I spent my early life in the Sierra Nevada mountains and grew up chasing trout around and learning to love the Sierra Nevada mountains and people.
As I progressed in life, this took more of a back seat to my corporate life and I rarely spent much time in the woods as a result. But, as the old saying goes, you can take the boy out of the mountains but you can’t take the mountains out of the boy.
In 2017, I retired after three decades in the aerospace business and was thoroughly OVER the myth that a corporate life could be rewarding for me. Perhaps others have better experiences, especially those who have the golden ticket handed to them by their familial connections or by their more base and political instincts to climb over others on the way to the “top”, but I was not one of those. Some folks do make it through hard work in Corporate life and that is the exception in my estimation and not the rule. I had my successes along the way, but by the time it was over for my career, I was more than ready to never look back. I’m not complaining. Just recognizing that these experiences in life prepared me for what I really loved and wanted to do. Hard work pays off when you run your own ship and are not beholden to interests that run counter to yours.
I did get back to outdoor travel in 2017 through 2019 and then… Covid hit. And the past two years have been ones that I cannot fondly remember. With various restrictions imposed by life and the quarantine since 2019, I virtually quit leaving my home. And that was a huge mistake. As I have mentioned in my prior article it was my own bad choice to comply with the restrictions and to live life in a virtual prison.
After a great deal of introspection, I realized the best way out of this is to get out of the damned house, be it to other spots on my ranch or to travel out and practice what makes me happy. So, I decided to take my own advice and BE FREE and to BE HAPPY.
Enter Survival Lab
This is still a concept that is evolving but I love the outdoors and also have my background in chasing the unusual and unknown, ranging from ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot and more. I also love Bushcraft as well. Couple that with my radio voice and love of doing video and it’s a fun recipe.
I live on a 6 acre ranch and to get this ball rolling, I am setting up a “Survival Lab”, a creative area where I can do bushcraft videos, talks outside for my media channels and spend the night in custom shelters and testing ideas and products. I’ll also talk about the Unknown, be it UFOs, Bigfoot and Ghosts and mix and match everything as I see fit. It’ll be a lot of fun and I’ll be speaking freely about the things I’ve experienced, ideas and my opinions on things. If things look good with me doing live video from the field, I will do so. It all depends on my ability to host a feed from the field and on if there remains infrastructure to do so with everything going on right now.
December 2021 – Starting up the lab
I recently purchased a hot tent on sale at Amazon on Cybermonday. It is the “OneTigris TEGIMEN Hammock Hot Tent“and is a good budget entry to the hot tent arena. The regular price is about $210 U.S. but it did get down to the $165 or so range during that sale. So, I pulled the trigger and it is on the way as of this writing.
I do plan to review it at some point, but will simply feature it as the initial video backdrop for the first lab video and will spend the night in it with my new hot tent stove.
I am including a video from the creator of this tent. There is QUITE the back story to his creation of this tent but I’ll just share this video and hope you enjoy what this guy did. I would have posted the video here, but he did not allow this video to be shared on other websites.
Here is a separate review of the OneTigris TEGIMEN from Corporal’s Corner. I really like his videos and he’s an excellent bushcrafter. I rate it as a virtual certainty that his timing of the release of this video just prior to the sale on Amazon was NO coincidence. Anyway, this is a great video and shares the essentials about the tent.
The original inventor of the OneTigris TEGIMEN , Lonewolf902,ย has since gone on to create another tent called the “Pomoly Canvas Tarp” that is even better and the video for it is below. The price for this tent is very competitive and worth checking out. I plan to acquire one in 2022 to test out at the lab. He’s very proud of his design and it shows in this video.
The immediate future of the Survival Lab
The plan is to establish a permanent working area to do bushcraft at the big field on my ranch and get started with the videos sharing my thoughts and adventures. We will be operational in mid December and hope to have our video provider selected by then. As I have mentioned elsewhere on this site, YouTube, in my opinion, has continually bullied and mistreated it’s content creator community to the point that it is almost pointless to use their platform for anything beyond promoting your own business. I plan on writing books, sharing video on the appropriate platforms and engaging with the world on platforms free of censorship.
In 2022, I also to erect another huge tent I have in the form of a 18 foot Crow tipi. I am missing the 24 foot poles I need and will be working to get hold of the 15 to 20 poles I’ll need as the main poles and spares. I will be appealing to the bushcraft community for help when the time comes to help me set this thing up and get it all dialed in.
With my handicap with degenerative disc disease, it is likely far beyond me to do this size of a tipi alone bit we will see how it goes! One step at a time to reach our dreams!
The goal with the overall survival camp is to do weekly overnighters out in the survival lab and then to do field missions as weather and my life situation allows. It will be fun and I am looking forward to the missions ahead!