Pathfinder Pacific NW Advanced Survival Class – The 5 Cs

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As I am sometimes in the backcountry alone I thought it would be good to get some training to bolster my wilderness skills in case I find myself injured or lost and need to camp out unexpectedly. As it were, I found a survival class being taught by Dave Canterbury - one of the two stars of the show “Dual Survival“. I didn’t know who he was before I found this course. But, I did watch some of his excellent Youtube videos to get acquainted. What I found was a great presentation style and simple straightforward way of managing things in the woods. I liked it. So I called the phone number to ask some questions. It went kind of like this:

Dave: “This is Dave.”

Me: “Hi. I’m calling about the Advanced Survival Class in the Pacific NW. Can you tell me about it?”

Dave: “Sure brother. It’s going to be four days and we will cover my Pathfinder system for survival.”

Me: “Sounds great. So you cover fire, shelter, water and food procurement?”

Dave: “We’ll cover all of that.”

Me: “What kind of food do I need to bring?”

Dave: <Laughter> “You won’t need any food brother.” <More Laughter>

Me: “OK. So they’ll be food there?”

Dave: “Well I don’t want to say too much, but you won’t need food or your water filter.” <More laughter>

Me: “What about a tent?”

Dave: “You can bring that, but you may not need that either.” <Much more laughter>

…

Well, you get the idea. He laughed just a little too much, a little too long and a little too hard. Perfect! This was what I was looking for: A realistic survival situation for a few days to put everyone under real-world stress. I signed up.

I’m not going to get into a play by play of the thing as another student already gave a good write-up below:

Overpacked and Underprepared

However the course had several great take-aways and definitely improved my confidence to be outdoors with minimal equipment. I’ll go over the big points.

Leave the Food Behind

When the morning of the class arrived we were told that we had to unpack all of our food and could not bring it (I had already mentally prepared for this and didn’t have any food packed anyway). Then we were briefed that the course would be simulating actual survival situations of calorie and water deprivation. We would be foraging for food and boiling our own drinking water for purification among other tasks. Anyone that didn’t want to do this for the next four days was advised to bail out now. That set the mood going forward.

We were broken up into groups of two to work as teams for the entire trip for all survival tasks. Once this happened we hiked into the designated camping area about two miles which was 100 yards off a beautiful beach on the Pacific coast near a location called “Tunnel Island” on the Quinault Indian Reservation (we had Tribal permission to be there which was a special and unique privilege).

Camp was in a ring about 50 yards in diameter on sandy soil. Most of the camp was exposed with no cover. There was a fire pit and a couple primitive structures such as a wooden tripod and large A-Frame with a well-used table beneath it. We were given an hour or so to setup our camp (tents, etc.) and meet back in the center again for our first lecture on Dave’s Pathfinder wilderness survival methods. The fun begins.

It’s a Calorie Game

The above sums up the course and was said repeatedly by the instructors. A survival situation is all about conserving energy when you can and expending energy wisely to accomplish something to better your situation. Whether it’s building a shelter for weather protection, to using traps to hunt for game while you are busy doing other things, it’s all about calories. To save calories in a survival situation you need to focus on the essentials and not spin your wheels doing a bunch of things that won’t improve your status or enable a rescue. Dave’s Pathfinder methods help you focus your efforts smartly to conserve calories and stay alive. Survival is a calorie game.

The Five Cs

The Five Cs are the core of what Dave teaches in what he calls the Pathfinder System. The five Cs are (in priority):

Cutting – A solid dependable knife.

Combustion – A way to quickly and reliably start a fire in all conditions.

Cover/Clothing- A way to get out of the elements of nature and be protected. Also how to dress appropriately for where you are.

Container - A way to carry, store and boil water for purification. Also for carrying food, cooking, etc.

Cordage - A way to tie and lash together available resources for shelter, carrying, traps, etc.

Cutting

A knife does not need to be expensive but it does need to be reliable. You should always carry a knife as it is very difficult to make a good cutting tool in the field.

There are many knives and many opinions on knives. Dave prefers a simple tough fixed blade of what looks like to be in 5-6″ range (which is his own design Pathfinder Knife). He likes a larger blade because it can be used for chopping more efficiently if needed. The big thing is the blade must be of a good quality steel that is reliable. Carbon steel is also Dave’s preference because of the durability and the fact that it can strike a spark off a hard rock to start a fire if needed.

I think a lot of knife blades are just gimmicks and completely unsuited for serious work in the woods. Just like my investing advice, I encourage you to keep things simple on a knife and you’ll be a lot happier. 

