Latest / Virginia Outdoor Adventures: Hiking, Camping, Kayaking, Local Travel and more! / Wilderness Survival Skills That Could Save Your Life When You’re Lost, Injured, or Stranded with Tim MacWelch, Advanced Survival Training (Ep 71, Part 2)

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Wilderness Survival Skills That Could Save Your Life When You’re Lost, Injured, or Stranded with Tim MacWelch, Advanced Survival Training (Ep 71, Part 2) · Virginia Outdoor Adventures: Hiking, Camping, Kayaking, Local Travel and more!

• 0:00
  Jessica Bowser: From the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia is a mecca for outdoor travel and adventure. Virginia outdoor adventures Podcast is your local guide for hiking, camping, kayaking, travel and so much more. Get the information and the inspiration to plan your own adventure right here in Virginia, I'm your host. Jessica Bowser, could your outdoor adventure turn into a survival situation? In this eye opening conversation with wilderness expert Tim mcwelch of advanced survival training, we dive into the essential skills and knowledge that could mean the difference between life and death when venturing into Virginia's beautiful but sometimes unforgiving wilderness, Tim shares critical insights about why even experienced hikers and outdoor enthusiasts can find themselves in trouble, including unexpected weather changes, injuries becoming lost, or accidents that can escalate quickly. The conversation takes a practical turn as Tim addresses listener questions about survival priorities that help you focus on what matters most in an emergency, whether you're a casual day hiker or seasoned adventurer, this conversation delivers practical wisdom that makes the outdoors safer for everyone. Let's go. This is part two of a two part episode.
• 1:25
  Jessica Bowser: Virginia Outdoor Adventures is sponsored by the Virginia association for parks, V, A, F, P champions parks across the Commonwealth. Registration for the annual conference is now live. Join us may 1 through fourth at occaneechi State Park.
• 1:42
  Jessica Bowser: This year's conference will feature a tour of Staunton river battlefield State Park, a guided paddle program at occaneechi, perfect for those working on paddle quest, and a special dark sky program at Stanton River State Park, plus special guests and speakers, workshops and panel discussions, meals and lodging provided, plus plenty of opportunities for conviviality around the campfire with like minded Park enthusiasts.
• 2:08
  Jessica Bowser: Register for the VA FP annual conference today by clicking on Virginia association for parks in the show notes of your listening app. Ben from reidville would like to know, how do I find shelter? I want to live like the kid from my side of the mountain. That's
• 2:27
  Unknown: that's such a classic.
• 2:27
  Unknown: So many people get interested in wilderness survival because of books like that and hatchet and all these other, all these other publications that they read in middle school or or some, some point in their formative years, and so, yeah. So our protagonist lived in a little hollow tree for my side of the mountain. We don't quite have the luxury of the old growth forests that you know, Virginia and the Mid Atlantic once had. There are stories of giant hollow sycamore tree on the banks of the Ohio River, which was used as a meeting place for First Nations peoples and and this, this hollow tree was so big 30 people could go inside and sit down together, oh my, be out of the weather and have a have a meeting. Or, you know, like, like, just, just get out of the rain. So there used to be some really massive trees, and they're not here anymore, but you can still sometimes find the hollow tree, the hollow log, the rock overhang. You can find natural shelters. You just want to be very aware that a shelter for you is also a shelter for wildlife, and we don't know if there's going to be a rattlesnake or a black widow nest. We don't know what's going to be up in that hollow log or tree or little cave or whatever sheltered spot you found. So you could build your own if you knew how to build a leaf hut out of sticks and leaves, and that's something that we teach on our classes, where if you knew how to put some other type of shelter together, then we don't have to rely on finding one in a good spot. Mind you, you know, you don't, you don't want to have a shelter in a bad location, but you could make it in in a preferred spot, rather than waiting to find it,
• 4:15
  Jessica Bowser: yeah, kind of like we did during the Bush craft crash course, I could see that being really warm in the elements. They
• 4:22
  Unknown: are, yeah, the coldest I ever spent a night in one of those shelters. It got down to 14 Fahrenheit, and I was just wearing, you know, a jacket and just normal clothing. And I got inside of one of those leaf shelters, and I did have a few hot stones in there, not hot enough to burn my skin or anything just hot enough to act as a radiant heater, you know, like those little hot hand packets. I made it. I didn't sleep great, but I got a few hours here and there, and that's enough to keep somebody alive.
