In nearly any survival situation, shelter should be at the top of the list of things required to survive.  The only reason I can see for it not being the first thing to do is if you happen to be early morning, on a warm (not hot) partly sunny or even overcast day without a hint of rain or humidity.  Then I might rank water first.

  You might ask yourself why this might be.  This is why.  Under most circumstances, people can go without eating for weeks, if not a month or two without food.  Not a pleasant thing to do, but the body has enough reserves to tide it over in the case of starvation or famine.  Most healthy people can go for almost a week without water, depending on how much movement you’re doing and the environment you’re in.  Without protection from the elements, in the right situation, you could die within minutes or hours.

  How so you might ask?  Glad you’re trying to think ahead.  Here’s one good example that comes to mind.  Say you’re out for a walk in the winter and you happen to make the mistake of walking across thin ice and you fall through and get soaked.  If you have proper shelter nearby, you might be able to stay mobile and coherent long enough to get a fire/heat going to get warm and dry.  Without said shelter, it’s possible to die within minutes due to exposure.  Unlikely?  Too extreme of an example?  Ok, how about this.  Slightly chilly, but not to cold, windy day.  Possibly in the mid 50’s.  If you were to get caught in a downpour and get soaked, you could still die from exposure.  It doesn’t take much to lower your core body temperature, and with it dropping only a few degrees, it’s very easy to become incapacitated in a short period of time. Still think it’s an unlikely scenario, ok, here’s one from my personal past.  Warm day, working hard, sun beating down.  Got a heat injury.  If it wasn’t for the fact that there were people around that were able to get my body temperature down by dumping water on me, it wouldn’t have been that much longer before I died.  Granted, I was in the Marines and we had been PT’ing and running for awhile and I didn’t drink enough water, but how much different is that from people doing yard work and zoning out, or being in a situation where there ISN’T a lot of water, or at least clean water, available.

  With a proper protective shelter, these types of situations are more easily avoided.  For heat/sun issues, you can stay in your shelter during the hottest parts of the day and be protected from direct sun.  During rainy times easier to stay warm and dry.  During cold times, easier to stay warm.

  Now while I don’t advocate going out and chopping down trees and other plants to practice making survival shelters, what I do suggest is getting either lumber, or more easily managed is plain old PVC pipe.  In the 1/2” to 1 1/2” diameters, it’s more than stiff enough to practice with, will last longer than you will, and is light enough to experiment with.  The only real downside is that since it is manufactured, it doesn’t have natural projections unless you fake it by cutting and gluing in different types of joints, like Y and T joints to simulate branches and twigs sticking out.  Then it’ll be easier to get the structure to stay/join together. With some experimentation, I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with ideas on how to simulate other parts of the building materials that we’ll be discussing here when I start adding pages about different survival shelters.