Whether you’re in an emergency survival situation or a planned one, having a shelter is more important than many people fully understand. A shelter can be anything from an abandoned house or building down to a lean-to built with tree branches. For the sake of this series we’re talking about the shelters you build yourself.
The first step in building a shelter is finding a proper site for the shelter. You don’t want to build too close to any dangerous environmental conditions and you definitely don’t want your shelter to stand out. Check out the steps below for choosing the best site for your shelter and check back for the second part of this series where we’ll talk about the different types of shelters.
Choosing the Right Shelter Site
Before you can start building a shelter you need to decide where your shelter will live. There’s an acronym you can use when choosing a great shelter site: BLISS. This stands for:
B – Blend in with the surroundings
L – Low silhouette
I – Irregular Shape
S – Small
S – Secluded location
Past these basics, your shelter site needs depend on a variety of requirements, but the first two you should ask yourself are:
Material Selection – You don’t want to waste energy carrying the materials for the shelter any real distance. They should all be close at hand.
Size – You need enough room to build a shelter large enough for you to lie down comfortably in.
Once these two basic needs are met, you should focus on both tactical and safety needs of your shelter site.
Concealment – While the main use of a shelter is to, well, shelter you from the elements, the secondary use is to conceal your position. You need to scout the area around your proposed shelter site to make sure it’s not near anyone that could be considered an “enemy.”
Escape – While the view on a cliff might be spectacular, this would leave you very few methods of escape if you had to leave in a hurry. Make sure wherever you choose to build your shelter, there are more than one way to escape it.
Signaling – If you’re in a survival situation where you’re waiting for rescue, you should make sure you have a clear line of sight to the sky or major roads so you can signal for help. If you’re in a WROL situation however, signaling is the least of your concerns.
Protection – The elements and enemies aren’t the only thing you need to protect against, as the environment around you can easily cause you harm, too. Make sure your shelter site can be protected against wild animals, including the ability to have a smokeless fire and tie your food in a nearby tree. Above animal threats however, you need to make sure there aren’t any natural threats like dead trees or large rocks that can come down and hurt your shelter or worse yet, you.
The Itchy and Scratchy Show – Examine the area surrounding your shelter site, looking for poisonous plants and any sources of insect life. You don’t want to find out in the middle of the night that the tree you built your shelter against is the home to an ant colony, or that you’ve built on a field of poison ivy.
Remember that what looks like good, solid ground now could be come unstable and dangerous without warning. The last important series of requirements should get you looking at the physical world around your shelter site.
Flooding – What might seem like a great spot upon building your shelter can easily become a flooded mess. Check around your site for evidence of recent flooding and for potential sources for flooding. Remember, just because the water you see is at a safe level now, that doesn’t mean it will be at a safe level in 6 or 8 hours from now.
Like a Rock – Using a rocky outcropping as a roof for your shelter can be great, but you should look around the base of these structures for signs of recent collapse or instability. Try to get to the top of such structures and look for cracks, slippage, and other signs of an unstable rock formation.
Beyond these key deciding factors, you need to be aware of the season and what that brings for the area you’re in. This includes wind direction and speed and how warm or cold it is.
In cold months you should have little worry of insect activity so sheltering near bodies of water is not an issue, but in the warmer months this would be a big no-no. Wind can be a killer in freezing temperatures, but can keep insects away and cool you off in the summer.
Necessities
The last major deciding factor in choosing a proper shelter site has to do with your necessities. While water can be a source of insects and flooding, you need a clean source of water and the farther away it is, the more energy you’ll use getting to it. You want to be close enough to your traps and snares to get your food, but far enough away as to not scare the prey off.
If you’re staying in a place for an extended period of time, you need to be aware of the fuel you’re using for fires. Just like water, you want a good fuel source close enough to not carry for long, but far enough away as to not catch if a fire gets a little too big. It’s not uncommon to build camp near a large fallen tree that can be chopped or pieced apart for firewood.
Wrap-Up
There are hundreds of small tips and tricks for finding a proper shelter site, but by following these basics you can make sure you only need to build your shelter once, and that it remains safe for as long as you need it.