Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Ovens Rocky Mountain Bushcraft" channel.

@TsandLman My dad was a city boy, who learned survival techniques in the 82nd Airborne, including a stint at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado. Having learned them, he arranged his life so that he would never need them. He'd regale us with stories and talk about survival skills, but he had zero interest in leaving the comfort of home to go camping with us kids. So even though I've spent a lot of time out camping, fishing and hunting, pretty much everything I know and do is trial-and-error, and the slow accumulation of the right kind of gear, on what started out as a pretty limited budget. But I learned in my 20s that it was worth paying extra - even if it meant waiting a whole year - for equipment that worked and would last many years.
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Yeah. I knew an MD who retired while he was still young and fit enough to go back to school, learn some of the math he didn't learn the first time through, and go hiking, skiing and camping. He was living the dream. Then he slid off a high-mountain trail in Colorado, and that was it for him. So sad, to finally be living his dream, enjoying all the years of hard work and dedication, only to perish due to ice on a trail in the spring.
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Swedwoods, Outdoor Boys, and Ovens Rocky Mtn Survival are 3 of my favorites. Outdoor Boys should open up the comments, but I think they shut them off because they've got kids, and some people think that taking the kids camping is child abuse. Swedwoods never gets himself in a bind. Always prepared for the same basic level of comfort. Luke and Greg put themselves into more uncomfortable situations. Swedwoods never talks. He just shows. He might annotate a scene to explain what's going on, but usually, he just documents what he's doing, visually. One thing these channels never really show is the true level of discomfort you might encounter. But at least they show the main thing: Always be thinking of what you can do to improve your situation even a little bit, and never let yourself be discouraged or feel despair, because that's what'll get you more surely than any of the mistakes you made.
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Seriously, crawdads can be good eating. I used to catch them by flipping rocks and grabbing them, but I learned that all you have to do is tie some string to a piece of chicken. They'll latch on and you can have them out of the water before they let loose. Anyway, you can boil them up just like lobster. Each one is like one good bite of lobster.
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It might save your life if you came upon one, but it'll be nasty, and yeah, a lot of sharp, rusted metal and tetanus hazard.
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@Llirik13 Women are really the main reason we men get civilized in the first place. Full belly. Roof over the head and 4 walls, even if it's only a canvas tent, and most men can be pretty happy.
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Just so people know, if you're up in the Rockies and the sun is out, you can be pretty comfortable in pretty cold temperatures. Dad told me about playing volleyball up in Leadville when he was doing his ski training. In t-shirts. In the dead of winter. I experienced some of that, myself, in Gunnison. The thermometer says one thing, but if you're out in the sun, you're not cold. Colorado's a great state for passive solar heating of your home. It's not end-all, be-all, but when I was in Gunnison, there was never a day without SOME good sunlight. Not sure what it was. Maybe it was the rising heat over those high valleys that punched a hole in the cloud cover. But there were probably only a handful of days in the 7 years I was up there that there wasn't at least some direct sun in the afternoon. By contrast, in the Northwest, you have overcast skies for weeks at a time. I miss that about Colorado, but I don't miss the politics.
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