With a proper knife you can process food, carve and cut wood, build shelter, make primitive tools, weapons, traps, etc. This is a key tool that you should always have on your person at all times especially in the backcountry. If carrying one knife is a good idea, carrying a spare knife is an even better idea. My personal preference is a good solid fixed blade knife and a Swiss Army Knife folder in the pocket as a backup. I will talk about the knives I brought as part of my field test and how they worked in the next part. A folding saw and hatchet/forest axe is also a consideration which will be covered.

Combustion

Dave puts the idea of being able to make a fire at the top of his list of critical skills. With a fire you can dry yourself off if needed, stay warm, cook food, purify water, signal for help, make new tools and many other uses. Even if you can’t build a proper shelter, with a fire nearby to keep warm in foul weather you can do OK.

To emphasize this point, Dave had all of the teams on the course make their first fire with primitive methods. This means no matches, lighters, fire steels, magnifying glasses, blowtorches or what-have-you. Primitive methods included anything from rubbing two sticks together to bow drills. As long as the method was primitive it was OK.

My partner and I (and the rest of the class) chose a bow drill for this task. It’s perhaps the fastest primitive way to get an ember. We fumbled with this for about three hours until we got the right combination of wood to use for the fire board and spindle. We got lots of smoke from our first attempts but the ember wouldn’t form correctly. With Dave’s help we started using the same wood for both spindle and fire board as our solution (we were trying various woods in combination and this was the problem). We ended up with cedar that we scavenged from the beach that was made into the spindle and the fire board. Once we had this combination we were able to generate an ember and turn our tinder into a nice ball of flame in less than an hour re-doing everything. Once our team did this feat, we were then allowed to use whatever means we had at your disposal for the rest of the class for fire. But the first fire had to be primitive to pass.

What was the lesson from this? Starting a fire with primitive means is a tremendous pain. It took us about three hours to do it and this was in dry conditions with 70 degree weather. Any kind of rain that day and the entire class would have found it almost impossible to do. Not only would it have been hard to generate the ember, but all the tinder around would have been soaked.

Dave’s point in this exercise was simple:

Make sure you have at least one fool-proof “sure fire.” This is the one method in your kit that you know will get you fire no matter what. Make sure you have multiple redundant ways to start a fire with you at all times. Make sure you know how to use them in all weather conditions. Make sure you also have a way to start the “next fire.” This is the fire method you take with when you break camp and move to a new location so you don’t have to rely on primitive means to start a fire again.

Without a fire in an emergency situation you significantly lower your chances of survival (especially if the weather is cold). Remember, it’s a calorie game and if you are cold you are burning many calories to keep your body temperature up. If your core temperature drops too much then hyperthermia will set in and it is game over. This can happen even in conditions that someone would consider mild by most standards. A 50 degree day where you find yourself soaking wet for instance could quickly become life threatening if you don’t have an ability to dry off and get warm.

Cover and Clothing

Cover is shelter. Whether it’s shelter from the rain, snow or sun it’s a way to get out of the elements. For the first night of the course we could use our tents. But the second day we spent the later part of the afternoon making an improvised shelter. This is the shelter we would use that night. Did I mention that the forecast was for rain?

For this task my partner and I decided that we wanted to keep things simple and use as little energy as possible to make the shelter (It’s a calorie game, remember?). We also wanted a shelter that would be 100% dry because we expected rain. So we took a USGI poncho and converted it into a low-slung lean-to next to a very large log which worked as a wind break.

In this photo you can see how we used the log facing the ocean to brace the upper part of the roof. This would serve as a wind break if a storm rolled in off the ocean. The low-slung nature of the shelter would ensure that it would avoid wind damage. The angle of the shelter was made so that a container could be put on one side of it and the roof would roll water off to collect for drinking. One corner of the shelter could be untied and put up higher so sitting room could be made for daytime use.

Overall it took us about two hours to build the shelter. We could have finished it faster but weren’t in a rush. This process included scrounging for pieces of wood on the beach that would not need to be cut (remember it’s a calorie game and we didn’t want to burn energy sawing and cutting). It also included the niceties like a fire pit, water collection feature, some bough overhang for the foot end for extra weather protection, etc. This shelter, as simple as it is, stayed dry the entire weekend even under a constant overnight rain and intermittent showers.

