Survival Lilly. Yeah.
March 31, 2017 5:57 AM   Subscribe

Lilly cooks eggs on a shovel, hits the bullseye at 300 meters, explains how to wear a shemagh, makes fire with shoelaces, spends a week alone in the wilderness on Vancouver Island, explains which survival knife is best, snow camps in the Austrian Alps, makes a torch out of a Red Bull can. Bonus: Lilly’s bushcraft dog, a Kleiner Münsterländer named Dax, is adorable.
posted by valkane (28 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
"Don't bleed into the notch"
I live a sheltered life....
posted by Malingering Hector at 6:16 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


What a good dog!

Also, the other videos are good. But, you know, dog.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:27 AM on March 31, 2017 [3 favorites]


What's with the box in the fire? Was that her trash?
posted by askmehow at 6:28 AM on March 31, 2017


spends a week alone in the wilderness on Vancouver Island

Man that makes me homesick. Vancouver Island has some of the nicest country in BC.
posted by bonehead at 6:40 AM on March 31, 2017


I look forward to a future video where she and the Primitive Technology guy chat to each other on shortwaves built with clay, boxwood leaves, pan harvested gold, and elderberries.
posted by gwint at 6:48 AM on March 31, 2017 [9 favorites]


This woman is my Camping Yoda.

I've been leveling up on camping gear lately, using my son's scouting as an excuse. Last night I packed for a trip (finally get to field test my new Hennessy hammock somewhere other than my yard, maybe in the rain), and after I got my tent in my new backpack, I looked down and thought well, I'm that much more prepared for the impending apocalypse, I guess.

Then I woke up and watched the egg video and realized I ain't ready for shit.

What's with the box in the fire? Was that her trash?

I wondered that too. Seems like a ritual thing, like she's got the special pouch for the burny can to show how "leave no trace" hardcore she is?
posted by middleclasstool at 6:53 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


She was making char cloth.
posted by valkane at 6:55 AM on March 31, 2017 [7 favorites]


What's with the box in the fire? Was that her trash?

She was turning cotton cloth into char cloth, it's used as tinder when starting a fire. Later, she puts the rest of her fire starting tools in the tin, it looks like some flint, magnesium and fatwood.
posted by peeedro at 6:55 AM on March 31, 2017 [4 favorites]


I suppose being in my 50s precludes me from being her when I grow up, but still I wish. Really amazing stuff.
posted by Lame_username at 7:04 AM on March 31, 2017


that dog's tail is in near constant wag.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:17 AM on March 31, 2017


> explains how to wear a shemagh

In case anybody else is ignorant/curious, like me, it turns out a shemagh is what I knew as a keffiyeh; Wiktionary says it's "British military use, from Arabic شْمَاغ (šmāḡ)." Which would explain why Yanks like me don't know it.
posted by languagehat at 7:45 AM on March 31, 2017 [3 favorites]


> Man that makes me homesick. Vancouver Island has some of the nicest country in BC.

I have thought so too (my experience is limited, though). My mind was changed a little when I devoured all the episodes I could of Alone. Or, not changed, exactly - it's beautiful, but not soft or easy.
posted by rtha at 7:55 AM on March 31, 2017


Hunh, never heard of Alone before. I've camped near Port Hardy a bunch of times---Cape Scott is really pretty. Kind of surprised they're making it out as an especially harsh environment though. Historically (and to this day) the BC coast and islands are considered some of the lushest and most biologically productive ecosystems anywhere in Canada. Access to the shore pretty much guarantees plentiful food anywhere from the Salish Sea to Haida Gwaii. But then, I don't know what kind of limitations the contestants were under either.
posted by bonehead at 9:16 AM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


Watching a couple of these made me wonder about how they were shot. Maybe it's just her alone, stopping her efforts every few minutes to change the camera setup, but wouldn't that make everything take two or three times as long to do? If there's someone else assisting with shooting, why is their presence edited out of the final cut?
posted by Flexagon at 9:19 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


Maybe it's just her alone, stopping her efforts every few minutes to change the camera setup, but wouldn't that make everything take two or three times as long to do?

It looks like that's the case. I know on the Survivorman show they would have scenes of him doing that and he would make comments about how much of his time and energy was spent setting up cameras.

I'm someone who thinks about that the entire time I'm watching something. I also sit and wonder about what drives people to go to all that work and make videos like this. I spend too much time thinking about those kind of things instead of the contents.

Cool videos though, I just wish she'd explain more since I have no idea about the why's of some of this stuff. It seems like they're made for people with more experience.
posted by bongo_x at 9:35 AM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


Heckin' good doggo. 13/10 would survive a nuclear apocalypse with.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:43 AM on March 31, 2017 [3 favorites]


> I don't know what kind of limitations the contestants were under either.