• 4:50
  Unknown: You know, survival is not always about comfort. We have to forget that survival will not always be a comfortable thing. That we're going to do, but it keeps us alive so that we can go chase comfort later. Yes,
• 5:06
  Jessica Bowser: and I don't know why I never did hot stones before. I'm so glad you showed us that I've heard people say that you could take stones from the fire and put them in your sleeping bag. And my brain was thinking, why would I ever pick up a rock out of a fire and put it into my sleeping bag, but you showed us how to do it, and we were it was a very cold day when we did that bush craft. Course, I was freezing all day. I had to go to my car and get a blanket to wrap around myself, and then you picked up this flat stone that you had propped up at just the right angle near the fire, and put it on my seat, and I sat on it, and all of a sudden I was like a completely different person. It saved me. Yeah,
• 5:44
  Unknown: it's a game changer.
• 5:44
  Unknown: This is ancient technology that modern people have just lost touch with. But a rock can be a heat battery. It's a thermal battery, and so your natural instinct was correct. If you're imagining a rock from out of the depths of the fire, it's going to be too hot to be against your skin or against your clothing or your bedding. But if we don't have it in such a hell fire situation, if it's just propped up near the fire, just gently soaking up a small amount of heat, then it becomes a heat battery. And so we want to get that rock maybe 130 degrees, 120 degrees, just tap water hot. You can touch it, you know. And it's it's going to hold that heat for a while, especially if you wrap it up in some cloth to insulate it and hold that heat in.
• 6:32
  Unknown: Longer, the heat will escape slowly. And the longest I ever got on a hot rock in my sleeping bag was seven hours. But it stayed warm all night long, seven hours of of just very gentle heat. And so, yeah, it's, it's old tech, but it still works.
• 6:49
  Jessica Bowser: It's literally better than the hot hands that you buy, because those are eight hours. But these are bigger.
• 6:55
  Unknown: They're bigger. Yeah, they could be any size you want.
• 6:57
  Unknown: I mean, I've done hot rock mattresses before, where you actually, like, build a flat rock platform, burn a big, long fire on top of it, move the fire off, bury it with a couple of inches of soil, and then cover that with a couple inches of leaves, and that holds in the heat. And so you could actually lay on that and sleep all night long, you know, and be incredibly warm, too warm at the beginning, but then it's just right for a couple, you know, couple hours in the middle of the night. But that's a lot of work. So now we've burnt a ton of calories to have one night of warm sleep, you know. So we've got to have the calories coming in to justify the calorie expense of doing something extravagant like that. But you know, in certain situations, having a trick like that up your sleeve, you know, could really mean a could mean a lot. Let's say your friend has hypothermia.
• 7:53
  Unknown: You build them a hot rug mattress, and now they can lay on it and they can recover. So speaking
• 8:01
  Jessica Bowser: of fires, Wren from Hampton Roads would like to know, can you make a fire with minimal smoke, like if you want to hide out, one
• 8:08
  Unknown: of the biggest tricks is to use sticks that don't have bark on them. So if you've got dead sticks that you've collected off of trees, and you can peel the bark off just easily. Just just peel off bare handed or with gloves on, that's going to make less smoke. And if noise wasn't an issue, we could split little pieces of wood and make small pieces of kindling and burn those, and that will make less smoke. And so smoke is the result of incomplete combustion. If we can get our fire running more effectively, we won't have that smoke. There are different ways to do this. A Dakota fire hole is a little pit with an airflow trench, and that can burn much more efficiently than an open air fire. It's essentially a wood stove in the ground. More correctly, it's a rocket stove in the ground. So look that one up. Ran the Dakota fire hole, and then just for a fire on open ground, just burn really, really good, dry, small pieces of stuff with no bark, and you shouldn't have hardly any smoke at all.
