A storm tested my lean to shelter on the river and proved that real experience matters more than criticism. In this episode I share lessons from that night, what makes a shelter work, and why building on the right foundation of both wood and faith makes all the difference.
The sky was heavy with rain clouds as I sat by the fire at camp, listening to the treetops groan in the wind. That sound carried me back to a night on the river when I built a simple lean to shelter from natural materials, never expecting to face a storm. A survival instructor later scoffed online, saying my shelter would never hold water. What he did not see was the storm that raged all night while I stayed warm and dry beneath the leaves.
This episode digs into what that night taught me. Real skill comes from doing, not from sitting on the sidelines criticizing. We talk about what makes a lean to work, including roof pitch, coverage, wind block, and heat reflection. You only learn these lessons in the field, not from a comment thread.
Then we turn to Matthew chapter 7 verses 24 through 25, where Jesus says the wise man builds his house on the rock. Just as I had to prepare my shelter before the rain came, our faith needs a strong foundation long before life’s storms arrive.
You will walk away with practical shelter building advice, encouragement to practice your skills for real, and a reminder that criticism will always come but the real test is whether you are ready when the rain falls.
Action of the Week:
Build a natural shelter. It can be in your backyard, at a campsite, or even as a practice exercise with a tarp. Test it with a garden hose, a bucket of water, or wait for the next storm. Learn where it leaks, patch it, and build it better next time. Then reflect on your faith. Are you preparing now, or waiting for the storm to hit?
Welcome to the Primitive Camping at Bushcraft podcast. I'm your host, Chris Speir. So here we're gonna talk about gear grit and the kind of stories you only get around a fire. It's all about learning, adapting and keeping your faith strong. So whether you're a seasoned outdoorsman or just looking to unplug and reconnect, you are in the right place.
So pull up a chair by the fire and let's get into it. Alright, welcome back to the Primitive Camp in the Bushcraft podcast. And I am right back down here at camp. What the heck? I got fire good and going. I got green tea and water, everything ready to go. The sky is turning into that heavy, fixing to look like rain.
Look, you know the gray clouds? You know what I'm talking about. The air's real damp and your shirt kind of sticks to you because of the humidity. I could just feel the rain coming. Every now and then the wind's gonna pick up. Every once in a while the wind picks up and makes the treetop scream. They talk a little bit and that's what got me thinking about tonight, the show tonight.
I record this in the evenings usually, and then airs on the, mornings. But the storm coming in got me thinking about a time that I was out on the river. And I was doing something for, I'm still, I can't really talk about it, but I was filming something for someone and I had to do it by myself and I had to demonstrate my skills and I was, I made a lean to shelter on the river.
You know, I'd set up on a spot right by the Old River. And it had this nice little area, flat area there with a little bluff going down into the water. And it had some, sycamore trees and it had some old cypress trees and stuff like that out there. It was a beautiful place. a friend of mine showed me, this place that he goes fishing out there a lot.
And, I decided I was gonna go out there and camp out in this specifically for this particular video. And I got out there and I didn't bring any kind of tarp or anything of the such, and I made a lean-to with what I had, you know, some sticks and some leaves. I just made a nice lean-to, but the winds started blowing real bad and it came, it was, I can't remember, oh, it was, coming out of the west, I guess.
So I made a lean to with a wall where it blocked the wind from blowing at me on that direction. And so the lean to kinda looked like an L and it wasn't quite an Aron Adirondack shelter, but it was just a lean to, I ain't no other ways to see it. It was nothing fancy and had an angled roof and enough coverage for me and for my gear.
I covered it real thick with leaves just made a good shelter out of it, something to block the wind, and it really blocked the wind and it got pretty cold that night. Now, this was, this was last year in November timeframe, something to that effect, something like that. And it, it wasn't anything fancy, you know, later.
I posted the video about that after I got back. I posted the video on this trip. I went out there and I made this, video of setting up your camp with nothing but your, your, you know, natural materials. And I posted this thing on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok. And a quote unquote survival instructor left a comment, boy, what's up with me in these comments lately?
But he left that, comment that said that Lean two won't shed water. If it rains, you're gonna be soaked. That's all it said. And the reason I know he is a survival instructor is because I follow his school. And this fella was very snotty about the whole thing. Like, I know more than you, you're not good enough type deal.
And well, the thing about that night that nobody saw that I didn't record 'cause I didn't bring any lights with me or anything like that, I was just recording What I had in the daylight is that it rained. It didn't just sprinkle. It rained. It rained sideways. The wind was blowing that rain in from the direction that the wind was blowing.
And it was pretty, it was pretty rough and intense there. For a while, I thought I was gonna be going home soaking wet, you know? You know, and looking back at it now, it's no big deal. But at the time, you know, the water. Beat it off of that shelter, it rain it hit it, hit the leaves and it rolled down.