They seem to be dropped off in the late fall, and they have a limited amount of stuff they can bring - a way to make fire, items to create a shelter, a way to catch fish if they want. It seems to rain a lot, and there are a lot of bears. The ones who talk toughest about their awesome survival skillz always seem to tap out in the first couple of days. And they only person they have to talk to is themselves, via the camera they set up (and, I guess, a periodic check-call with a medic). They get weirder the longer they're out alone.
posted by rtha at 9:57 AM on March 31, 2017


Pretty much all traditional users, aboriginal or not, focus on shellfish along that coast. If they weren't digging clams or taking mussels as a primary food source, then they're really not understanding the environment they're in.

Though, that's one thing that always bugs me about these videos---and Lily does it too---harvesting without talking about sustainability or the ecosystem/organism effects of the catch or harvest they do. She harvest food from the stream and bark from living trees. As a former scout and a present environmental scientist (who has spent the past five years focusing on those littoral ecosystems), that naive attitude kind of grates. There has to be an element of stewardship in the way a camper approaches the land now. The typical survivalist attitudes to the land simply being a resource that one must simply cleverly exploit feels very 19th century to me. Not to be overly critical here, but the whole enterprise seems old-fashioned and a bit tone deaf to modern conservation policies.
posted by bonehead at 10:18 AM on March 31, 2017 [4 favorites]


While it would be nice if she would explain more, my favorite part is how quiet it is and the ambient sounds of her dog and her activities. Survival Binaural Beats, if you will.
posted by brokeaspoke at 10:34 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


She seems wholly awesome right up until the bullseye at 300m with a scope. 300m is iron sights range. Scopes are for further away. Grumble grumble, scopes.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 12:03 PM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


languagehat: I think the "shemagh" term is gaining heavy use in the US - at least among military and wannabees - thanks to US military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Which means that various edc/prep/etc places sell them but with zombie skulls on them and such.
posted by rmd1023 at 1:11 PM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


> If they weren't digging clams or taking mussels as a primary food source, then they're really not understanding the environment they're in.

Oh, they were. And they mostly didn't. They all had wilderness survival skills, but even so almost none of them expected it to be as wet, the forest as dense, how hard it would be to light a fire and keep it lit, to find fresh water. How scary it would be to be sleeping under a tarp and hear bears next to it, or wolves howling on the ridge above. In the first season, at least, the ones who lasted longest did so mostly because they were mentally best able to handle it - the isolation, the uncertainty, the self-doubt - and adapt.
posted by rtha at 1:28 PM on March 31, 2017


She seems wholly awesome right up until the bullseye at 300m with a scope. 300m is iron sights range. Scopes are for further away. Grumble grumble, scopes.

I mean, it depends on what shooting discipline you subscribe to, doesn't it? And also what you consider a scope, I guess, since red dots are, by my understanding, becoming increasingly common these days even for civilian shooters.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:32 PM on March 31, 2017


explains how to wear a shemagh

heh, I'm wearing one as we speak. It's my go to when it's chilly, sitting around the house. Mine was bought many, many years ago in Germany when all the kids wore them with their German army surplus parkas.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 2:07 PM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


She seems wholly awesome right up until the bullseye at 300m with a scope. 300m is iron sights range. Scopes are for further away. Grumble grumble, scopes.

I mean, it depends on what shooting discipline you subscribe to, doesn't it? And also what you consider a scope, I guess, since red dots are, by my understanding, becoming increasingly common these days even for civilian shooters.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:32 PM on March 31 [+] [!]


I just meant that most of the things she does look challenging. Except shooting a target at 300m with a scope on a bipod is like slam dunking on a 4 foot rim with a tennis ball.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 6:51 PM on March 31, 2017


shooting a target at 300m with a scope on a bipod is like slam dunking on a 4 foot rim with a tennis ball.

For you. Maybe. I'd like to see it. Especially with a new gun that you're not used to.

But I think that, honestly, you're discounting something that most people could not accomplish without doing the work to get to that point. Using a modern firearm with modern optics is not something I would dismiss as tennis balls and four foot rims.

Long range shooting is a growing sport, one that is focused on targets from 300 to 1200 yards (or meters), and allows the use of a scope.
posted by valkane at 7:35 PM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm sorry to report this, but Dax (per this video) is no longer with us. But that dog turned loving life up to 11.

Lilly will survive the zombie apocalypse, and I won't.
posted by bryon at 12:14 AM on April 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


I had been meaning to post to the Green asking for recommendations for what to watch after I'd gone through all of the Primitive Technology videos, and now I don't have to. Awesome.
posted by spamloaf at 5:23 PM on April 1, 2017


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