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A homemade tracked machine the size of a garden tiller just opened up the deep taiga to one man and his gear.
Lars, the bushcraft builder behind the YouTube channel Survival Russia, has spent years turning scrap steel and small engines into working off-road machines. His latest outing, “Camping In The Multi-Purpose Tracked Crawler,” sends him three days deep into the Russian backcountry — not on foot, but aboard a home-built mini crawler small enough to thread through brush that would stop a truck cold.
- The trip is a solo, three-day camping excursion into remote taiga and deep forest, with Lars relying entirely on his self-built tracked vehicle for transport and gear-hauling.
- The machine — known across his channel as the “Mini Crawler” or “Multi-Purpose Tracked Crawler” — runs on rubberized continuous tracks, has high ground clearance, an open utility bed, and a small single-cylinder engine.
- Once at camp, the crawler doubles as a basecamp utility platform, moving axes, canvas shelters, and supplies rather than just sitting parked.
The Build Behind the Trip
The crawler featured in this video isn’t a commercial product pulled off a dealer lot — it’s the latest evolution of a machine Lars has been refining on camera since at least 2018, when he first showed off “The Mini Crawler 2018 Ultra Light Tracked Vehicle.” The core idea hasn’t changed: strip a tracked chassis down to the essentials, keep the weight low, and let the rubberized tracks and ground clearance do the work that four wheels can’t in marsh, deep rut, or standing brush. A single-cylinder utility engine — the kind you’d find on a tiller or a small generator — is enough to crawl the machine forward at low speed over terrain that would bog down anything heavier.
That low-and-slow approach is the whole point. Where a wheeled ATV needs momentum and traction to punch through soft ground, a tracked crawler spreads its weight out and just keeps grinding forward, track link by track link, whether that’s a rutted logging trail or a stretch of taiga floor nobody has driven over.
Hauling the Camp In, Not Just the Body
What separates this video from a straightforward hiking trip is how the crawler gets used once Lars is off the trail and into deep woods. The open utility bed carries the load — axes, canvas for shelter, and the rest of his kit — meaning he isn’t limited to what fits in a backpack. That changes the calculus of a three-day solo trip: heavier canvas, more substantial tools, and a setup closer to a real basecamp than a minimalist bivouac.
The crawler isn’t just the ride in — it’s the workhorse that stays at camp, hauling gear and shelter material long after the engine’s been switched off for the night.
That dual role — transport out, utility platform once parked — is the throughline of Lars’s Mini Crawler series, which has followed the machine through repeated field tests in extreme backcountry conditions. Viewers who’ve watched his other bushcraft work, including builds like the plastic-wrap shelter he’s rigged up in past videos, will recognize the same instinct: make do with a small, purpose-built tool rather than over-engineer the trip.
Camp Craft in the Taiga
Once the crawler reaches its stopping point, the video shifts into familiar Survival Russia territory — practical off-grid camp craft rather than vehicle demonstration. Setting canvas, managing an axe, and establishing a livable camp deep in the woods are the same skills that show up across solo bushcraft content, the kind demonstrated in builds like the sandbag shelter overnight other creators in this space have tackled. The difference here is logistics: the crawler means Lars can bring in more, and range farther from any road, than a foot-based trip would allow.
That’s the real test the video is running — not whether the crawler looks capable in a driveway, but whether it holds up hauling real gear over three days of actual forest floor, brush, and marsh. Judging by the ground it covers, the ultra-light approach is paying off exactly where it’s supposed to: in the terrain a normal vehicle never sees.
Lars has already put earlier versions of this crawler through winter runs and heavier load tests on his channel’s Mini Crawler playlist, so this three-day taiga trip reads as another data point in a build he keeps iterating on trip by trip — the next question being how it holds up once the snow comes back.
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