Arctic survival: YouTuber on how to rough it without tent in Alaska winter

An Arctic survival video documenting YouTuber Luke Nichols’ two-night wilderness trip without a tent in Alaska topped the video sharing website’s trending list on Sunday.

Newsweek has reached out to Nichols for comment via email on Sunday.

Why It Matters

The video, posted by The Outdoor Boys, boasts over 4.2 million views as of Sunday afternoon and is the number 1 trending video on YouTube. The channel has around 12 million subscribers and over 2 billion views on various outdoor activities.

What To Know

The Outdoor Boys YouTube channel, run by Nichols, features outdoor adventure videos with his three sons: Tommy, Nate, and Jake. The channel’s About Page reads: “We love all things outdoors: family projects and adventures, travel, forging, camping, camp fire cooking, fossil hunting, magnet fishing, metal detecting, goofing around whatever we darn-well feel like!!” According to Nichols’ LinkedIn, the channel started in 2017.

Some of the videos have received upwards of 100 million views.

In a video posted December 28, Nichols documents his solo three-day trip in the Alaskan wilderness, demonstrating how to set up a bushcraft survival shelter, cook, and survive in Arctic conditions.

Setting Up Camp

After finding a spot to set up camp, he cut down and stripped dozens of trees, removing their branches. He then started a fire using the traditional flint and steel method to warm the camp and dry his wet clothes and shoes.

He warned viewers, “Always got to make sure to put your flint and steel away it’s so easy to get focused on the fire and then drop it in the snow and lose it.”

In order to prepare the firewood and build the shelter he had to dry out some of the logs, which were covered in ice and snow. Nichols explained his method of drying out the wood and said, “I put the firewood around the fire until it starts to catch and then I put it out and stack it up next to the fire.”

He also made a heat reflector wall behind the fire, which he says “absorbs the heat of the fire and then reflects it back towards you. But more importantly it acts as a wind break and keeps the wind from blowing the smoke in your face.” It also helps dry out the ice and snow on branches and firewood.

Survival Shelters

Nichols’ video shows him assembling logs horizontally and sizing them to match the length and width of his body to create a bed as the foundation of the shelter. He added supportive logs, tying some in place to construct a lean-to style bush shelter, then topped the slanted logs with cut branches.

Once he dried out his sleeping logs over the fire, to prevent him from being cold and wet, he placed his caribou hide over the logs as support and used the buffalo hide as a blanket. He recommends drying boots, socks, and pants all before bed.

After the first night, he bolstered his shelter, adding more structural logs and making a log cabin wall around the shelter and fire. He added new brush on the shelters top, saying, “This actually only does a marginal job of keeping the wind out, but once you get a little bit of snow on top of it, then it’s absolutely airtight.”

He added: “The trick is that you got to make it thick enough and far enough away from the fire that when you get a nice big roaring fire in here you don’t have drips of water from melting snow.”

Fire Cooking

Most of the video is Nichols cutting wood, cooking, and savoring his meals in the Alaskan wilderness. On the second night, he crafts a homemade cooking griddle from steel, which he uses the next morning to whip up corned beef hash and egg sandwiches.

His first night’s dinner featured reheated moose fajitas, followed by a breakfast of warm tortillas with butter and cinnamon sugar, paired with steel-cut Irish oatmeal sweetened with brown sugar and raisins. Lunch was two caribou hot dogs cooked over an open flame, and dinner was King Crab legs he had previously caught with one of his sons.

“When you cook the crabs over the fire too it makes their shells brittle, it makes it a lot easier to shell them. Just use your hands,” he said, adding “You gotta eat quick, things cool off really quick around here.”

Nichols then cleans the dishes with snow, filling up the dirty pot and melting it to clean it out.