Essential for all outdoor enthusiasts.
Wilderness survival skills are essential for all hikers and backpackers to have. Should you ever find yourself lost and alone, you’ll be thankful you took the time to prepare yourself ahead of time for just that situation.
Fellow outdoor enthusiast and passionate outdoor blogger Julie Dobson at escapingthemidwest.com, equipped with a copy of The Backpacker’s Field Journal, has put together a terrific post discussing the 3 most import wilderness survival skills tips for you to commit to memory: Identify your location, signal for help, and remember the 5 basic survival priorities to get out alive.
Julie has taken the time to develop each of the wilderness survival skills tips into concise, easy-to-understand guide. We found the post to be incredibly insightful and beneficial to our readers so we thought we would share some of the highlights of Julie’s post with our audience.
We’ve all been there before, finding ourselves in a situation where we’ve lost our bearing due to a wrong turn, getting off the trail, or simply not paying attention. Things could have gone much worse.
The following is a summary of Julie’s top three tips for wilderness survival skills:
• Tip #1: Identifying your location. Julie illustrates the best practices you can deploy to avoid disorientation and panic from setting in; From Identifying landmarks to applying the Mountain Rescue Association’s acronym STOP (S.T.O.P. – Stop, Think, Observe, and Plan.) to your situation.
• Tip# 2: Signal for help. Here Julie offers up practical wilderness survival skills steps that you can take to signal for help should you find yourself lost and alone. Those steps include using fires, mirrors, or using the surrounding landscape to spell out an SOS. Remember: the universal signal for distress is anything deployed in a series of threes (ex: whistling in 3 short bursts).
• Tip #3: The 5 basic priorities for getting out alive: Attitude, Shelter, Water, Fire, and food.
Of course, Julie goes into far more detail for each tip, including providing some suggestions for in the wild survival steps and some lifesaving equipment you want to make sure you have on you. We encourage each and every one of our readers to check out the original article located at: http://escapingthemidwest.com/solo-survival-how-to-survive-being-lost-and-alone-in-the-wilderness
It is our hope here at Southwest Discoveries that you will never find yourself in a situation where you are dependent on your wilderness survival skills. Should that be the case, you’ll be thankful you took the time to prepare.
• Images used on this page are copyright© Julie Dobson and escapingthemidwest.com and howstuffworks.com.