And I did not get soaked. As time went by that night, the more and more it rained, I stayed dry. And, looking at the shelter itself, a lot of people would be like, dude, if it rained, you're not going to, you're, you're gonna be soaked. I listened to it storm all night long and I stayed warm on my little debris bed and I was dry as a bone.
But that comment stuck with me, not because it hurt my feelings or anything, but because it made me think people will tell you what won't work and that sometimes they're right and sometimes they're just repeating something that they heard. But the truth is you find out what works when you test it and you can't test it from your couch.
You can't test it from there. You gotta be out there in the woods and actually do it. You gotta be in the rain. You gotta be in the wind, you gotta be, listening to the river while your shelter's either keeping you dry or soaking you wet. If you're going to build a lean to out of, out of real, natural material materials, and it's gonna last for the real weather, there's gonna be a few things that's gonna make the difference.
The pitch of the roof, it's going to gotta be steep enough so water runs off fast and too flat. It's gonna pull and it's gonna drip on you all night long
Then. I had the ridge pole set to where I had a good angle all the way across, not too high. And I did it, just above, chest height, just below chest height. And then I set everything. It looked like it was either 45, like less than 45, like 30 degrees, something like that.
Angles all the way down. the wind was blocked the way I set it up in the L-shaped and blended it all together. So the wind was blocked from blowing me in the face, and then I set a fire up right in front. And that fire reflected inside that "L" and reflected back to me and kept me worn all night.
But the good thing about these type of shelters is that once you get out there in there and you start building a natural debris shelter, lean to, like this, it doesn't have to have 10 feet thick of leaves. you're gonna use what's available to you, of course you're gonna rake it up. You're gonna fill in the spots.
People will always tell you that is not good enough. That's not going to work. And
I proved it wrong that I didn't get soaking wet. I didn't have water dripping me dripping on me a whole time. And I have had built shelters before that I did. I had water dripping me in the forehead all night long. But this particular time I did not. And it, it goes to show that people are going to critique everything and anything that you do.
I've said it time and time again on this, uh, show. Get out there, practice, get out there and do practice. Try, What you're looking for when you're building a lean to out of natural material is you want it to block the wind. You want it to shed the rain, and you want it to reflect the heat to keep you warm.
That's pretty much it, and if it could do those three things, you're good to go. Matthew seven verses 24 through 25 says, therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew a beat against that house, but it did not fall because it had its foundation built upon the rock.
Now,
that night on the river, my shelter held because it was built with care before the storm came. Our faith works in the same way. You don't wait until the winds are howling or whatever, till the storm's coming, the hurricane's about to hit or whatnot before you start building it because you're gonna be building it in a rush.
You prepare now so when the storms hit that you're not scrambling.
I've done a couple of camping trips, like I mentioned while ago that I did primitive shelters. I demonstrated one in the book. And it was mainly a wind block. You know, when I did this one, it was barely enough to keep me, warm and dry. And I did that one. It was no big deal. But since then, I've practiced more.
I've done more. With it. And natural shelters can be, you, you could do debris, huts, if you're trying to stay warm, you're gonna want a lot of insulation. You want it closer to the ground for you to get into, to keep you warm. But when it rains, you want it to also show it shed the water off at an angle to where it is not getting all over you.
And you would think that if you're using a bunch of leaves. That it's going to just pool up and soak through, but it does not, it actually acts as a, Thatching or a, like a shingles or whatnot. And.
But these shelters are made in the .... I, I typically only do the lean two tight shelters in South Mississippi, and granted, all right guys, listen up. This is South Mississippi. it's not Colorado. It's not, somewhere else where it gets cooler in the winter times and falls and springs and stuff, and Mississippi is hot almost year round.
But here I can get away with a Lean-to shelter. Here I could practically get away with a tarp being the only shelter I have, and you could do that pretty much majority of places you go. A TARP is a very vol versatile tool. But today's episode's more about this, these primitive shelters. So this guy left me this comment.
And he's a survival instructor,
and I just wanted to laugh because it made me feel like these people don't know what they're talking about. They're quick to judge and slow to understand.
So when the winds come. And the rains come, and the streams rise, and the rivers rise. Is your shelter, is your house going to be able to withstand or is it just gonna wash away? Now if you take that and put it in context of life,
life is a very. Funny Thing because the rains are gonna come, the streams are going to rise, the winds are gonna blow, and all that is gonna be trials that we have to go through. It doesn't matter if you're a believer or a nonbeliever, you're still going through trials, you're still gonna have troubles.
Things are going to happen to you in your life. It's not going to be all, all. Rainbows and unicorns as they say, everything's not gonna be peachy. Peachy, peachy. Mm-hmm. Everything's not peachy all the time.
That trials and tribulations will come no matter what your faith is. No matter where you are in your faith, no matter where you are in life, there's going to be situations that come and arise. Are you gonna be ready? That's crazy to sit and think about that. Are you going to be ready for it? Are you gonna be ready for the rains?