Clothing is going to be environment specific. Cotton, which normally is a horrible fabric to wear in cold environments because it absorbs and holds moisture, can be perfectly fine in a hot environment where the extra cooling it provides is a benefit. Synthetics are lightweight and tend to dry quickly and work in a variety of applications and is what I normally wear. Wool can maintain warmth even when wet which is a huge plus in some circumstances, but it also gets very heavy and takes forever to dry. I mainly use merino wool underwear as a base layer and synthetic on the outer layers.

For the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State you must understand that it is wet, and stays wet, for days or even weeks at a time. It is in fact the wettest part of the continental US averaging around 100 inches of rain a year. In this part of the country you want clothes that are warm when wet because you may not be able to dry out your clothes. Further, the persistent misty rain tends to get everything soaked eventually no matter how careful you are.

I will discuss this topic as well in the next part because I have specific opinions about clothing for this type of weather. These opinions differ from what clothing marketers (usually showing beautiful people rappelling down frozen waterfalls while drinking lattes) advertise.

Container

A container is another simple item but is vital. The container allows you in survival situation to carry water, purify water from unknown sources, cook, gather food and many other tasks. To do these things the container should be made of metal and should be able to be placed directly in a fire. Dave likes the canteens from Guyot Designs with the straight sides (not the taper). This canteen design has a wide mouth so you can pack it with snow to melt if needed and also use as a container to eat out of and boiling water for purification needs.

Suppose you don’t have a container? Well if you look around for garbage that is ubiquitous you can find containers all over (that’s what we did for some of ours). Barring this, you must make a container. This was the next task we had in the course after building a fire. The task was to make a wooden bowl by burning that could hold 16 oz. of water and would allow the water to be boiled.

For this task I found a nice big wood knot drift log on the beach that had a natural bowl shape to it already. I patiently took coals from the fire and placed them in the center and gradually worked the embers out to the edges of what I wanted the bowl to be. This process was sped up by using a piece of garden hose we scrounged to blow on the embers and spread the burning out in the right direction without putting a hole in the bowl. The entire process took many hours of careful work because a mistake could ruin the entire bowl quickly.

So how do you boil water in a wooden bowl without putting it in a fire? Simple. You put some rocks around your fire and heat up the rocks. Next, put the water in your bowl and scoop the rocks out with some makeshift wooden tongs and drop them in. After putting in a few hot rocks the water will reach boiling temps. Completing this task gave us our next key skill after fire needed to survive. That is the ability to acquire and purify questionable water.

Cordage

Cordage is critical for a wilderness survival situation. Even for our bow drill above, we used cordage to power the entire thing. We then used cordage to build our shelter, fashion improvised weapons, make traps, etc. Cordage can be used to repair clothing, suture wounds, build ways to haul supplies and other applications. While it is typically recommended to use Parachute Cord, Dave actually prefers cat fishing “bank line” which is a tar coated line used for catfish fishing from the shore. The line can be bought on spools and is made of three twisted strands coated in a tar-like material that gives it a tacky feel. The coating makes knots stay tied tighter and works well for snare loops and lashing as the texture of the string really wants to bind to itself compared to Parachute Cord. If you untwist it you get 3X the amount of cordage with a breaking strength of about 100lb. per strand. This is more than enough for most camp tasks.

Making cordage out in the bush is very time consuming and prone to fail unless you have good materials around. For this course we did not attempt to make our own cordage and used what we brought or could scavenge from the beach. My partner and I both had parachute cord with us and we scavenged at least another 50 ft. of cord in the form of old fishing tackle that washed ashore. We used the scavenged cord to lash together our shelter in fact saving the parachute cord for other tasks.

Keeping it Simple

Dave’s approach to wilderness survival is very simple. With the five basics above you can do quite well in an emergency situation. Heck, you can do pretty well just camping out in general. You can cut things, stay warm, stay dry, stay hydrated and acquire food. What else do you need?

There actually are another 5 Cs you can add to your basic kit so you have 10 Cs total. These are the “luxury items” but still pretty basic. They are:

Cargo - A good pack to carry everything.

Compass - Reliable navigation tool with knowledge to use it.

Candle - Actually a LED headlamp or other reliable light source.

Cotton Cloth - A bandanna (or a couple of them) made of 100% cotton.

Combination Tool - Leatherman, Swiss Army, etc. A saw and pliers are handy for a variety of tasks in the field.

This doesn’t sound like much to carry (and it isn’t). In the next part we’ll go over some specific gear recommendations and how we used them in the course.

Read the second party of this entry here:

Pacific NW Advanced Survival Class – Lessons Learned

 

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Related posts:

1. Pathfinder Pacific NW Advanced Survival Course