The Plan

Any combat soldier will tell you that when the fighting breaks out, he automatically falls back on his training to get him through. It's the training that becomes instinctive through countless hours of drills that keeps you alive when the going gets rough. If you have no training, you have nothing to fall back on.

The same goes for a Plan. If you have a survival plan that you have rehearsed and practiced over and over again, chances are your brain will revert to that plan when you need it to save your bacon. If you have no plan, you have nothing to fall back on.

There should be a Primary Plan and at least one Contingency Plan. The primary plan is the one to use when everything goes just right. Contingency plans are the fallback strategies to use when the primary plan fails due to unforeseen circumstances (which are the very essence of a disaster).

In a military sense, when the enemy shows up on your landing zone where friendly choppers are scheduled to pick you up, the primary plan is scrapped and the first contingency clan put into operation. You make radio contact with the chopper and tell them to head for the first alternate landing zone. Notice I mention "first" when I talk about contingency plans such as alternate landing zones. You always need more than one contingency plan, because your first option might also run amok. Then you head for your second option.

In survival planning, you need to outline what you will do, where you will go, and how you will get there (and all that kind of stuff) in a primary plan. Hopefully, when you put that plan into action, it will go well. But as often as not, you need to change something(s) on the run, and that's where contingency planning comes into play. For example, if your primary destination is still viable but your means of getting there is not, then pick a new method or transportation from your contingency plan. The same concept applies to all aspects of the survival plan.

It isn't a plan until you write it down. Until it's on paper, it's only a concept. Once you put it down in writing it becomes a tangible plan that you can run through in your mind and use the eraser to adjust whatever need to be changed. Keep doing that until you think you've got it right. Then build first, second, and third contingency plans that will give you options in case Plan A doesn't work out.

Practice all the plans mentally, and then do simulated run-throughs to make sure you can get from Point A to Point B in the amount of time you have planned. If you never go out and actually follow through on the plan, you won't know if there is some new obstacle in the way that would prevent that plan from working. Maybe a road that you were thinking would be a viable route has been torn out, etc. From time to time, trace your routes in real time so you can be aware of changes.

Share your plan with all family members, so everybody will know where the primary and alternate rendezvous points are when a crisis hits.

With a plan, you have a chance. Without a plan, you're probably not a survivor.

Power Outage

We're heading in the season that brings more storms and colder weather to the country — just the kind of conditions that result in trees losing limbs (or toppling) during high wind or heavy snow load.  When that happens, power lines can be brought down, so it's time to consider what you would do during a power outage.

We'll explore this subject in greater detail as the season progresses, but for now I just want to pass along to you one tip that I received from our local utility company. During a power outage, the crews are out night and day trying to restore power as fast as they can. While you're snuggling in your home, trying to stay warm and safe, those folks are out in the screaming storm, cold, wet, exhausted, and working in dangerous conditions. So we owe it to them to do as much as possible to make their job easier.

One of the things we can do is alert them that power has been restored to our home. We don't have to make a phone call to do this — just leave an exterior light switched on so that when the power is restored the light will come on and let the power crew know that electricity is coming to your house.

For yourself, leave one light switched on inside so you'll know when the power is on again. Of course, if your digital clock on the stove (or elsewhere in the house) starts blinking, you'll know the power is back on.

During a power outage, the utility company recommends that you turn off all appliances and heaters. When power is restored, it takes a little while for everything to stabilize, so the recommendation is to wait 15 minutes after power restoration before turning on electric furnaces or heaters, and major appliances.

Easy To Get Lost — Lucky To Live

Sixty-four-year-old real estate broker Edward Rosenthal set out on what he thought would be an easy day hike in an area of Southern California desert known as Joshua Tree National Park.  He hiked this area on a regular basis, but even though he was familiar with the area he somehow got off the intended trail he thought he knew well. Six days later, a search and rescue team found him — severely dehydrated, but alive.

According to Joshua Tree National Park spokesman Joe Zarki, "He was conscious when the rescuers found him and was talking with them, but he does have some injuries and some exposure issues."  

A San Bernardino County sheriff's helicopter was summoned to evacuate Rosenthal to the High Desert Medical Center, where he was placed in intensive care to recover from severe dehydration. 

Rosenthal's wife, Nicole Kaplan, said her husband didn't have any paper with him so he wrote on his hat, expressing his love to her and their daughter, issuing some advice to business partners, and instructions on what kind of funeral he wanted. "He realized he was lost and could not go any further, so he lied low and wrote on his hat," Kaplan explained. His last journal entry simply said, "Still here."

Rosenthal was luckier than 65-year-old William Ewasko who went missing in the same area last June and was never found. Park spokesman Zarki said that the difference between the two cases was that Rosenthal's footprints showed up, but Ewasko left no track to follow. "We had a good trail to follow coming off the loop trail where (Rosenthal) made a wrong turn. The one in June, we never had a clear idea where that gentleman was."

A couple of lessons can be drawn from this episode. 

• Never assume just because you have hike an area before without incident that you will always be so fortunate. 
• Always assume that something might prevent you from finishing your hike in the expected time frame. 
• Even for a day-hike, go prepared to spend a few days and nights. 
• If you discover that you are lost, stop and prepare a shelter (in this case to get out of the sun), conserve your energy, and start working on methods of signaling for help. 
• Rosenthal did the right thing by laying low and conserving his energy and body fluid. To live six days in the heat of that desert in late Summer is no easy feat, and he deserves credit for keeping himself alive until rescuers could find him. 

