Last year, the news was filled with story after story, of someone being stranded in the outdoors in an inhospitable climate trying to survive.
Whether it was started because their car broke down, they took a wrong turn on a hiking trip, or time and distance got away while they were tracking an animal, getting lost just happened to them. It can also just as easily happen to you.
Many in the military special operations community and those that study survival methodology know that the “Law of Three” is one of the easiest things to help them prioritize their responsibilities when they have determined they are lost.
The Law of Three, simply stated, is that each of us cannot continue to live three hours without body heat, three days without water, or three weeks without food. Those are generalizations of time, for the purpose of easy memorization and recall. By looking at this Law of Three it easy to determine that in a situation where you are lost your top priority is to conserve body heat. In this column we will only be taking a look at the first of these three.
In a situation where you find yourself lost, one of the worst things you can do is panic. When you panic, you will start to move too fast, make irrational decisions, and therefore start to sweat. Sweating is our way of cooling the body down. This is counter to remaining with the Law of Three which states that we must conserve body heat first and foremost, without it we will succumb to hypothermia.
Secondly, if the weather is cold, you need to find or build a structure that will help you conserve body heat through the night. This can be as simple as taking extra clothing out of your pack, particularly a head covering, or building a survival structure. Survival structures will be covered in detail in another column, but you can simply build what some have termed a “squirrel’s nest” which is just a pile of leaves you crawl into, or debris hut which is much like a one-man tent made out of sticks and leaves, or lean-to structure. Also if you can find a rock overhang or fallen tree to crawl under and pack leaves or pine branches around, they both will serve as a great wind break for you and get you out of the elements.
Next priority to help conserve heat is to build a fire. If you happen to have a lighter, or matches (I always keep some of each in my day pack and car), you can build a fire. If you don’t have these with you, you can make a fire from hand, bow or mouth drill. These are skills that you need to study before you need them. They are difficult at best, under nice conditions, under duress, they become even more difficult.
The last thing you need to remember if you find yourself lost is to, stay in one place. Search and rescue teams typically lay out a grid on topography maps of your last known location. They then proceed to move out and search particular grids. Once a grid has been searched, they will mark it off as being searched. If you move around you may by accident go into a grid that has already been searched. If so, search teams may not find you until days later.
The last thing I would like to share about going in the outdoors is to have a plan of where you are going and when you should return. Tell someone not in your hiking or hunting party, what time they should alert authorities if you do not return. In these situations, time is of the essence. An early report to authorities and the use of these basic skills to conserve body heat, will help you be found before it is too late.
I hope to see you outside!
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Edibles and Medicinals in the Wild
You have heard (or simply remember) the story of your grandmother who said you could eat “poke salat” and it was OK, actually it was good for you. The truth is she is correct, sort of.
There is a bounty of edible and medicinal plants that surround us. They could prove to be very useful to our health and happiness, but you need to proceed with caution. Virtually all naturalists that utilize these plants regularly recommend a basic methodology for identifying and utilizing these plants. This involves two steps.
Step one is to utilize, at minimum, three sources when identifying these plants. There are two specific ones that I often recommend to people when they are getting started and those are, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal by Steve Brill and Evelyn Dean and, Edible Wild Plants, Eastern/Central North America, by Lee Allen Peterson. Brill and Dean’s book has line drawings and is heavily researched with their own “hands on” approach. Mr. Brill has an exceptional ability to relate interesting tid bits into detailed information about both edibles and medicinals. He relates folklore, Native American customs, as well as his own experience finding many of these plants in New York City.
For those that are familiar with the Peterson series of guides, you know they great resources for a host of outdoor topics ranging from identification of amphibians, bugs, and mammals to trees and wild edibles. It is heavily researched and has wonderfully detailed drawings, and exceptional photography. It is also very compact and easy to throw in you day pack on your next hike.
As for a third source, just pick one. There are literally dozens out there. Simply browse one at the various online booksellers or visit a good bookstore and pick one that seems to fit what you are looking for.
Step two in this process is to get outside. This is one of those topics, that you can do a lot of reading on and studying pictures on the internet The only way to really grasp it, is to get outside and match pictures in books, printouts, or your digital handheld to actual living plants. My family’s methodology for learning was to read about one plant, its possible habitats, they way it looks and then go find as much of it as we could. I had an instructor at an outdoor survival school have each of his students choose a plant species after his lectures, and then go find a paper bag full of it. Then all of the students put together our species and made a great stir fry and salads with our species. After picking lambs quarters all afternoon, I can now see it on the side of the road as I drive at 55 mph!
