Welcoem to posts!!

River Bound
Posted 4 years ago

In the spring of this year I decided to test my metal a little bit and sink myself into my environment and at the same time learn a little about those who walked here before us. My goal was to recreate what it might have been like to spend a night on the river without any modern conveniences. A night on the river as if I was 200 years in the past. I was going to camp as primitively as I could.

Buffalo chips. I decided I was going to build a fire out of buffalo chips instead of the wood I usually used.....but where to find buffalo chips? There had been a farm nearby that had buffalo but alas they had been sold and their pasture planted in corn, OK, so let's go with the next closest thing......cow chips. A friend of mine had a fairly substantial herd of cattle and allowed me to walk the pasture for chips.....heck....he even helped me gather them. First lesson learned.......be careful about which chip you pickup.....they have to be just right. About 40 chips later and I figured I was in business.

Now for the basics.........clothes and sleeping gear. My wife made me a wonderful set of leggings and I decided on a really good green material for a breechcloth. Much like learning to wear a kilt.....you have to practice wearing a breechcloth and leggings. Several trips on the river and I had learned the basics. For my upper body I went for three layers of modern fabrics but stayed away from anything that would make me feel like I had an advantage or was cheating. Now I had to come up with my sleeping arrangements. No tent......no sleeping bag.....no sleeping mat....I settled on a small oil cloth like tarp and a wool blanket.

So now jump ahead to an hour before sunset on a Friday night. I beached my canoe on a nice sandy elbow on the river and prepared for my experimental night. I dug a depression in the sand for my fire. I had done a limited experiment and knew that starting a cow chip without some sort of kindling was pretty hard. So, I got my fire started and using my tarp as my outer shell and my blanket as the inner; I settled in for the night.

I had stacked my chips close by so that I could feed them into the fire easily. My cow chips burned but not with the intensity of wood. The smoke they created was not at all what I thought it would be...... I expected them to be well "stinky" but they didn't smoke a whole lot and they didn't smell at all bad. I woke up periodically as I seem to always do when sleeping anywhere other than at home in my bed and added a few chips from time to time. I noticed that the chips on the edge of my fire would smolder for a long time and the other interesting thing I noticed was that after having burned the chips still retained their basic shape for the most part. Also.........the ashes from the chips were very lite and dusty. 

My sleeping tarp and blanket arrangement worked fairly well. No night on the river is exactly peaceful what with beavers slapping the water and grinding their teeth because they are unhappy with your visit, raccoons quarreling about whatever they find to quarrel about and song dogs announcing their presence. I slept fairly comfortably despite the above listed inconveniences and the lack of modern equipment. I had placed my tarp on the ground, wrapped myself in my blanket on top of it and then I pulled the remainder of the tarp overtop of me. The thing I did seem to miss the most was a pillow. The tarp kept any dew off of me and my blanket was just a little too short for me but I managed to make it through the 39 degree night unscathed.

Morning came and the songbirds announced the coming of dawn. I made a cup of tea with my last two chips and then broke camp. The biggest difference.....no rolling and packing of gear. I only had to wrap my blanket in the tarp and presto......I was ready to go. I poured some water on the remains of my fire and then covered the ashes with sand.........as I pushed my canoe off into the water I started thinking about what experiment I could possibly try during my next outing.

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