
While bushcraft or wilderness survival skills aren’t a “top priority” when it comes to prepping skills and being prepared for disaster, they are force multiplying skills. Knowing how to build a fire, filter water, or forage for food will come in handy more than you think.
We have all these modern conveniences which are fantastic, but what happens when those are unavailable. Can you build a fire without a bic lighter? Or could you find food if you found yourself in a survival situation?
This is what I mean by force multiplying skills. Knowing a little bit about bushcraft gives you a fallback option when all else fails.
Not every person that is interested in wilderness survival or bushcraft is interested in preparedness, but in my opinion, all preppers should have some wilderness survival skills.
Camping and hiking require very basic wilderness skills, and something most preppers love to do. Camping is great for preppers because it teaches us how to live with just the basics.
WILDERNESS SKILLS FOR THE URBAN PREPPER
While most of us have no plans on bugging out into the forest, so why even learn these prepping skills? It’s because most of these skills can be utilized in an urban or suburban environment.
Knowing how to build a survival shelter doesn’t mean you will be chopping down your neighbors tree, but it give you an idea about how the process works. The materials may be different, but the process is the same.
resources for building shelter in a wilderness environment include sticks, branches, leaves or anything you can find laying around. In an urban environment these resources could be wire, plywood, and 2 X4’s.
The point is, you just never know when these skills might become important. As with everything with prepping, we learn as much as we can, about everything we can, because we just don’t know how things will unfold.
IMPORTANT BUSHCRAFT SKILLS
Preppers steal important aspects from anything that might be important. Whether it’s from the military, the medical field, or bushcraft. If it can help our survivability, we learn about it.
When it comes to wilderness skills, we don’t need to be Dave Canterbury or Grizzly Adams, but there are many aspects of bushcraft that are important prepping skills.
- Fire Building
- Finding & Filtering Water
- Shelter Building
- Wilderness Medicine
- Hunting, Trapping & Foraging
- Navigation
- Cordage & Knot Tying
Again, we don’t need to become expert wilderness survivalists (it wouldn’t hurt though), but these basic survival skills could be very beneficial skills to have in your prepper tool box.
SURVIVAL SHOWS
While most of the survival shows out there are a little extreme and scripted, we can learn some things from these shows. I was never a big Bear Grylls fan, but Duel Survival (with Cody Lundin & Dave Canterbury) is still one of my favorite survival shows.
A few years ago there were only a few of these shows on TV, but recently that’s changed. These days there are 20 shows about people living in Alaska, and even people running around the jungle naked.
The one survival show that has come out recently that ranks up there with Duel Survival is the show Alone on the History channel. It’s a great show about surviving with nothing but what you can carry, for as long as you can.
Even thought the “Survival show” market has become a little saturated, I still enjoy watching them, and taking in bits and pieces of knowledge when I can. Here is a list of 10 good survival shows if your looking for more.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Just like everything with preparedness, it’s not enough to have the supplies, we need to use them. As I said earlier, we don’t need to become bushcraft experts, but getting good at building fire, building shelter and water filtering can’t hurt.
The great thing about these wilderness skills is most can be practiced right in your own backyard. Camping is also a great way to hone your bushcraft skills and turn them into prepper skills.
WILDERENSS SURVIVAL SKILLS FOR PREPPERS VIDOE
Here is a video that Brian Duff (Mind4Survival) and I did talking about why some of these skills are so important, and how many preppers actually become preppers because of their interest in the outdoors.

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