The finest outdoor equipment in the world is of no value if you don’t know how to use it properly. Knowledge of key outdoor survival skills and when to pull them out of the bag trumps the best gear every time. Here are 10 indispensable outdoor ...
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How to Make Moonshine: A Down-and-Dirty Guide to White Lightning
No matter how hard I try, I can never escape my redneck past. In fact, the older I get, the more I just embrace it. When you say the words “West Virginia,” three things come to mind: Marrying your sister, John Denver, and kick-ass moonshine. Let me ...
Things Worse Than Death: Why Laura Zerra Chooses a Life of Adventure
Laura Zerra is a self-proclaimed nomad, experienced hunter-gatherer, and an enthusiastic adventure traveler. She is also an expert survivalist who enjoys “finding comfort in the uncomfortable" and walking the road less traveled. Zerra is ...
Survival Garden 105: How To Plant a Garden
It’s time to plant a garden. Survivalist gardening is all about simplifying the planting process while not compromising crop production. It’s about growing kick-ass veggies while removing all the time-consuming, obsessive crap from gardening. It’s a ...
How To Eat Everything: A Guide to Edible Flowers
The landscape is edible. Sure, pick the wrong mushroom and you might take an unexpected trip — or die. Those odds are pretty low but scary for some nevertheless. A better, more risk-averse starting block for new foragers is flowers. They’re generally ...
Incredibly Dumb Moments in Survival Movies
Sometimes, characters in movies make inexplicably stupid decisions, the kind that make you scream at the screen in fury. In survival movies, when the stakes are incredibly high, dumb characters making dumb choices is even more infuriating than it ...
Naked and Not Afraid: A Profile of Laura Zerra
Laura Zerra is focused. The 35-year-old reality television star and social media influencer sits in an ice shack on a frozen river in South Dakota, her gloved hand tapping an 8-foot steel spear. A rectangle the size of a 60-inch ...
10 of the Best River Misadventure Movies Ever Made
The thing about taking a river trip is that it’s kind of a one-way affair, and once you’re committed, you have to just take the ride or hike out. Most river adventures in movies go bad when a group either accidentally navigates into unexpected rapids ...
Sporting Art: Zippo Lighters Designed with the Outdoors in Mind
Early man in Africa and Eurasia first harnessed the power of fire 2 million years ago, discovering its usefulness for not only warmth and light but also protection from predators — and the ability to cook food. The earliest cave paintings, ...
Contingency Planning: 5-Point Prep for Tech Failure
Our reliance on technology isn't going away anytime soon. We have cellphones, satellite phones, GPS communicators, and GPS beacons that relay our locations to those with a need to know. What happens when technology fails? In US Army small-unit ...
Survival Garden 104: Planting Cold Crops
Survivalist gardening is all about knowing what works ahead of time. Take planting cold crops, for example. Most people have accepted Memorial Day weekend as the start date for the planting season; however, experienced gardeners know late March to ...
Survival Garden 103: How To Prep Your Soil Before the Season Starts
If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that a global panic disrupts supply chains and creates scarcity. Many grocery stores issued buying limits on certain food items, prices skyrocketed, and store shelves thinned out. Realizations of just how dependent ...
6 Crazy Facts About the Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo
The sounds of drilling and blasting amid the big rock cliffs over the Tsavo River for the Kenya-Uganda Railroad didn’t scare off the big cats of Africa — it did just the opposite. At night when the bridge construction stopped, and the laborers ...
Survival Garden 102: Starting Seeds Indoors
Assume an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, was to hit. Would you be able to provide food for your loved ones? Do you know how to take one seed and turn it into hundreds to ensure a food supply for years to come? Harvesting seeds and starting seeds ...
Know Every Plant: A Cool and Useful Flora Identification Smartphone App
Sometimes the Instagram ads really nail you. No, I’m not talking about the cheap Made-in-China adult onesie it tried to sell me or the arthritis pain gel that got Paula Abdul dancing again. (How old do you think I am, IG?) But in my case, the ’Borg ...
