Bushcraft is the practice of using nature’s resources to live with the land instead of constantly struggling with it. The idea of doing more with less and recognizing the more you know, the less you have to carry are central concepts to bushcraft.
Like any outdoor activity, there are certain staple items that you never want to leave home without. A stout knife, a good canteen, quality fire starters, and excellent appropriate clothing are some of the basics and non-negotiables that immediately come to mind.
Then there are the items that go beyond the “need to have” category and into the “nice to have” category. I like to think of the nice-to-have items as the ones you may deem too heavy to pack all day and may decide to leave them in camp for when you return. These items can improve the comfort level of a backcountry camp and move you from the surviving to thriving mindset.
In a recent canoe camping trip, I stowed some camp essentials in a 5-gallon bucket with a gamma lid on it.
Small Splitting Hatchet and Saw Combination
There is nothing more comforting in camp than a large pile of firewood cut and split, ready for the fire. While an emergency fire can be made with the tinder, kindling, and fuel found on dead and down trees, a proper pile of wood is processed with tools.
A small splitting hatchet, like the Outdoor Axe from Gransfors Bruks, and a folding saw like the Bahco Laplander will fit easily inside a 5-gallon bucket. The Bahco is capable of quickly cutting wrist-thickness wood, and the axe can be used like a wood bullet with a wooden mallet to drive it.
The extra space in the bucket can hold a puck for repairs and some axe wax for maintenance. For an extended trip, pack the smaller axe and hatchet as a backup, and use a full-size axe and bow saw for your primary means of collecting ample firewood.
Billy Pot with Lid
Your canteen cup is your primary cooking vessel and it works well to treat water through boiling. A larger cooking pot easily fits inside the bushcraft camp bucket and in the hollow of the cooking pot, some essentials can be carried. Coffee, bannock mix, spices for cooking wild game are all nice additions to the camp kitchen and I’ll argue coffee is a must have item in of itself.
The billy pot can be suspended over the fire for melting snow, treating water, or keeping coffee hot while the camp is kept in order. A larger pot dedicated for cooking will also make it easier to make stews and soups from whatever you butcher from your hunting and fishing efforts.
10’x10’ Square Tarp
Clothing is your first line of shelter against the elements. You should have a good layering system in place to regulate your comfort as the temperature swings throughout the day.
A poncho or personal sized tarp can make a great emergency shelter but a larger 10’x10’ tarp becomes an area shelter providing living space. That tarp can be pitched directly to the ground as a lean-to blocking the wind or it can be set up as an A frame or Diamond for a place to get out of the rain.
The 10’x10’ tarp, strung up high, becomes the central meeting point for a group camp setting with multiple individual camps. To make the tarp setup even easier, your bucket prep can include a tie-down, hanks of cordage, and at least one longer length for spanning a wide gap between trees.
Wash Bucket and Towel
Cleanliness is next to Godliness and after a while in the great outdoors, you’re going to smell. A wash basin and a bar of soap go a long way after getting sweaty, muddy, and grimey.
Using the bush pot and a small wash cloth, you can set up a “bird bath” station to keep the funk off of you and maintain camp hygiene with an extended stay in the wild.
That same wash bucket and soap bar can be used by the group to clean up prior to meals. It doesn’t take much for one person to get an entire group of campers sick by contaminating a food source with a grubby hand grab.
Don’t overlook the obvious of using the 5 gallon bucket as a cleaning container but also don’t forget to use it, you have to remove all the contents making the separate folding wash bucket more convenient.
Folding Camp Seat Pad and Bucket
There are ways to build camp chairs using nothing more than a tripod, a square lashed branch, and a wool blanket but those require some effort and resources. Sometimes, the best solution is the most obvious or the easiest.
The bucket itself with a folding camp pad makes the perfect camp chair sans a backrest. With a little square lashing, a horizontal bar can be tied between two trees to rest up against when using the bucket chair.
On the canoe camping trip I recently took, I used the bucket as my seat when taking an impromptu break along the river. Come campfire time, the bucket seat shows it’s worth, keeping you higher than the base of the fire where the heat rises. In muddy or soft ground, the wide base of the bucket won’t sink in like other folding chairs.
Again, the best solution is often the most apparent.
Extra Space and Miscellaneous Items
The items listed to this point won’t take up the entirety of the bucket’s capacity. That will leave you with extra space for some miscellaneous items like a heavy duty sportsman’s blanket, toilet paper/wet ones, or even water tight storage for your holstered pistol.
The gamma lid will keep water out of your bucket making it a great dry container. It also takes a lot of weight to sink a sealed bucket, making it easy to recover should your canoe tip over granted it isn’t packed too heavily.
The extra space you have in your bucket prep can also be used for redundant layers of kit you may already have on your person or in your PFD. The best way to determine what items should take up this extra space is by taking the existing kit to the field.
The dirt time you experience will expose the additional needs or wants you have, like a set of leather gloves for working around the fire or small folding shovel for digging catholes when nature calls.
The 5 gallon bucket is ubiquitous and much like duct tape and WD40, there are many uses for them. In the coming weeks, I will present other variations of kits using the bucket as the baseline container for various projects.
