As a child growing up in Wyoming, my family would go hiking and camping every summer in the Medicine Bow National Forest. One of our favorite camping spots was a place named Vedauwoo (pronounced Vee-duh-Voo). Vedauwoo is known for its strange piles of boulders. This is also a great place to find various types of evergreen bushes and trees, and even to this day I still go hiking there to forage for items I use regularly in my natural remedies.

Surrounded by all the various types of pine trees as a child, I had no idea that when I grew up I’d discover they contained one of the most fascinating natural medicines. There is an age old remedy I have discovered that has worked wonders for me and my family in repeatedly beating the common cold and flu, sometimes even in the harshest of conditions.

During a 19-day course on POW training and wilderness survival while in the Army, I gained some valuable practical experience using these evergreen trees to treat various ailments. The chief ailment I used it for was a common cold/flu.

It was November in North Carolina, when I came down with a fairly severe cold. Staying as silent as possible in our small hide site, piled next to 5 other team mates, I must have also reached a fever since I was shivering while huddled in my 3-layer sleeping bag. Not wanting to be medically dropped from the course, and also just wanting to try ANYTHING to make me better, I began making cups of pine needle tea. This is before I was aware of what terpenes were and how they worked in breaking down mucus and other buildup in the body. All I knew was that my SERE instructor told me it had lots of Vitamin C in it.

I would take water from a stream, boil it, and add the pine needles. I also shared some rose-hips I’d found with my teammates. My cough was barely noticeable after the first night. A cough can often worsen when exposed to cold air. I was cautiously observant in case my conditioned worsened. It did not. My fever also quickly subsided after the first night. Quite surprisingly, nobody else on my team came down with any illness despite our close proximity sleeping in our cramped hide site. The hide site was literally in the nook of a hill where we piled branches and leaves over a few logs and made a makeshift cave. It blended in nicely with the surrounding landscape, but it was like sleeping in a sardine can. Nevertheless, I quickly beat the flu just in time for us to be thrown in a van with bags over our heads, headed to the more brutal part of our training. The rest of my time in that course could have been a disaster had it not been for the application of pine needle tea.

Since I left the military, I have used this cold and flu treatment every year and have passed it along to my family with similar results. I decided this year to further refine my plant based medicine bag. After a brief search, I found three great tasting combinations you can try that will further boost the already reliable homeopathic treatment of Pine Tip Tea.

Just as it sounds, the tips of the pine boughs can be harvested and simmered in hot water. Although any green pine needles will make an effective tea, the new growth at the ends of the pine boughs hold the freshest and most readily available nutrients. These can be harvested throughout the year, but are perhaps most potent when gathered in the spring. If properly dried, the pine tips can be kept for over a year and still maintain their potency. Keeping the dried bits in a cool, dark, dry area like a root cellar is probably the best condition for their preservation.

You may also be aware of turpentine, which comes from distilled pine tree sap. There is a small amount of this age-old medicine all throughout the tips of the branches as well. The plant terpenes (after which Turpentine is named) are known to prevent infection in cuts and may even help break down lymphatic buildup in your body that lead to various other illnesses. They also help break down mucus in the body which is amazing when you have a chest cold.

Pine Tip Tea pairs nicely with many other herbal remedies including thyme (used for digestive issues as well as treating coughs), camphor (a powerful cold remedy), and even onion (same). These are all useful not only in the treatment of the symptoms of a cold or flu, but they contain the ingredients your body can use to heal itself far more rapidly than it would if you just gave it drugs. The more we examine nature based medicine, we see how man-made chemicals that are engineered by billion dollar companies really only mask the symptoms of an illness yet do very little to help the body heal itself. We will do better.

Feel free to expand on these three simple Pine Tip Tea recipes. Your sense of smell will let you know if your body needs or wants any of the properties in the concoctions. As a bonus, these are all safe to give to children, and have been used for many centuries in both early western and native medicine. I have given this to my own daughter throughout her life with good effect. Note: I like to mince the pine a bit if using the long needles, and simmer for 10-20 minutes. You can even let it sit overnight. This is to draw out the maximum amount of nutrients from the pine tips. You can try steeping it like a normal tea as well, as I have not scientifically tested which method is better.

Thanks for reading! If you have any natural remedies you’d like to share, we’d love to hear them and perhaps publish them as our next featured article! Submit completed articles and pictures to wellness@beartariatimes.com Check out more remedies at our Wellness page.