Survival Garden 101: Why You Need To Plan Before Planting
Free Range American celebrates self-reliance and self-sufficiency, and a survival garden is one essential part of that lifestyle. This growing season, we’re rolling out step-by-step directions taking you through the planting process while removing ...
The critical importance of being uncomfortable
For three days I averaged only a few miserable hours of sleep a night while camped out on the prairie. I alternated time between trying to get comfortable on my thin and far-too-narrow sleeping mat, scratching dozens of fresh mosquito bites, and ...
Superfoods: How to Make Bone Broth
Endurance athletes have long known the power of salty, high-protein, high-fat bone broth for in-event energy and post-exercise recovery. Health food companies have caught on, too, with a litany of frozen broths and powder concentrates available now ...
How To Stay Safe in Bear Country
Like most wild animals, bears have an innate and healthy fear of humans. If you’ve ever hiked through the Appalachian Mountains, the Northern Rockies, or the Alaskan bush, odds are you crossed paths with wild bears but never knew it. Bear attacks are ...
5 Winter Survival Tips You Need to Know, According to the Boy Scouts
When the days grow cold and short, a lot of people use that as an excuse to stay indoors. But with a little bit of preparation and forethought, you can hike and backpack all through the winter without an issue. The Boy Scouts of America keep a ...
6 Ways to Beat Cabin Fever This Winter
This can be a hard time of year. The holidays are over, and we’re ready for spring — but it’s still winter. For many people that means not leaving the house, or the couch, until the middle of March. But let's face it, there are only so many shows you ...
Mountaineering Hacks: Popping Viagra and Teetotaling on Top of the World
High-altitude mountaineering is a miserable endeavor. In the rarefied air of the world’s highest peaks, there’s simply not enough oxygen for the body to function normally. At great height, however, our genes kickstart a whole host of corporeal ...
Survival Knife: Understanding Blades
There is no such thing as a survival knife. Knives have been called that and have been marketed that way — as some kind of magical tool that will save your ass in some unlikely situation. But that idea is inherently flawed. Sure, some ...
6 Reasons America’s First Daredevil Is a Dude Worth Remembering
Long before Evel Knievel, Travis Pastrana, or Smagical, Sam Patch was launching off Niagara Falls for money, wowing crowds, and, notably, not dying in the process. America’s first daredevil was the original extreme sports badass — and here are six ...
Hellespont: I Swam from Europe to Asia and Earned My Survival
I stopped swimming to poke my head above the waves and figure out where I was. While treading water, I met a chilling sight — nothing. Through the spray of the 30-knot winds coming off the water, I could barely make out a cell phone tower on the ...
The Real Hugh Glass Versus What We Saw in ‘The Revenant’
When The Revenant came out in 2015, it made a big splash for a few reasons. The film’s star Leonardo DiCaprio earned a best actor Oscar for his depiction of a legendary mountain man: the real Hugh Glass. The bear-attack scene made headlines, too. But ...
A Conversation with ‘Professional Caveman’ Donny Dust
This story originally ran on Oct. 15, 2020 on The Ultimate Predator. Even the most experienced, seasoned hunters get a chill when imagining themselves stripped of their gear, alone in the wilderness. It’s a pretty extraordinary thing, then, to ...
The 10 Best Holiday Adventure Movies We All Need to Learn From
There’s just something about holiday movies. They’re like holiday music. After about 10 minutes, you’ve had enough for the whole year already and you have a weird urge to shove that candy cane you’ve licked into a sharp point right into your ear. ...
Wilderness Movies: 10 of the Best Ever Made
The wilderness can be one of man’s greatest allies or his biggest enemy. It can be a refuge for those seeking a greater purpose in life or a hellacious landscape that proves to be unconquerable for those unprepared for the rigors of the great beyond. ...
10 of the Best Adventure Movies Ever Made
Good adventure movies have a few necessary ingredients. You need a protagonist, or a group of them. There also has to be a mission — a goal, a reason for setting out. Then there’s the journey. It can be a literal journey — into space, up a river, or ...
