Hike along as we spot natural insect repellent (American beautyberry), gather dry pine-straw tinder, collect and filter water, and choose a safe campsite away from widow-makers. Then I show exactly how to pitch a lean-to: setting a ridgeline with bank line, using a marlinspike toggle, tightening with a trucker’s hitch, and attaching the tarp with prusik loops and stakes.
In Part 2 of our Fundamental Friday series, we move from pack talk to practical fieldcraft. You’ll see how I:
Use American beautyberry as a natural bug repellent and grab elevated pine straw for dry tinder after rain.
Collect creek water, then pre-boil or filter it (quick demo with a GRAYL) for safe drinking.
Evaluate a campsite: distance between trees (12–14 ft), proximity to water, ground conditions, and scanning for widow-makers.
Rig a clean ridgeline using bank line with an overhand loop + toggle (marlinspike hitch), tighten it with a trucker’s hitch, and add three prusik loops with toggles to anchor the tarp.
Stake out a simple, stormworthy lean-to tarp and stage the area for sleeping, cooking, and lighting.
If this helped, drop a comment with your favorite knot—or the next shelter you want to see!
below is a list of gear used in this series:
Fire redundancy: Ferro rod, Bic lighter, char cloth, and even a pencil sharpener for tinder.
Cutting tools: Belt knife (Mora Garberg), backup knife, multi-tool, and folding saw.
Cooking gear: Bush pot, skillet, wood burning grill, cutting board, and seasoning containers.
Food & drink: Freeze-dried meals, tortillas, powdered milk, trail mix, and drink mixes.
(if you are interested in my new homemade freeze-dried meals email me at chris@speiroutdoors.com I will be offering:
Breakfast, (Southern) Red Beans & Rice, Chicken Stew and Shepherd's Pie)
Water systems: GRAYL filter, 6L gravity bag, and backup metal bottle for boiling.
Shelter: DD 3x3 tarp, wool blanket, hammock, and a blow-up mattress for flexibility.
Comfort & safety: First aid kit, solar lanterns, gloves, shemagh, change of clothes, and even a folding camp chair.
If you’ve ever wondered how to put together a primitive camping kit that covers every base without overpacking, this video lays out the blueprint.
All right. In order to pick this up, you wanna grab this handle right here, then pull it up on your knee, and then swing it around on your backpack like that.
And that's how you don't wear out these straps on your backpack.
Remember guys, whatever you bring in with you, make sure you take it out with you.
All right. Anytime you're walking through the woods, you want to keep an eye out for certain things, okay? Like in this instance right down here in South Mississippi, we have what's called American beauty berry. Now the leaves, if you saw me rubbing this on my arms, the leaves keep the mosquitoes and the biting flies away.
The berries are edible, and this stuff is just like a natural insect repellent, so you always wanna be able to get something off the landscape and use it naturally if you can.
All right. Right here we have some pine straw off of a dead pine branch that fell down. We're always wanting to think about starting our fire, so. It's been raining a little while. This stuff is dry. Anytime you have something up off the ground, it's gonna be drier than stuff on the ground. So you wanna go ahead and collect this.
Put it in your pocket. That's why you got cargo pockets on your pants. And you could use this to start a fire whenever you get to your camp spot.
All right.
All guess. We'll stop here and get us some water on the way to Finest Camp Spot. Now remember how I said keep your stuff on the top? That's why we can filter our water now. And what we're going to do is we're going to collect a bag full of dirty water.
It's a little bit easier to take our metal water bottle and fill it up first
and they pour it into here. 'cause we're gonna boil the water in the metal water bottle Anyway.
All right, there we go. We got a couple more to go.
Now we got us about a gallon and a half of dirty water. All we gotta do is filter this once we get to our camp and we're good to go for drinking water.
We can also use this Grayle water filter. Just take that out. Fill this cup up with some dirty water. There's a fill line right there, 24 ounces. You just set it onto the ground. Open this lid up just a little bit. There's a little arrow, and then you just squeeze that puppy down.
Now I had a little bit of clean water in here already.
Now. There we go. All that dirty water is a hundred percent ready to drink.
It tastes clear, clean it, fresh. All the nasty has been taken out of it. Now we got drinking water for the trip. All right, let's continue on.
All right. Yes, indeed. I think this is going to work. We got a tree here. And we got a tree here. Alright, so we have a tree here and a tree here. They're right off camera. They're about 12 to 14 feet apart and there's no dead trees laying around. That's can fall on us. In the middle of the night if the wind picks up, those are called widow makers.
You gotta watch out for those whenever you get to a camp spot. But it's relatively clean in here. There's plenty of firewood laying around on the ground, and that's some of the things that you wanna look for whenever you're doing a campsite. You wanna make sure that you have plenty of firewood, you got a close proximity to the water, and you don't want any widow makers uh, falling.
On you in the middle of the night. Any dead trees, anything like that. It's relatively clean. We got a lot of pine straw on the ground. Uh, we can use the pine straw to start a fire, but in this case it's wet. So, uh, remember how we collected the pine straw earlier? We're gonna use that pine straw to start our fire and we're only gonna use our little cooking stove for fire this evening.
So let's get started setting up our shelter for the evening and get our camp all set up and I'm gonna show you how we hang a ridge line and then we're gonna hang our tarp over. We're gonna do a lean two type shelter. So let's get started. Lemme show you what we're gonna do first.
