How to Tie Cow Hitch

Series Summary

Those of us living amidst the mountains of sky scrapers, fields of concrete, and the rivers of highways can truly appreciate the adventure of camping in the pristine great outdoors. Even though a day or two in the wild may be enough to make us drive to the nearest Holiday Inn, there is a relaxing quality to living simply in the woods and enjoying nature. While it is simpler there are tasks to be done that are unfamiliar to us that make camping not quite as simple as staying at home. Consequently many times the camping experience is more stressful than relaxing. However, preparations can be made and skills improved before “roughing it”. One such skill that is important to master in order to camp successfully is knot tying. A broad base of hitch knot tying knowledge will allow you to secure tent poles, carry bottles, and secure tarps and tents to stakes and trees.

In this free video series learn how to tie hitch knots from knot tying expert and outdoor enthusiast Robert Segundo. He will demonstrate how to tie the cow hitch, the buntline hitch, the clove hitch, the clinging clara and many other hitches for your camping, boating and other outdoor adventures.

Video Transcript

"A hitch is a classic way to secure something to a solid object, post, hitching post. It's really a classic way to things. So, if you look down here, you can see I have my makeshift hitch post and I've got my line. Know this is called a pedigree hitch, a simple hitch. What we are going to do is we are going to take our line. We are going to run it underneath or actually we are going to run it over and underneath. So this way you can see the knot a lot better. We'll take it and we'll loop it over like this. You can see that we have a loop here and I'm just looping it over. Pull it out a little bit more because I'm going to need it. I'm going to take it back under and loop it over again. As you can see I've got this symmetrical almost butterfly shape going on too. As I pull it to tighten it up, I'm going to take my working end again and I'm going to run it under both lines creating a loop around my initial line that I put in here. Just pulling it tight, this is a nice secure hitch and as you can see as I pull on. My horse is definitely not pulling loose from this one."