It was a rainy Thursday afternoon in early April, 2011 when disaster struck. Steve was hit with the wilderness blues. The only way to overcome this terrible disaster is to survive a night in the woods like Bear Grylls. Fortunately, Steve was prepared for a wilderness survival situation by watching Man vs. Wild religiously. Steve called up his friend Scott, and together they headed out into the woods.
The women-folk thought the men were crazy for a number of reasons. First, men wanted to see how difficult it would be to survive a night in the wild "unprepared." This meant no tent, no extra warm clothes, no food -- just the clothes and equipment that they would have if they were going on a day hike that afternoon. Second, it was raining with a 100% chance of storms that night. The men figured anybody can spend a night outdoors in good weather without proper equipment (they have done it many times) but they wanted to know what survival was like when the weather was working against them. As they headed off to the mountains the women thought to themselves 'they'll be back'.
Scott and Steve traveled for miles down a dirt road looking for the ideal place to build a shelter for the night. Many times the road was nearly blocked off by fallen debris. Just as Bear instructs, you should always take advantage of the resources at hand. The men decided to utilize the local resources to the fullest extent. Fortunately, one of the "local resources" consisted of a 4x4 truck.
(Yes that is a tree hanging off the back of the truck. It acted as the main cross member of the shelter). The men built a shelter. It took about 4-5 hours and included about four times the branches seen in the image above. It readily became apparent that the most important survival tool for building shelters is a saw. While both men had knives, it was the saw on a Leatherman that was by far the most useful and literally enabled the shelter to be about 50% bigger than it would have been otherwise. (As a result of this experience, I will always have a saw in my backpack. Either on my Leatherman or a small cable or wire saw like the one below). 
The men completed the shelter. The shelter was large enough that both the men could lay down in it comfortably and have access to the fire. The men were lucky while setting up the shelter as the weather decided to withhold the life-giving moisture. However, that only meant that it was to rain harder that night -- and all night long. It rained and rained and rained and rained and rained and snowed and snowed and rained and snowed.
Then it rained and snowed some more. Notice the "firewall" which helps reflect the heat back into the shelter. Even with about 1.5 feet of evergreen boughs, the shelter was not even close to being waterproof. However, the men were surprised at how warm the shelter stayed -- relatively (it was still cold unless the fire got to big then we were afraid of melting our clothes). At this point, the men had two choices, cheat or spend a miserable night soaking wet. But as luck would have it, one of the local resources in the truck was a large tarp. The men decided to cheat. Even with the tarp covering most of the shelter, the rain still caught on the branches and trickled down under the tarp to constantly drip on the "sleeping" men.
Needless to say, it was a wet, sleepless night but the men are anxious to do it again.
Lessons Learned:
1. Always have a saw if you want to make a shelter.
2. Always find the driest spot for building a shelter. While we built the shelter under two trees, we could have found a drier spot.
3. The fire shield was excellent at reflecting the heat into the shelter and amplifying the effects of the fire.
4. The biggest loss of heat was to the ground. While we knew this, we still decided to sleep on the ground since the evergreen boughs were thin and wouldn't have been comfortable to sleep on. We thought about building a fire where we were going to sleep, then covering it in dirt and sleeping on the warmed ground but we ran out of time. Instead, we heated rocks in the fire and cuddled up with them. It was amazing at how well the rocks work at keeping you warm (especially the side away from the fire). Next time I would rather put more effort into warming the ground and less effort on the shelter (especially if you can find a dry tree to sleep under).
5. One needs to consider the energy exerted in building the shelter. If this really was a survival situation, our dinner of sunflower seeds would not meet our energy needs.
6. I was really hoping to have time to set up some deadfall traps and trying to catch a squirrel, but again, we ran out of time. It takes a long time to build a shelter that is only mediocre!