• 9:09
  Jessica Bowser: So if you were trying to accomplish the opposite, and you wanted to be found and you wanted to create a lot of smoke, then you would what burn a lot of wet things.
• 9:18
  Jessica Bowser: Or what would be the advice there?
• 9:21
  Unknown: Yeah, that's an excellent flip side to this scenario. So if we want to gain attention, then, like you said, we're going to burn wet stuff that's going to make a lot of white smoke. We could burn stuff that is rotten. We could burn stuff that's got a lot of bark and not so flammable parts to it. And we can burn things like fat wood and pine knots, those will darken the smoke and make it more gray, because, individually, fat wood and things like that will burn with a black smoke. And so when we mix that with a white smoke, we get a gray smoke. And then, if you had some modern junk, you know, let's say your car broke down, you know, in the middle of Saskatchewan in. And you start ripping out plastic parts, like the glove box and all that other junk, if we if we throw plastic pieces or motor oil or anything like that into a fire, then we will get black smoke, and that's highly visible, especially against like an overcast sky, so when the sky is kind of white and you've got a column of black smoke that's hard to miss.
• 10:22
  Unknown: Interesting. All right, we're in the gasoline. It's going to blow up and don't roll a tire onto the fire. If it's still on the rim, that also will blow up, and don't burn brake fluid, you'll die. That's the opposite of survival. So just keep those little
• 10:36
  Jessica Bowser: things in mind, good things, good things to know. All right, Jan from southwest Virginia, would like to know about snake bite care?
• 10:44
  Unknown: Another excellent question. Sometimes it's our fear of scary animals that keeps us from going into the woods.
• 10:52
  Unknown: I've met a lot of people over the years that won't go into the woods because of bears. They've just seen too many nature shows.
• 10:58
  Unknown: They don't want to get eaten by a bear. They won't go and snakes are another one of those things that we instinctively fear. You know, this is just wired into us, because for millennia, if we step on a snake and it bites us, and, you know, we didn't have hospitals and all that stuff for most of human history, we're not going to make it, or we're going to lose a lot of tissue, or we're going to have some other horrible time. So the natural fear of predators, snakes, spiders, even bees, the natural fear of these animals is valid.
• 11:30
  Unknown: Most people that are going to suffer a snake bite, it's going to occur on the foot or the ankle. So this is lower part of the body. There is a smaller percentage of people who are going to have snake bites on the hands and forearms. It's a very specific demographic. Jessica, can you guess who gets bitten on the hands and forearms? People who are messing with the snakes, the people who are messing with the snakes. And there's a very, very like, laser focused demographic for that,
• 12:02
  Jessica Bowser: I'm not going to say it. I'll let you say it.
• 12:03
  Jessica Bowser: Yeah, I'll say it. I don't care.
• 12:03
  Jessica Bowser: I was one,
• 12:06
  Unknown: so I was a male between 18 and 25 at a certain point in my life. And yeah, we would, you know, handle serpents and do other dumb things. We sometimes are our own worst enemies. And so at no point should you try to pull a fever when and pick up a deadly serpent and play with that or or do anything with it.
