Pine Resin for Wilderness First-Aid

Fresh pine resin is an often overlooked resource that has many uses in the wilderness.  One of these uses is to quickly seal wounds and stop bleeding.

The other day when I posted the contents of an EDC (every day carry) survival kit,  frequent commenter Dave Sears mentioned Super Glue as something he would include in such a kit.  As he says, Super Glue has many uses, including sealing a cut closed or re-installing a loosened crown on a tooth.

On another blog I frequent, Paul at the Urban Survivalist mentioned that he followed the advice in my book and went out and purchased himself a machete.  He promptly sliced open his finger with it, as happens all to often with this wickedly-dangerous tool if you are not 100% cognizant of where the edge is every moment you have one out of its sheath.  I felt bad that he got cut with something I recommended, but I've done it myself as well.  And I once took a fellow member of a survey crew to the emergency room after he nearly whacked off his index finger with one while trying to split the end of a stake he was holding upright with the other hand.

But back to the topic here.  If you spend enough time outdoors doing anything with machetes, axes, hatches, knives or even chainsaws, you're bound to get cut at some point.  Many years ago I learned an old woodsman's trick from a backwoods kinda gal who's father was a logger that had cut himself severely more than once while working alone deep in the woods with no proper first aid kit. 

I had scored a piece of glass with a glass cutter and placed it on the edge of my outdoor workbench to snap it off by pressing down with considerable force. It snapped alright, but when it did, my wrist went across the edge and the blood started pouring.  At first I thought I had hit an artery, but it wasn't nearly that bad - just a long, clean cut that let the blood flow freely and looked like it would require stitches to stop it.  But this person referred to above knew what to do, and ran away for a moment to a grove of pine trees nearby, quickly returning with a big gob of sticky, amber-colored resin which she pressed onto my wrist directly over the still pouring cut.  To my amazement, though the blood mixed with the messy pine sap, the bleeding stopped, as there was no way for it to get through this tenacious mess.  Anyone who has ever inadvertently put their hand in a patch of this stuff while passing a pine tree knows how hard it is to get off. 

I was worried that it might be harmful, but she assured me that it would not only stop the bleeding, but heal the wound.  She told me how her father had used in once after a deep cut with a chainsaw that went into his thigh almost to the bone.  I decided to experiment and test it out, leaving the resin on my wrist until it dried out enough to peel off.  When it did finally all come off, to my amazement, the cut was cleanly sealed without scabbing.  Eventually it healed with hardly a trace, much less conspicuous than another glass cut I had on a finger years before that I had sewn up with stitches in an emergency room.

I did a little searching around and found other references to pine sap's usefulness in sealing wounds.  Apparently it has anti-fungal and antibacterial properties, and is safe to use in this application, as well as for more obvious uses like making pitch glue.  Here is a discussion thread about it on the BushcraftUSA forums that you may find of interest.  The discussion gets more interesting on page 2:  

  http://www.bushcraftusa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4613

You won't find fresh pine sap on every tree, even in a pine forest, but since that incident, whenever I make camp in the woods and there are pine trees around, I make a mental note of any particular trees in the area that are oozing sap - just in case.

A Few Photos from Homochitto National Forest

As I mentioned in my last post, I was heading over to the Homochitto National Forest on Saturday to spend the day hiking.  It was a perfect day to do so, with the high only in the low forties and the sky overcast and gray - which meant we had it all to ourselves and didn't see anyone else on the trails in several hours of walking.

This part of southwest Mississippi has a lot of surprises, mainly the fact that it is so hilly when so much of the state is relatively flat.  Hiking in the Homochitto is series of ups and downs, making it a great workout.  The woods are also different than most parts of Mississippi, in that throughout most of this 189,000-acre national forest, there is an open feeling of spaciousness that encourages off-trail bushwhacking.

Below: Ernest Herndon pauses on a ridge overlooking one of the many deep hollows alongside the trail we hiked.

These areas of hollows usually have more hardwoods, but this national forest does not have the extensive swampy hardwood bottoms found in most parts of Mississippi.

Many of the hollows have small streams, so finding water is never a problem here. 

As clear as it looks, it still should be treated before drinking, of course.  But exploring these small streams among the clay banks, you can sometimes find the springs that are the source as well, and these are safe to drink from as is.

The higher parts of the Homochitto have vast areas of open pine forests as shown below.  It's the kind of place that beckons to be explored by taking a compass heading and just hiking cross-country. 

But if you're more inclined to explore by vehicle, whether four-wheel drive, ATV, dual-sport motorcycle, or mountain bike, the Homochitto, like most national forests, also contains a network of hundreds of miles of lonely, unpaved forest service roads like this:

We were walking fast and talking most of the time as well, so looking for wildlife was not a priority, but even so we walked right up on a young whitetail doe that didn't seem particularly alarmed to see us.  Deer tracks were evident everywhere, especially in the wet bottom areas along the creeks.  The Homochitto offers good hunting for deer, turkey, squirrel and rabbit.  There are also populations of wild hogs, a few black bear and plenty of big eastern diamondback rattlesnakes.

Looking Forward to a Day in the Woods

I've been spending far too much time at a desk lately, wrapping up the final revisions of my book, writing a couple of magazine articles, posting here, editing photos and doing online research. Today I'm breaking free to hike a few miles in the Homochitto National Forest, Mississippi's second largest tract of U.S. Forest Service land, at roughly 190,000 acres.

Below: The Homochitto National Forest covers a big chunk of southwest Mississippi between the Mississippi River (at the left of this image) and the town of Bude (at the right of this image along Hwy. 84).

The Homochitto contains a mix of pine and hardwoods, in a region of surprisingly rugged sandy hills and deep ravines, where countless clear streams wind their way to the river for which the forest is named. Though it contains no federally-designated wilderness areas, and is cut by forest service roads and areas of clear-cuts and new pine plantations, there are still many isolated hollows tucked away in this corner of southwest Mississippi. You can walk for miles in many areas and hear nothing but the sound of the wind in the pines, and that's exactly what I need about now. I'm meeting my friend and long-time camping buddy Ernest Herndon there today, to hike one of the mountain bike trails that loop through the forest in the Clear Springs Lake vicinity. Ernest lives closer to the Homochitto than I do - this big tract of federally land practically his backyard.

Below: A closer view of the Clear Springs Lake area.  This part of the national forest is full of deep ravines and the trails here are a favorite with mountain bikers because of the steep climbs and winding descents through thick forest.

This is a good time to go hiking there. It's been raining for two days, so there won't likely be any mountain bikers attempting the muddy trails, and deer season just closed with the end of January, so it's unlikely we'll see anyone. I'm taking my camera gear, so I'll post some photos of what it's like on the ground there sometime after I get back. The Homochitto National Forest is one of the bug-out locations described in my new book (in Chapter Five - The Gulf Coast Southeast Region), as it is rich with game, well-watered, and big enough to have some good hideouts, especially if you bushwhack off trail.  But regardless of its potential as a BOL, like most wild places it's a great place to go to restore one's sanity after too much time at the keyboard.