A Week in the Woods: Day Two

I slept for eight and a half hours the first night, which is about as much as I've ever slept while camping. A warm sleeping bag over several layers of spruce branches and needles was just slightly worse than my mattress at home; the thin branches form a springy frame and the needles flatten under your weight into some sort of prehistoric memory foam. Even better, as you crush the mattress beneath you a pleasant spruce aroma is released.

My first task of the day was to fill up my 1 liter water bottle from the nearby stream. I had done this a couple times the day before, but I decided to record how long it took this time around. Walking to the stream took 4 minutes, then filtering took another 14. A fellow researcher had kindly lent me a hand-pumped water filter, and my system was to fill the bottle at the stream, drink as much as I felt like on the spot, then refill it to take back to camp. Factoring the 4 minute walk back, my final result for a water trip was 22 minutes. I made this trip roughly 3 or 4 times a day throughout the week.

The next big job of the day was to finish roofing my shelter. I thought I had cut a lot of spruce boughs to make my mattress, but the local defoliation required for covering the shelter was on another level. I determined to cut just 5 boughs from any one tree so as not to injure their health unnecessarily, but there was no shortage of spruce in the area so I still didn't need to walk very far. I used the saw blade on my multi-tool extensively in the collection and it is stained with spruce sap to this day.

I built the roof up in layers, starting at the bottom with one ring of boughs, then laying another ring above but overlapping, and so on to the top. Growing up in the village, I had seen people thatch huts in a similar manner, and in both cases it worked pretty well to make rainwater run off the roof instead of dripping through.

In the evening, two of my coworkers from camp came to visit my site, which was pleasant. They brought a container of fried rice and a thermos of hot chocolate as housewarming gifts; it tasted practically gourmet even though I had just been on my diet of granola, raisins, and peanut butter for one day. It was a good end to a productive day, and I lay down to sleep happily that night with spruce above me and below me.