Did you put enough leaves on your primitive shelter to keep the rain off of you? I've seen a video one time where a dude used a wool blanket. I'll see if I can try to find where this is, but I do use a wool blanket as his shelter.
now then it snowed on top of his wool blanket. what was cool about that is that the snow insulated and it kept him warm inside there the whole time with the wool land. Now, I can't tell you how waterproof it was. I don't remember, but this was, this was a long time ago. I was watching some guy, some documentary somewhere.
Where was it? I was still in the military and I was watching it. It was circulating around. it was in an email and it was like, watch this guy and. So it was in like 2011, 12, something like that. YouTube had just come out in 2010 and it was old. It was it. It was back there in the day. it's neither here nor there, but still, he would set this thing up.
And he set it up in an A-frame type, configuration somehow with an A-frame. It was like a king size blanket or something. And then he set it up and the snow came and insulated his whole shelter. He slept on the ground. I'm like, this is crazy. Yeah. No, no, thank you. If there's snow, it's cold. If it's cold, it's not South Mississippi.
If it's not South Mississippi, I don't know. I don't know. Camping in it is a different creature. I take back that, I can't say that.
we got to make sure that we put enough leaves on our shelter. We have to make sure that our shelter is at the right angle, and we just make sure that it is built in a direction to where to block the wind and allow the fire to radiate that heat or reflect that heat back to us.
If you could do that. Then you got yourself a shelter. It's easy. You just find a stick as a ridge pole, put it in between two trees tied up there. I used vines. I used vines to tie my ridge pole up about nipple high. And I'm six foot, so about four feet up, And then, I did it four feet high. tied it up with vines.
I found some, they got these, Muscadine vines out here that in the swamps where I was, they grow roots off of the main vine. They'll start growing these root chutes and those are amazing cordage. Now you can use 'em as cordage, but you can't, you can't twist them. but you can weave 'em together. And they make a pretty decent, strong rope, but whenever they dry out, they get real brittle and they'll break easily.
But for a night or two, they'll, they're, they're, they'll do it. I've never had 'em not work whenever I went out into the woods and used them for a situation like this, those roots are amazing things. So shelter's not hard. You can make a shelter any way that you want. It does not have to follow the directions of the quote unquote, survival instructors.
These guys, there is no certification. There is no national certification to make these guys quote unquote, an instructor. What it is is years of experience and them making up their own curriculums and teaching other people how to do it. I could be a survival instructor. I could be a primitive camping bushcraft instructor, and I could charge a few hundred dollars for you to come to my class and I could teach you how to camp.
That's all it is. You can get the same knowledge off of watching videos from YouTube. You can get the same knowledge off of reading a book. You do not. And then you go outside and then you practice the skills of what you just read and what you saw. These guys are not the end all, be all of everything for primitive camping, for bushcraft, for survival,
So to all you folks who doubt.
If they doubt you, sometimes they're doing you a favor. They make you think, they make you tighten things up. They make you build better. They make you practice harder, and sometimes you just smile when the rain comes, knowing that you're ready. Like I said, this guy said. That will never shed water, but the part he didn't see is it rained all night long.
He never knew. He had no clue. So this week, our action of the week, alright, we're gonna set up a shelter, if you can get in there and set up a shelter. Even if it's in your backyard, Hey, that's what you could practice in your yard. If you got a little bit of woods behind your house, go practice. Practice everything.
Get out there, start you a fire, build you a shelter. Practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. build this thing like you're expecting a storm. you could test it with a garden hose or five gallon bucket of water or one of those, what was that? That they sent me to do a video on the, the flex tail gear shower.
You put the pump down in a five gallon bucket of water and then spray it all over your shelter, or you could just wait for a rainy day, climb up underneath there and see if it is going to drip and be nasty. You can see where it holds. You can see where it Leaks. You know what you need to do for the next time.
You don't have to build it perfect. Each time you do it, you're gonna be better. You know that old saying, people say, practice makes perfect no practice. Don't make perfect practice makes you better. It does not make you perfect. So if this helped you follow along, share it with somebody who loves the great outdoors, and then tell me about it.
come on over to, I know Spotify has, comments. I know Apple has comments. Facebook, join the group on Facebook. Pick up a copy of the book, primitive Camp in the bushcraft. Join the group, primitive camp in the bushcraft on Facebook. Leave a comment, join the conversation. Get in there involved with all of us and we'll talk about it.
Let me know how your shelter is. Let me know your worst or best shelter experience. Get in there and type away, do all the, the button punching and all the thumbs up and the forwarding and the sharing and stuff like that. And just remember I read every single comment. So remember in all your ways, acknowledge him and I'll see you next time.
God bless you. Thanks for sitting around the fire with me today. If this episode gave you something to think about, if it helped you feel a little bit more prepared, or it even stirred your faith a tiny bit. Go ahead and share it with someone else who might need it as well. We don't go camping to run away from life.
We come out here to slow down and recharge. So grab another law, throw it on the fire, and remember this in all your ways, acknowledge him and he will direct your path. I'll see you next time. God bless you.