Hi, fellow nutjobs!! I want to start writing a blog, so as my first article, I wanted to cover what wilderness survival is and what it entails. But before I publish it, I wanted to get some opinions from you to see if I'm missing something or if something is redundant. The article is not finished, so if you think something is worth adding, just let me know.
Here's the text so far. I'll add pictures, so it's not as boring, and I'm still working on the ending. Wilderness Survival is a common subject among variety of people: from common outdoorsmen, hunters, and fishermen all the way to military personnel, search and rescue teams, law enforcement officers etc. It is on the minds of pretty much everyone with a sense of self-preservation and respect for nature's dangerous beauty. If you spend enough time in nature, you quickly learn that it commands respect. Nature does not discriminate, it doesn't have bias, it can be beautiful and brutal at the same time, and the difference between making nature your most trusted ally and your mortal enemy is a matter of speaking its language. In that analogy, wilderness survival is the conversation between you and nature, and much like any conversation, there are many factors affecting it - the mood, the context, the tone of the conversation etc., and how fluent you are in the nature's tongue will determine how your conversation goes. With that said, wilderness survival is not usually a concern of people when they are enjoying the beauty of wilderness. It is mostly something to keep in mind in case things go wrong: plane crash, climbing injury, venomous bite, being lost on a hike, stranded car, and the list goes on. While these events are relatively rare, the low odds are offset by extremely high stakes, so even a few occasions a year is enough to raise a concern, especially considering that many of those situations can be triggered by the slightest gestures - a foot placed on a loose rock, stepping next to a venomous snake, taking a wrong turn, flat tire, and so on. So what steps do people commonly take to prepare themselves for such scenarios? Well, there are various approaches, and I will try my best to describe them in short. 1. Gear. A large portion of "survival" community, and consequently, industry revolves around survival gear. The idea behind it is simple - humans evolved into creatures that lack the tools in the field: we don't have sharp strong teeth and claws, we don't have warm layers of fur, our bodies are not as durable as those of many wild animals etc., and this results in a need to compensate for those disadvantages using man-made items (tents, blankets, knives, ropes, bottles, just to name a few). There is a plethora of items that are marketed as survival items and even more items re-purposed for survival use. However, at the end of the day, they are just items. Durability doesn't make a knife into a "survival knife", it just makes it a sturdy knife. The term "survival" is a marketing gimmick used to compel people into buying products by giving them a false sense of purpose. In my opinion, the term "survival_____" is applicable AS LONG AS the item is being used in a survival situation, not what the item is supposedly meant for. For example, if you're stuck with only a pairing knife in the field, guess what? That paring knife is your survival knife for the time. And by the same rationale, if you buy a Tom Brown Tracker knife, but all you do is open beer bottles with it, it's not a survival knife - it's a bottle opener. Another issue I have with items marketed as "survival" is that, like I mentioned earlier, you don't go out to find a survival situation, the survival situation finds you. And as such, you cannot rely on always having your "survival gear" on you unless you are ready to carry all those items with you at all times. I'm not bringing an ESEE Junglas to a fishing trip, I'll probably have a fillet blade, and if something happens while I'm fishing, that fillet knife becomes my survival knife. What I'm trying to say is you have to practice various methods with various tools in order to be fully prepared, which brings us to the next aspect - skills. 2. Skills. You hear that term a lot - "survival skills". The key with skills is practice. Through practice, precision is achieved. You will learn to waste no unnecessary energy when performing a task if you perform it time and time again. But much like it is with gear, "survival skills" are just skills that you may have to use if you need to get yourself out of a hairy situation. There is not a particular subset of skills only used for wilderness survival, these skills come from a variety of other uses and applications. Useful skills like navigation, first aid, knots, carving, shelter building, fire building etc. are common in various professions (SAR, EMT, Park Rangers, etc.) and hobbies (camping, bushcraft, hiking), and they are useful in helping you utilize your tools more effectively and efficiently, take care of your basic needs, and find your way to the target destination. In short, skills can be described as knowledge applied with technique, which brings us to knowledge. 3. Knowledge. This is fairly self-explanatory: knowledge is information with a purpose. Obviously, knowledge alone is not enough to accomplish tasks. Knowing how to do something is useless if you have no ability to do it (skill) or no tools to aid you (gear), but knowledge has something more important and useful - comprehension. You see, the ability to make a trap, to build a shelter, to start a fire etc. are skills. You learned how to do it, you practiced doing it, your nervous system has built neuro-muscular pathways that resulted in "muscle memory", and you can do it blindfolded with one hand tied behind your back. Good, that means you have those skills. Knowledge of those skills is understanding why they work the way they do. Do you understand the physics of a friction fire? Do you know where to set a trap? Do you have a working engineering knowledge of levers, structural support, and joint strength that make a shelter work? If you do, you can devise various ways to accomplish the same task, and tailor your operations to your current situation. Being able to build a lean-to or a debris shelter is a skill; knowing which one to build in cold weather is knowledge. It's good to have gear and skills in your toolbox, but it is even better to be able to think outside the box, and that is what knowledge helps us achieve. 4. Physical Fitness. This aspect of wilderness survival is often overlooked, but in reality, it is one of the most important factors determining your chances to get out alive. However, it is not to be confused with mainstream fitness. The purpose of physical fitness in the wilderness survival is to minimize injuries, improve stamina, endurance, strength, flexibility and speed, NOT to make you look good. In fact, lack of body fat and large muscles often would be detrimental to your long term survival because you will burn through calories faster and will have nothing in storage. Being in good physical shape will allow your body to use your energy efficiently, accomplish tasks effectively, and last in the optimal condition for as long as possible. Therefore, your physical fitness, as applied to wilderness survival, is about performance and not looks. 5. Mental Fortitude. This is the most important aspect to wilderness survival, in my opinion. And it rests on a simple principle - the will to live is the minimum requirement to survival. If you are to survive in the wilderness, you'll have to push yourself through obstacles mentally and emotionally before you ever do so physically. It's about the choice you have to make for yourself when you find yourself in a difficult situation. Jeff Randall, co-owner and co-founder of Randall Adventure and Training and ESEE Knives, told us about people who had minimal gear, minimal skills, and a level of knowledge that was detrimental to their survival, yet were able to survive in a situation and get out alive just on their drive and guts alone. That is not to downplay the importance of skill, knowledge and gear in a survival situation, but to illustrate the role that mental toughness plays because that is the aspect of survival that's taken for granted the most. You see numerous youtubers and bloggers, out of shape and reluctant to leave their backyard, telling you what you need to survive, and more often than not, their focus is on knowledge, skill, and gear.
Good article. I like what you said about "Knowledge". All my life I have asked "why". If I have an understanding of why something is done in a particular way, then I can learn the principle and apply that understanding to other situations. Telling me to only use two or three nails on a shingle does not help me to understand why you don't use a dozen. As to gear, it seems to me that having multipurpose tools can help reduce weight rather than having unitask tools. Problem is that if I have a tool that can be used to accomplish 4 different necessary tasks and I lose it or break it, then there are now 4 things I can't do whereas if I am carrying unitaskers then I only have one task I can't accomplish. Again, good article.
Thanks, ATS. Yeah, I prefer to have multiple tools. Not only do you diversify the risk, but some of the tools can substitute for others, albeit with slightly decreased performance. For example, if I carry a hatchet, a saw, and a knife, I can substitute either of them with the remaining two, should I lose one of them. Also, I think it's good to practice using all the tools you have for different tasks in order to be prepared because there are nuances to using different tools for certain tasks (splitting wood with a thin machete is different than it is with an axe or a knife).
