Weekend testing

This weekend we went to a park close to the house that has nice forest coverage.  We had gone there to get some nice green sticks to try cooking Bannock bread on over an open fire.  Our first hurdle was that the forest is full of deer ticks!  It was horrible, they covered our boots and pants.  We had used tick repellent and they were still crawling all over us.  This would be a serious issue in a GOOD situation, and one I had not put much thought into.  So far the only natural repellent I have found uses hard to find ingredients.  I will keep looking.  For now I will stock up on commercial repellent.  In no little way has this pointed out that there are lots of issues out there that you will never think of unless you go out and test ideas.

The second issue was cutting the green branches.  I had my Skeletool CX as our only cutting tool.  Other than the real danger of slicing our bodies it worked poorly at cutting down the saplings we choose.  We need a real cutting tool that is portable and slightly less dangerous to our well being.  Fortunately no one was injured by the process of cutting "walking sticks".  We choose sticks about four feet long and one inch in diameter.  They were easy to find and only took about ten to fifteen minutes to cut down with the leatherman.

We continued the walk and pointed out good places to make camps and how we would construct the shelters, always with the tick problem on our minds.  As far as game to eat we only saw a couple squirrels.  We decided to see if our skills were good enough to hunt one.  Not wanting to kill any squirrels since not one of us was willing to eat one, McDonald's was just to close, less messy, and likely more tasty.  I have never eaten a squirrel.  We set up one of our empty plastic water bottles on a log about 10 yards away and unpacked our wrist rocket style sling shots.  We used steel bearings that are sold as slingshot ammo as our projectiles, these are about the size of a 00 buck pellet.  Only my youngest son was able to even hit the bottle at that range and only after dozen of shots.  We also decided that it is unlikely that the projectile would have killed a squirrel or done it serious damage, not that we could have ever hit one.  We saw no squirrels that close to us and it was mostly luck that the bottle was hit.  Also the pellets did no perceivable damage to the bottle at point blank range and no damage to the log that we set the bottle on.  I do not think slingshot hunting would work.

Lessons learned:  Stock up on insect repellent and learn to make it, Slingshots do not work.  We plan on trying some pump pellet pistols in the future., Find and carry a small saw for cutting small trees.