The last step in the process is to actually utilize by ingestion or topical application of the various plants. There is another methodology to testing various plants that may come into question, either because your resources are vague, or unavailable. We will cover that in another column. Until then, I hope to see you outside!
There is a bounty of edible and medicinal plants that surround us. They could prove to be very useful to our health and happiness, but you need to proceed with caution. Virtually all naturalists that utilize these plants regularly recommend a basic methodology for identifying and utilizing these plants. This involves two steps.
Step one is to utilize, at minimum, three sources when identifying these plants. There are two specific ones that I often recommend to people when they are getting started and those are, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal by Steve Brill and Evelyn Dean and, Edible Wild Plants, Eastern/Central North America, by Lee Allen Peterson. Brill and Dean’s book has line drawings and is heavily researched with their own “hands on” approach. Mr. Brill has an exceptional ability to relate interesting tid bits into detailed information about both edibles and medicinals. He relates folklore, Native American customs, as well as his own experience finding many of these plants in New York City.
For those that are familiar with the Peterson series of guides, you know they great resources for a host of outdoor topics ranging from identification of amphibians, bugs, and mammals to trees and wild edibles. It is heavily researched and has wonderfully detailed drawings, and exceptional photography. It is also very compact and easy to throw in you day pack on your next hike.
As for a third source, just pick one. There are literally dozens out there. Simply browse one at the various online booksellers or visit a good bookstore and pick one that seems to fit what you are looking for.
Step two in this process is to get outside. This is one of those topics, that you can do a lot of reading on and studying pictures on the internet The only way to really grasp it, is to get outside and match pictures in books, printouts, or your digital handheld to actual living plants. My family’s methodology for learning was to read about one plant, its possible habitats, they way it looks and then go find as much of it as we could. I had an instructor at an outdoor survival school have each of his students choose a plant species after his lectures, and then go find a paper bag full of it. Then all of the students put together our species and made a great stir fry and salads with our species. After picking lambs quarters all afternoon, I can now see it on the side of the road as I drive at 55 mph!
The last step in the process is to actually utilize by ingestion or topical application of the various plants. There is another methodology to testing various plants that may come into question, either because your resources are vague, or unavailable. We will cover that in another column. Until then, I hope to see you outside!
Survival Methodology
That’s right, survival! What is survival anyway? Thanks to Bear Gryls and the ever popular Survivorman, survival strategy and methodology has become a household topic.
Survival means to take the steps necessary to simply stay alive, typically in hard or otherwise inopportune circumstances. To many that means being able to conquer what nature throws at us such as, hard climatic conditions, being lost, or loss of a backpack. To others that means, making sure everyone stays safe and warm during a prolonged power outage. Perhaps taking a step in a different direction survival, to a certain age group, is learning how to cope with out texting for a few hours!
I would submit to you that all of these mindsets are true survival. Survival mindset is exactly that, a mindset. I have studied with experts and on my own for years in the art of survival methodology. Last year I took a class in survival in the beautiful Smoky Mountains, from an instructor who is known virtually worldwide as a “survival expert”. There is no denying that he is exactly that, an expert. He taught our group many things, from edible and medicinal plants to navigating without a compass or GPS, to building our own debris hut or survival shelter. What I discovered throughout the class was that the things he was teaching as survival were merely things I had been doing most of my life for fun!
What most people would call “survival” most of our grandparents and theirs before them, would simply call natural living. For you see, survival, is not learning how to conquer or defeat much of anything, it is rather learning how to work with the circumstances that a given situation puts you in. Now don’t get me wrong, there are times where someone may be lost and without quick access to shelter, water, and food. That may be a situation where a survival mindset is of the upmost importance. For example what is most important, food, water, discovering where you are, rest? There is definitely a priority list of things to go through in your mind when you find yourself in this sort of situation (which we will cover in our next column).
These are all skills that are now lost to us thanks to big box stores and easy access to food and the fact that water simply comes to us by turning a faucet. Please don’t misunderstand me; I enjoy these things as well. But, these are places and ways of convenience that we all take for granted I believe. Generations not to far removed from our own, pumped or gathered their own water from a well, or creek. Slaughtered and processed their own domestic animals, or had wild game opportunities around them as well. Taking it a step further, many generations before our own, Native Americans were a part of their environment, not conquering it. They thought of rivers as “the long human”, because these waterways were alive and vibrant to them and worked with them to keep them alive. Conversely they would never do anything to harm their sources of water. Even in my lifetime, I am now 40, our closest river has gone from a waterway that I played in as a boy, to one we would not dare drink from without lots of purification and cleansing.