So first of all, we're gonna get our bank line out, and this is what we're going to use to make our ridge line on our tarp, and I'll show you how to do that in the next step. What we have here is our bank line. This is what we're going to use to go from tree to tree. This is gonna create what's called a ridge line.
Now, for this ridge line, what we're gonna do is we're going to loop it over just like so. And then we're gonna fold it around and make it overhand loop knot. Now with that overhand loop knot, we're gonna create a toggle, and that's how we're going to affix this thing to this tree. On this side, what we're gonna do is take this string that we put this overhand loop knot in, put.
Then we're gonna wrap it around the tree like that. Then we're gonna pull the string through the loop and it's gonna make another loop inside that loop. If you've watched any of my videos before, I have a toggle. A toggle is just a stick that you're gonna stick inside there, just like that. And it's gonna keep this from coming apart and it's gonna hold it all together.
So we're gonna take that in that we made. We're gonna wrap it around the tree this way. About six foot tall or so. We're gonna pull that string through our loop and create a marline spike hitch, and we're gonna put this toggle through that loop just like that. Now we can run this string all the way to the other tree.
Now we're gonna run this all the way to this other tree, and once we get our ridge line up, then we're gonna come in and clear the vines out and everything and get it ready for our camping spot. So here we're gonna do what's called a trucker's hitch. So we're gonna pull this as tight as we can get it around this tree right here, about six foot, a little bit taller than me, right at my height.
And we're gonna come around here and do a trucker's hitch. Now, doing a trucker's hitch is not really that complicated. What we're gonna do is we're gonna put a string around this tree.
Like so, and move our string back up to six feet. Now what we're gonna do is create a loop in our string right here to where we can use that loop to pry this as tight as we can get it. Now you wanna hold the string in your hand like this. You wanna twist it up and then back through here, just like that.
Now by doing that. You just made a secure loop inside your string, and now you want to put this string inside there and then you could just tighten it down. Let me show you how to do that knot again. So you take your hand, you wanna take your hand backwards and you want to twist it around like that. Then you wanna take that loop.
Slide it through, just like that. And you're gonna create a loop right here. So now you're just gonna feed this string, the end through that loop, and you're gonna pull this dude as tight as you can get it, and then it will cause this string right here where our ridge line's gonna be to be extremely tight.
Now once you get to the point where you got it as tight as you want, you just pinch it off right here to where it won't slip. And what you're gonna do is you're gonna make two slip knots, one, two,
just like that. And it's gonna keep it from slipping. Now, whenever we're done, we're able to untie this and we're going to save our cordage so we can use for something else.
Now. Now remember how I say keep them gloves nice and handy. They always come in use. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna pull these vines down out of these trees.
Now I just pull these dudes down.
Fire tender. We can start a fire with this. And also all these sticks right here. Even though they're come, they're dried and dead. All these old vines we could use as kindling to start our fire.
We're gonna need three more pieces of string here, and we're gonna take 'em about 12 inches, about 12 inches long or so. And then we're going to cut it. We're gonna cut it with our trusty but not rusty knife. And then we're gonna do another overhand loop knot, just like that. And you've made a loop. Now what we're gonna do with these loops, they're gonna become prusik knots.
And this is what we're gonna use to secure our tarp to our ridge line. So in addition to the three loops that we have here that we're gonna use to attach our tarp to our ridge line, we're gonna need three toggles as well. So you're gonna need three more sticks that you can use as a toggle. All right? So how you're gonna make the prusik loop is you're gonna take your little loop right there and you're just gonna loop it around one, two.
Three. All right. And then you're gonna pull it tight and make sure everything's on the outside, pulls together nice and neat like that. And it's gonna resemble a little fist, a little monkey's fist right there. Just like that. Okay? Now, when you have tension going this way, it's not going nowhere. This way, it's not gonna go nowhere, but.
You could slide it up and down the ridge line, however you wanna slide it back and forth, but once you put tension on it, it's not gonna go nowhere. All right, we need to repeat that process two more times.
You, you're simply gonna take one corner of your tarp, you're going to insert that prusik loop that we just did, and then you're gonna take your toggle. And insert your toggle into your loop. Now that's not gonna go nowhere, and we can slide it wherever we wanna slide it up and down this ridge line to make it tight.
Let's do it on the other end.
Now let's hang the one in the middle. We're all gonna go the same direction,
just like that. Now we can pull it tight.
Now if you notice what happened, it tightened up here in the middle. We put this up here, and then when we tightened up this side, it got real tight. We tightened up this side. It got real tight. Now this thing is nice and tight and stretched out along the ridge line here. So now all we gotta do is just pull it back, stake it down, and we have our shelter.
Once we get it all staked off, then we're gonna clean it out. Then we're gonna lay our bed pad down, and then we're going to go ahead and put the wool blanket down. Then we'll get started collecting some firewood. But first, before we do that, we're gonna filter some water because it's starting to get thirsty.
Now, the three by three tarp comes with some included tent stakes. All we're gonna do is stake out each corner and then in the middle, and we're gonna do it in a lean to fashion, and that's what we're gonna use for the shelter. You just grab a corner of your tarp and you just pull it kind of tight.
And do the same thing in the middle and do the same thing on the end. All right, so we're going to pull our end relatively tight. And insert it into the ground, and then the middle here and insert it into the ground. There we go. Now we have created a lean to shelter, and we're gonna put our bedding down back here, and then we're gonna clean this out and then we'll be able to cook and everything up front here.
Hanging lantern on the tree. Right now, let's go ahead and filter some of that water.