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Alone in the Woods — Solo Camping + Cooking Spicy Soup Over My Camp Stove

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A two-night bushcraft campout goes sideways in almost every way it possibly could.

British outdoor YouTuber WildBeare — real name Claire — set out for a straightforward two-night solo camp in the woods with a new shelter to test and a pot of soup on the menu. What actually happened involved a wobbling stick tripod over an open fire, a bird with terrible aim, and a growl in the dark that cost her a full night’s sleep. It’s the kind of trip that reminds anyone who’s spent time bushcrafting that the woods rarely cooperate with the plan.

• Claire pitches and tests a OneTigris Backwoods Bungalow bushcraft shelter for the two-night stay.
• She rigs a precarious stick tripod to hang her cooking pot over the campfire — and still manages to burn her soup at teatime.
• A bird poops directly onto her plate mid-meal, and later that night she’s woken by an unidentified animal growling outside her shelter, leaving her with roughly an hour of sleep.

Setting Up the Backwoods Bungalow

The trip centers on the OneTigris Backwoods Bungalow, a lightweight bushcraft shelter built for exactly this kind of ground-dwelling, fire-adjacent camping rather than a standard freestanding tent. Claire pitches it solo in the woodland, working through guy-lines and stakes on uneven ground before turning her attention to the fire pit that would double as her kitchen for the next two nights. It’s the same rough, hands-on approach fans of bushcraft content have seen from builds like the Iron Age roof build in soaking rain, where the terrain dictates the plan more than any checklist does.

Once the shelter is up, the real test becomes cooking without a stove — everything has to be done over open flame, using whatever sticks, forked branches, and cordage she can rig on the spot.

The Tripod That Wouldn’t Behave

To get her pot over the fire, Claire builds a stick tripod — three lashed branches meant to suspend the cooking pot above the flames. It’s a classic bushcraft rig, but this one leans, wobbles, and generally looks like it’s one gust away from dumping dinner into the ashes. She works around the instability rather than starting over, and the tripod holds — right up until the soup inside scorches anyway.

The tripod was sketchy — and somehow the soup still burned.

Burning a pot of soup over an open fire takes a special kind of bad luck, since coals are far more forgiving than a stovetop burner. But between the shaky rig and the uneven heat of the flames, teatime turns into a lesson in what not to do with a suspended pot.

A Bird Ruins the Plate, a Growl Ruins the Night

If the burnt soup wasn’t enough, dinner gets interrupted again when a bird flies overhead and drops its business straight onto her plate. It’s the kind of moment that turns a rough cooking session into outright comedy — the sort of mishap viewers of solo bushcraft trips, like the sandbag shelter overnight, know can happen even on a good trip.

The real low point comes after dark. Alone in the Backwoods Bungalow, Claire is woken by a growl from an unidentified animal somewhere just outside the shelter. With no idea what’s out there, sleep becomes impossible — she ends the night with only about an hour of rest across the whole overnight stretch, jumpy at every rustle in the leaves.

Two nights, one burnt dinner, one soiled plate, and an hour of sleep — that’s the tally by the time Claire breaks camp. It’s not the trip she probably planned when she packed the Backwoods Bungalow, but it’s exactly the kind of footage that keeps people watching solo bushcraft channels: nothing goes right, and somehow that’s the whole appeal.