• 12:26
  Unknown: And you certainly don't want to scoop it up and put it in a box or a bag after it bites you and try to take it to the ER. That's the fastest way to shut down an ER is when you show up with a snake bite, and then you've got a snake in a Rubbermaid bin, and you drop it and it gets loose in the emergency room. That's happened. That's a thing. So, yeah, again, like the search and rescue, let's help the people who are trying to help us and and we'll just go in with a description of the serpent and the two bite marks, you know, in hopefully, the footer or ankle, you know, in the event that we get bitten by snake. But yeah, this, this is a great question from Jan. So snakebite care is has so much pop culture lore surrounding it, and most of it is just not good medical practice. So the old westerns that show us cutting and sucking on a wound, no, no, that is a do not do. There's a lot of reasons why we do not want to do that, and so we don't even have, we don't have an hour to go into all the reasons. That's a terrible idea. So just don't the venom extractor products don't pull out much either. And so that also is ineffective. And so the best thing we can do for the event of a snake bite is to put a dressing on that wound. Slowly make our way to definitive medical care. We're going to need to go hit at least an urgent care center. This is going to be above and beyond the CVS Minute Clinic. We're going to have to hit an urgent care center or a full on hospital. So if we were bitten by a rattlesnake, a Copperhead or a water moccasin, they're going to give us the same antivenin. And these snakes are closely related their kin, and so that one single medical intervention is going to is going to be able to save us, and we may not die from a snake bite. You know, if we did not have access to medical care, we're going to have a tremendous amount of pain, a lot of different symptoms. It's not going to be fun. We may have a hole eventually rot in our tissue where this where the bite occurred, that could get infected, and then we're going to die of sepsis later on. But most of your pit viper bites, you know, are not that dangerous. About 7000 people get bitten in the United States every year from these types of snakes, and the number of deaths from that are usually under a dozen. You know, it may be only five deaths a year. Now this is with access to modern medical care, and so if we remove that from the equation, then. Course we would see the fatalities go up, but yeah, we just want to obviously not step on the snake in the first place. The more vigilant you are, the more likely you are to spot these camouflaged snakes because a cotton mouth, you know, the rattlesnake, the copperhead, they all have different patterns in their scales that make them camouflaged, and I almost stepped on a Copperhead one time. It was just coiled up in the leaves. And I don't know how I spotted it before I stepped on it, but I did, and I did not step on it. And most of the time, these things are not out to get you. You know, they're just doing their thing, and we accidentally step on them.
• 15:40
  Unknown: They're hurt, they're scared.
• 15:40
  Unknown: They lash out and they bite you.
• 15:44
  Unknown: And maybe up to a third of the bites from adult venomous snakes are dry bites. A dry bite doesn't deliver much or any venom. Adult snakes can regulate their venom output, and so they may just be trying to warn you, scare you off, you know, get rid of you. And they need to save that venom, because that's part of their digestion for, you know, biting the mice and all the other little things, so they don't want to waste it on something too big to eat, like a human. You might not even have any Venom if you get bitten, but vigilance is just the the first step we don't want to, you know, be reaching into an old wood pile and startle a venomous snake, and we want to watch where we put our feet when we're hiking. Yeah.
• 16:29
  Jessica Bowser: And for anybody who wants to know more just about snakes, I have an entire podcast episode about that, and that's episode 62 Virginia's venomous and non venomous snakes. So for someone who's looking for more information, that's a good resource, and I'll drop that link in the show notes with campgrounds open and warmer temperatures on the horizon, Virginia State Parks is launching its spring interpreter programs offering visitors of all ages the opportunity To explore the natural and cultural wonders of Virginia, the diverse programming is designed to inspire curiosity, foster environmental stewardship and provide enriching outdoor experiences for families, students and nature enthusiasts alike. Highlights include flora and fauna programs learn about Virginia's native species through up close encounters and expert talks, historical and cultural tours, step back in time with interpretive walks and hands on history lessons, outdoor skills workshops, gain valuable knowledge on topics like archery, camping, fishing, kayaking, backpacking and more, Junior Ranger adventures, fun and educational activities designed to engage young explorers, citizen science initiatives, participate in real world research projects that contribute to conservation efforts, self guided programs, explore at your own pace with geocaching, discovery, backpacks, photo scavenger hunts, stargazing, tree identification, birding and more. Join us at Virginia State Parks for exciting, family friendly events that invite you to explore the outdoors. For a full schedule of events, including park locations and program details, click on Virginia State Parks spring interpretive programs in your show notes. Tim, we're getting pretty close to the end here.
• 18:24
  Jessica Bowser: Glenn sent me a message on Facebook and wants to know what is the most dangerous myth or misconception about wilderness survival, another
• 18:33
  Unknown: excellent question. So there are plenty of myths. No, you cannot chop the top off of a cactus and just drink out of it like a water barrel. You know, no, the moss does not grow on the north side of the tree. You should buy a compass. So there's a lot out there. But I would say, from my experience, one of the biggest myths is that outdoor enthusiasts don't need survival skills. That's just not true. If you go out enough, you will need these skills sooner or later. You know, we're playing Russian roulette here. We're rolling the dice, and one of these days is going to come up and we're going to lose. And so if you never go into the woods, you know, maybe you don't need wilderness survival, but if you ever, ever plan on enjoying the outdoors, then then you should get some and some stuff to protect you. Think of it as an insurance policy. Survival skills are like a life insurance policy, but the good news is to keep you alive, like that's the benefit. You don't have to die to activate the policy, like if, if survival is your life insurance policy and you use it and it works. Then, then you stay alive.
