or whatever,
but he steals everybody's videos.
And he has stolen every
single survival video out there.
And he's got millions of followers
and every one of his videos
were stolen from somebody else.
He gives no credit to
nobody for no reason
and anything like that.
It's one of those, he's
making money hand over fist,
but he don't give credit to the people
he steals the stuff from.
And one of those that he
steals a lot of stuff from
is the woodbounds outdoors,
woods bound outdoors, John over there,
but it's all good.
We talked to him about it.
He's like, "Hey, there ain't
nothing I can do about it."
I put a video out two days later,
he's gonna make the same video.
So, I mean, it's crazy.
But anyway, the bottle filter or the
water bottle filter,
you find a two liter bottle,
everybody's seen this done.
Everybody's seen
somebody make a video of it.
Everybody has done it.
I've made a video on it.
And a lot of it is
given credit to the books
that we read it out of,
the survival books
that we read it out of,
because everybody has done this.
If you're in a survival space,
99% of you have done this.
But anyway, you're gonna
take a two liter bottle
or one gallon bottle,
some kind of soda bottle,
something to that effect.
And then you're gonna put a
handkerchief around the opening
or the spout where the
water bottle screws on.
And then the lid screws
onto the water bottle.
And then you're gonna cut off the bottom
or the bottom or the butt of the bottle.
You're gonna flip that up
where it's mouth side down.
And then you're gonna
fill the bottom third
of the bottle with sand.
So once again, you have
to have some sand for this.
You're gonna put some sand in there.
And then you're gonna
throw in some charcoal,
then a little bit more
sand, then some charcoal,
then some sand, and then some grass.
And so, by the time it's done,
it has hit all these
layers and it is filtrate.
Now all the nasty and the
extracurricular activities
that would normally get you sick,
but I still would not drink it.
I would still boil this water.
All this is gonna do is
clean the water for you to drink.
It's gonna clean it, get
it rid of the turbidity.
It's gonna get rid of the tea stain.
It's gonna get rid of the taste.
The charcoal will
actually absorb the nasty taste
of the river and give it a nutty,
a clean, awesome nutty flavor.
So there you go.
All right, so that's it for
the water bottle filtration
system.
You're gonna hang it up.
You're gonna fill it up.
You're gonna do the same thing you did
with the tripod water filter.
And you're gonna
discard the first little bit
and you're gonna keep
processing your water
through there, collecting
it in some kind of container.
Then you're gonna boil it
or you're gonna use your
commercial water filter.
Speaking of commercial water filter,
that's what we're
gonna get into next time.
And that's gonna be our last
subject until the new year.
And it's gonna be a doozy.
We've got a lot of things
to talk about in that one,
but we're going to go
ahead and cover that.
Then we're gonna take a
break till the first of the year.
So if you like this, go
ahead and give me a thumbs up
and leave a comment,
leave some kind of review
wherever you're
listening to the podcast at.
And the podcast is growing.
I'm growing every week.
More and more people are
downloading this thing.
More and more people are liking it.
More and more people are watching.
But by the way, guess what?
The primitive camping
in Bushcraft Blend Coffee
has now hit the shelves.
We are selling this stuff hand over fist.
This stuff is flying off the shelves.
So if you want some for Christmas,
you need to go ahead and order it now
because I could tell you right now,
this stuff is very popular.
We are extremely excited about this.
And I wanna thank
everybody, the thousands of you
that have already come
and ordered this stuff
because this stuff is
flying off the shelves.
I never thought that it
would be as awesome as it is.
And I really appreciate
all the support for this.
And we got K-cups here
and we got the ground.
You can select what
kind of ground you want.
If you want a fine
ground or coarse ground,
you want regular beans, you
want the coffee, the K-cups,
you want whatever you want.
There's different sizes.
You got six ounce, 12
ounce, two pounds, five pounds.
The beans come in five pound bags,
and you can get set up on a subscription.
That's where the
majority of the folks are doing
is they're getting a
month to month subscription
where they're constantly being filled
with the primitive camping
in Bushcraft Blend Coffee.
And like I said, I wanna say thanks to
the thousands of you
that are actually buying this stuff
and I really do appreciate it.
And like I said a while
ago, if you want some,
put your order in now or
you're gonna be missed out.
These are perfect for gifts.
This little bag is eight bucks.
It is a perfect
little gift for Christmas.
And so, I mean, this is a six ounce bag
that I'm holding in my hand
and that is plenty,
plenty of coffee for a gift.
Oh, all right guys, I thank you so much
for following me
along with this adventure.
And I really appreciate all the support
that I'm getting from you guys.
And I will see you in the very next video
and in the very next podcast.
I hope you have a blessed day.
We have so much to be thankful for.
God bless you.
(upbeat music)