The ability to work with the circumstances is above all most important. If you think to yourself, “Oh no, I am in big trouble”, then you are exactly that, in big trouble. If, on the other hand, you think something along the lines, of “I can do this” or “We will be just fine”, it goes a long way in your chances of survival in any given situation. When I travel alone, particularly in the forests and other backwoods of Kentucky I typically take a memento of my family, in the case I am lost or otherwise hurt such that I cannot find my way out. A remembrance helps in the mindset, of why one wants to return to normal life and goes a long way in keeping one’s spirit awake and alive for the hardships that may occur.
Survival, self-reliant living, relying on nature, emergency preparedness, are all buzzwords for these ways and methods that I look forward to exploring and covering with you in the future. Just so you know I am neither a “survival nut” nor a “tree hugger”, I suppose I am a little bit of both, or maybe better said, I am neither. Whatever I am, I look forward to getting on this trail with you and finding things together.
Survival means to take the steps necessary to simply stay alive, typically in hard or otherwise inopportune circumstances. To many that means being able to conquer what nature throws at us such as, hard climatic conditions, being lost, or loss of a backpack. To others that means, making sure everyone stays safe and warm during a prolonged power outage. Perhaps taking a step in a different direction survival, to a certain age group, is learning how to cope with out texting for a few hours!
I would submit to you that all of these mindsets are true survival. Survival mindset is exactly that, a mindset. I have studied with experts and on my own for years in the art of survival methodology. Last year I took a class in survival in the beautiful Smoky Mountains, from an instructor who is known virtually worldwide as a “survival expert”. There is no denying that he is exactly that, an expert. He taught our group many things, from edible and medicinal plants to navigating without a compass or GPS, to building our own debris hut or survival shelter. What I discovered throughout the class was that the things he was teaching as survival were merely things I had been doing most of my life for fun!
What most people would call “survival” most of our grandparents and theirs before them, would simply call natural living. For you see, survival, is not learning how to conquer or defeat much of anything, it is rather learning how to work with the circumstances that a given situation puts you in. Now don’t get me wrong, there are times where someone may be lost and without quick access to shelter, water, and food. That may be a situation where a survival mindset is of the upmost importance. For example what is most important, food, water, discovering where you are, rest? There is definitely a priority list of things to go through in your mind when you find yourself in this sort of situation (which we will cover in our next column).
These are all skills that are now lost to us thanks to big box stores and easy access to food and the fact that water simply comes to us by turning a faucet. Please don’t misunderstand me; I enjoy these things as well. But, these are places and ways of convenience that we all take for granted I believe. Generations not to far removed from our own, pumped or gathered their own water from a well, or creek. Slaughtered and processed their own domestic animals, or had wild game opportunities around them as well. Taking it a step further, many generations before our own, Native Americans were a part of their environment, not conquering it. They thought of rivers as “the long human”, because these waterways were alive and vibrant to them and worked with them to keep them alive. Conversely they would never do anything to harm their sources of water. Even in my lifetime, I am now 40, our closest river has gone from a waterway that I played in as a boy, to one we would not dare drink from without lots of purification and cleansing.
The ability to work with the circumstances is above all most important. If you think to yourself, “Oh no, I am in big trouble”, then you are exactly that, in big trouble. If, on the other hand, you think something along the lines, of “I can do this” or “We will be just fine”, it goes a long way in your chances of survival in any given situation. When I travel alone, particularly in the forests and other backwoods of Kentucky I typically take a memento of my family, in the case I am lost or otherwise hurt such that I cannot find my way out. A remembrance helps in the mindset, of why one wants to return to normal life and goes a long way in keeping one’s spirit awake and alive for the hardships that may occur.
Survival, self-reliant living, relying on nature, emergency preparedness, are all buzzwords for these ways and methods that I look forward to exploring and covering with you in the future. Just so you know I am neither a “survival nut” nor a “tree hugger”, I suppose I am a little bit of both, or maybe better said, I am neither. Whatever I am, I look forward to getting on this trail with you and finding things together.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)