• 19:43
  Jessica Bowser: Last question comes from Scott from shell rock, Iowa, not Virginia. And Scott says, I listen to a lot of outdoor podcasts, and everyone talks about the 10 essentials, but never hear anyone explaining how to use them. So the
• 19:59
  Unknown: 10 essentials were.
• 19:59
  Unknown: Developed in the 1930s by a mountaineering club, and back in the day, these were 10 separate items that every mountaineer should have, and some of it really isn't that practical for woodland, wilderness survival.
• 20:13
  Unknown: Some of the original items were things like sunglasses and other things that you would need at high elevation on the snow. So what people have done over the past couple of decades is to rewire the 10 essentials into systems. These are groups of supplies. And so the updated list is a navigation system that's a map and compass. And so by learning how to use map and compass, we don't get lost, we don't activate search and rescue in our local area. So that's a good thing. So learning how to navigate and bringing a map and compass is the first one. Sun Protection is still, is still on the list, and that could be sunscreen, sunglasses, you know, like long sleeve clothing for whatever terrain you're dealing with. But that's not as relevant for us in Woodland environments, insulation is a big deal. Like I would have put that as number one insulation. So this is clothing. It could be stuff like a space blanket. It's whatever we can use to keep hypothermia from sending us into shock. And so that's another facet. Other systems are illumination. That's like a headlamp or flashlight first aid supplies, a fire making system. So that's Bic lighters and maybe some Vaseline cotton balls, a repair kit that could be duct tape, a multi tool, a Swiss army knife, zip ties, super glue, you know, whatever you're comfortable with using for repairs. Nutrition is a system, and so that could just be a bunch of, you know, Snickers bars, or the survival food bars that I mentioned with a five year shelf life or or whatever you like. You know, whatever you're able to use, a hydration system is number nine.
• 21:48
  Unknown: That could be the disinfection tablets and a bottle go with a full bottle. Then once you drink it, then you can start finding water and using the tablets to disinfect it. And then the final thing could be an emergency shelter, so that could be above and beyond a space blanket. This could be something like a little biv sack, especially a reflective one. And so each of these 10 systems is pretty self explanatory, like, like, you know, we could figure it out, but it does help to research all the off label uses and all the little the little quirks and little special things with these different systems and items,
• 22:29
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• 23:12
  Jessica Bowser: These were all really excellent questions, and I wanted to thank everybody who submitted a question. We're going to wrap things up here. But before you go, Tim, I've got a couple of other points I want to hit.
• 23:25
  Jessica Bowser: First of all, can you tell us about some of your upcoming courses? Yeah,
• 23:29
  Unknown: absolutely. So if you didn't get enough foraging in the last episode, I have several spring edible plant classes coming up. And if you can't make those, I have them year round, there are plenty of opportunities for classes coming up, wilderness survival, heritage skills. I've got gardening classes, blacksmithing classes, bow making classes. So if it's something outdoorsy, I probably have it to offer.
• 23:54
  Unknown: You've got
• 23:55
  Jessica Bowser: courses that I didn't even know could be a course, like if I when I was scrolling through your website to see what you had coming up. I was like, I didn't even know this was a thing. It's so fascinating. All the different things that you offer and all the opportunities to learn something new. I think somebody could take classes with you all year round and just be constantly learning. Yeah,
• 24:15
  Unknown: I do have some people.
• 24:15
  Unknown: I call them my repeat offenders, and they come see me, you know, a couple times a year. For many years, I've had people with me for 20 years now, and so like, I try to come up with a new class every couple years. It's been a wonderful experience. So share
• 24:30
  Jessica Bowser: this stuff and your upcoming foraging classes.
