Wellness
Building a Shelter
Lesson time 29:19 min
Jessie shows you where and how to build an emergency shelter using a tarp and rope.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Choose Your Site • Build a Shelter • Make an Insulation Bed
Teaches Wilderness Survival
Wilderness survival expert and former Air Force SERE specialist Jessie Krebs teaches you the skills to explore nature safely and confidently.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] - So here we are. We've been working through personal protection. Clothing equipment, our first line of defense. Shelter, our second one. It's such a critical skill, so it's a really important one to know. And we want to make sure that we're doing the appropriate shelter for what we need. I could build a log cabin right now. It would take me a while. And I'd use up a lot of time, energy, materials to do that. So rather than doing that, I'm going to make something that's efficient and going to protect my needs as quickly with as least energy expenditures possible. So these are emergency shelters or we would call them immediate action shelters. And it's nice if I can build this in about 30 minutes or less. And if I have man-made materials, shelter is so important that this might be something I actually want to use that man-made material for. I'm going to have a tarp. But we could also use things like bed sheets. If you have lining in the top of a car that's kind of protecting the insulation, and the wiring, and the roof of your car from the inside, I can cut that out. I can take seats from the car and rip out the back. right, the whole trunk part that-- I can make that into a shelter. I can take rain gear, making sure it's extra big, right, so I can use it for padding with clothing. But now, if I don't want to wear that sitting in the rain and I want to work on stuff and have even just a small area I can sit in, and dry out, and do things, rigging up that rain gear like a little shelter over me. Right? Many ways in which I can conceive of a shelter. There's so many different styles and types. Keeping that in mind, if we want a particular style of shelter-- if I've got somebody else that's injured or I'm injured, I may want ease of access in and out of that shelter. I may want to put a fire out in front. And so in that concept I may want more of a lean-to design where I've got the front open. I'm going to have my fire here. I'm going to be settled in here. Right? And that can be a very open style. And it's easy to get access to that versus if I have more bad weather. I've got the wind howling, the snow is going, whatever. Then I'd like both sides to come down to the ground all the way on each side. And then there's all kinds of things in between that. Digging a snow cave or finding a tree well, which we stay out of if we're hiking, snowshoeing, skiing-- but if I can actually make steps going down into a tree well, which is where I got the treat coming down and all the snow has been sloughed to the outside-- there might be 10 feet of snow out here, but down at the base of the treat it might only be a foot deep. Right? So I've got this well of snow. So that could be wonderful if I could make some safe ways to get steps down into that and now build myself a shelter down in there. So these are quick, immediate action kind of things we can do. I can modify what's already existing very fast ...
About the Instructor
As a former Air Force SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) specialist, wilderness survival expert Jessie Krebs spent 30 years preparing people for the unexpected. Now she’s teaching you the mindset and skills to safely explore the outdoors. Learn essential survival techniques—from signaling for help to reading a map, finding water, making shelter, and more—and embark on your next adventure with confidence.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Jessie Krebs
Wilderness survival expert and former Air Force SERE specialist Jessie Krebs teaches you the skills to explore nature safely and confidently.
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