• 24:33
  Jessica Bowser: Are any of those at Sky Meadows State Park?
• 24:35
  Unknown: Yeah, we've actually got several sky Meadows classes on the books for this year.
• 24:39
  Unknown: There are three foraging classes at Sky meadows, and there will be a spring one, a summer one and a fall one. And then, of course, most of the classes are at our private our private camp in southern Fauci County, okay,
• 24:54
  Jessica Bowser: yeah, I really enjoyed that foraging class.
• 24:57
  Jessica Bowser: Also, I learned that not everything is some. Thing you should be putting in your mouth, and so you have to be really mindful.
• 25:04
  Unknown: Yeah, not every plant is our friend. Okay,
• 25:06
  Jessica Bowser: so where can people register if they want to sign up for one of your courses?
• 25:08
  Jessica Bowser: Folks can
• 25:11
  Unknown: find out more about the classes at Advanced survival training.com. So that's advanced with a D advanced survival training.com. Perfect.
• 25:21
  Jessica Bowser: I'll drop a link to that in the show notes so that people don't have to search for it. It will be right there.
• 25:28
  Jessica Bowser: Ready to increase your outdoor skill set. As a listener of this podcast, you can join Tim for his outdoor courses using an exclusive discount code choose from primitive cooking, foraging for edible plants, tree identification, herbal medicine, sustainable gardening, off grid cooking, blacksmithing, AX craft, rope craft and so much more. Click on Advanced survival training in your show notes and use the discount code vao a 15 for 15% off any of Tim's extensive course offerings.
• 26:01
  Jessica Bowser: Register soon. Offer expires on July 1. We're going to do a really fun giveaway. I don't know how many folks know this.
• 26:11
  Jessica Bowser: Tim, you are a New York Times best selling author too.
• 26:14
  Unknown: I know isn't that crazy? It still kind of blows me away. So yeah, I've written over a dozen books, and we have three of those become New York Times best sellers.
• 26:23
  Jessica Bowser: That's so fantastic. And you have a really awesome selection of books to choose from. And we're going to be giving away two of those. So the first one is the ultimate guide to survival shelters, how to build temporary refuge in any environment. Started to flip through this book a little bit, and you've got some really great photos in here. It's very easy to follow along and very easy to read. So I think this is a wonderful resource that people will enjoy. And then the other book is how to survive anything from animal attacks to the end of the world and everything in between. This book just screams your name all over it, Tim, even if it didn't have your name as the author.
• 27:01
  Unknown: Yeah, that's that's very much my style. That one was one of our New York Times bestsellers.
• 27:06
  Jessica Bowser: Oh, my God, and I can see why. So this book is going to be hard for me to ship to whoever wins it, because I want to keep it for myself. I'm gonna have to order one. It is so cool, like the illustrations, just the ease of being able to understand what you're what you're reading here. It's like the different scenarios are things that I never would have thought of either. Like, what if your plane crashes and, like, all these crazy things. It's so interesting. I just started to flip through and I found myself, like, actually sitting down reading it, reading like, reading it, reading it. So I might have to get a copy of my own, but that's a really fun one too. Well, I'm glad
• 27:41
  Unknown: you enjoyed it. Yeah, yeah, you go ahead and read the whole thing, you know, spill coffee on it and just whatever.
• 27:46
  Unknown: And then we'll send that one out as a special, like a special edition. We're gonna
• 27:52
  Jessica Bowser: give away these two books, and I think we're gonna have a couple of different ways to enter the giveaway, if listeners would like to enter the giveaway right now and not wait for it to come out on social media, which I think we're going to put it up on the socials too. Go ahead and go to your show notes and click on Send Jessica a text message and let me know what your biggest takeaway was from this episode.
• 28:15
  Jessica Bowser: I know Tim you and I would both love to hear feedback from folks how they enjoyed this, what they learned, how they plan to actually use what they learned?
• 28:22
  Jessica Bowser: I think all of that would be fantastic. And then on the socials, we'll probably have some more opportunities to share the podcast episode and get some additional entries into the giveaway.
• 28:33
  Unknown: That's exciting. I really appreciate you creating this opportunity to share these books with people.
• 28:39
  Jessica Bowser: Yes, it's going to be excellent. Whoever wins is going to be lucky. All right, so Tim, let's wrap it up. How can listeners connect with you?
• 28:44
  Jessica Bowser: Folks
• 28:46
  Unknown: can email me? If you jump on the website for my classes, advanced survival training.com, you'll find my email. And so if anybody has any questions or wants to find out more about the opportunities that I offer, which include kids classes, a lot of people don't know that I run kids classes.
• 29:02
  Unknown: I'm just a big kid myself, and that's actually where I started.
• 29:05
  Unknown: I started running kids classes 30 years ago this coming September, so we have an anniversary coming up, but I will occasionally check in on Instagram, and that handle is advanced survival training on Instagram, perfect.
• 29:19
  Jessica Bowser: Okay, and I asked you this question when we did the episode about foraging for wild edible plants. I'm curious if it's changed at all.
• 29:25
  Jessica Bowser: But what is one piece of gear you can't live without? I
• 29:31
  Unknown: am very partial to my knives. I said the plural word.
• 29:35
  Unknown: I have a lot of different knives. I just keep going back to just a really basic like Scandinavian wood carving knife, those really simple Mora knives from more Sweden. They're not expensive. They have a great edge. And I do so much with those. I make so many things, and I just use them all the time. Yeah, there are other things that are, you know, indispensable as well, your phone, your smartphone. You.
• 29:59
  Unknown: Know that our first question today, Kevin said he's got a phone in a car. Why does he need survival like if you've got a phone and it's got signal, you don't have to go into survival mode. You call for help, a phone, a lighter, a space blanket, a knife, a bottle of water, just those simple things that'll get you really far in the game. Scott
• 30:21
  Jessica Bowser: from Iowa, when he sent in a question, he also mentioned that he had bought that Mora knife that you recommended in the foraging episode, and he loves it, so he was really grateful that for that recommendation. Good,
• 30:34
  Unknown: good. Yeah. I mean, I'm not a brand ambassador. You know, they don't, they don't send me a dime for dropping their name. It's just, it's just a great piece of equipment, and so I'm happy to turn people onto it, perfect.
• 30:47
  Jessica Bowser: Yeah. And during the, during the Bucha, course, you showed us a bunch of different knives, including the gas station knives and everything in between. And what the difference is, because, honestly, how many people know?
• 30:58
  Jessica Bowser: I really, unless you're using knives all the time, you wouldn't know why buying the gas station knife is a bad idea.
• 31:05
  Unknown: You get what you pay for sometimes, and then sometimes you get a really good deal. And so, yeah, it's important to understand that, you know, maybe that single knife that costs $100 is not as good as you know that that that other really practical knife that costs $20 you could have five really good more knives, you know, for, you know, the cost of some of these, you know, single, you know, kind of high end Bushcraft knives. And maybe they don't even perform as well.
• 31:34
  Jessica Bowser: Good point, and you showed us how to sharpen them and everything. So good skills, good information to have. Thank you so much, Tim for being a guest on Virginia outdoor adventures. I certainly hope to see you at an upcoming course.
• 31:47
  Unknown: I would love that.
• 31:47
  Unknown: Jessica, yes, thank you so much for having me on as a guest again, and hopefully your listeners will have had fun and have more questions and want me to come back and have another episode.
• 31:58
  Jessica Bowser: That would be great, because you have so much knowledge, I'm sure that we could do yet another one of these episodes on a completely different topic. Yep, you name it all right. Tim adventure on Virginia. Outdoor Adventures is inspired by and supported by listeners like you, which is why your messages and feedback means so much to me. You can text me directly by clicking on Send Jessica a text message in your show notes. I answer questions, respond to comments and share your feedback on the show. Never miss a new episode. Sign up for my email newsletter and receive my listener resource guide with the top podcast episodes a Virginia outdoor bucket list and exclusive brand discounts for my listeners. Click on newsletter.
• 32:46
  Jessica Bowser: Sign up in your show notes or visit Virginia outdoor adventures.com thanks for listening until next time.
• 32:54
  Jessica Bowser: Adventure on you.