How It All Started

I thought it might be time for an explanation — a personal glimpse, as it were. 

Something happened to me when I was going through Special Forces training, and it changed the rest of my life. Not only my life, but the life of my wife Becky and our entire family. What happened was that I became a cave dweller at heart.

They didn’t teach cave dwelling in Special Forces, but they did teach survival techniques that sort of morphed in my brain and became an intense interest in living off the land. It may have been the concept of parachuting into hostile territory and knowing how to survive without outside assistance that spawned this interest of mine. Whatever it was, it moved into my head and stuck.

After returning to civilian life, I took to the libraries, reading everything I could get my hands on about non-military survival subjects such as how to identify and use wild edible and medicinal plants, the ethnobotany (the study of how botanical resources are used by indigenous people) of various regions of the world. I went into the field with a botanist friend who showed me how to read the plants’ identifying marks. Weeds started showing up in the refrigerator, and guests were sometimes surprised at what they saw being served for dinner. Added to all this was an in-depth study of primitive techniques involving shelter, tools, clothing, fire making, trapping, and food preparation methods. Such is the life of a budding cave dweller.

The trouble was that I was still working for a living, and being a weekend cave dweller just wasn’t totally satisfying. I needed (or at least wanted) more time, lots of time, uninterrupted time to practice my primitive arts and develop into a full-blown cave dweller. And I came up with a plan. I sat down with Becky one day and proposed an idea. “Honey, I think we should sell the house, get rid of everything we own, take the kids and move into a cave.”

I’m not kidding. Those were my exact words. Her exact words (once she regained her ability to speak) were lost in the distance as she ran down the hall to the bedroom and slammed the door. I’m not entirely sure what she said, but I thought I detected a hint of resistance to my great plan. My next thought was, “Hmmm, that didn’t go too well.” So I decided to drop the whole subject.

A few weeks later, a miracle happened. Married men everywhere fall down with envy when I tell them that Becky walked up to me, planted a kiss and told me that she would support me in whatever decision I made about moving into a cave. “You’re the breadwinner in this family,” she said, “and any way you want to earn the bread is okay with me.” In my opinion, those were the most heroic words I've ever heard. She has always been the brightest star in my universe, and at that moment she went supernova.

After I hugged and kissed her and thanked her from the bottom of my heart, I went outside and planted a For Sale sign on the front lawn. Must have been the right thing to do, because the house was sold in less than a month. We sold almost everything we owned, and put the few things we wanted to hand onto in storage. We moved into a 4-plex while we made final preparations, among which was finding a suitable cave.

Lest anyone misunderstand, the purpose of the whole project was to give me time and opportunity to hone my skills to the point that I could be a good teacher of outdoor survival and primitive living techniques. That was the plan. We never intended to shuck society and live for the rest of our lives in a hole in a rock. The strategy was to spend an entire year living in the wilderness, during which time I would be practicing survival skills until I became proficient enough to be a confident instructor. Kind of like O.J.T.

But I already had years of Special Forces survival training, and a wealth of non-military survival education under my belt. So it wasn’t like we were going out there to see IF we could survive. We had a very high level of confidence that we would survive. I would never intentionally place my wife and children in a risky situation if I thought it might turn out badly. Of course, things happen. We could have all perished. But we might all perish in a freeway accident, too. In fact, there’s a much higher probability of dying on the freeway than in the wilderness, if you know something about outdoor survival.

In our search for a suitable cave in an appropriate location (ie: not in the city park), I consulted an old friend, Larry Dean Olsen, who taught the outdoor survival course at BYU and authored the best selling book Outdoor Survival Skills. He pulled out a couple of maps and laid his finger on two spots in southern Utah. Both of those locations had been hot spots for Anasazi dwellings a thousand years ago. After much discussion, I decided on our new home.

In the middle of winter, Becky and I drove into the exotic slickrock country that flanks Capitol Reef National Park. Before actually moving into the cave, we wanted to recon the area. Caves are generally not indicated on topographic maps, unless they are important caves like Carlsbad Caverns. Our cave was not one of those, so we needed to put our boots on the ground and go search for what Larry had described.

On a frosty morning, we parked our ’64 T-bird among a stand of cottonwood trees where the Burr Trail road through Rattlesnake Canyon intersected The Gulch. Figuring that we would be back at the car by mid-afternoon, we left all of our camping gear in the trunk and headed south into The Gulch wearing only our regular outdoor clothes — mid-weight jackets, blue jeans, and lightweight hiking boots.

I’ll pause here just long enough to say that this is exactly how many real survival incidents begin. People think they’re just going for a short day hike, so they take no survival equipment with them, intending to be back in camp before nightfall. Then something happens and they don’t make it back. That’s what happened to us.

We knew that the cave we wanted to recon was about five miles down the canyon. Unfortunately, Becky was wearing new boots, and by about mile 4.5 her feet were starting to blister. By the time we reached the cave, she felt like she was walking on hot coals. Our hike had been slow and methodical, giving us a chance to explore side canyons and take in the atmosphere of the place, and that pretty well ate up the day. Winter at that latitude means short days and long nights, and as Becky took her last painful steps toward the cave, we had about an hour of sunlight left. We pulled off her boots and talked about the condition of her feet. It was clear that she was not going to be able to hike back to the car that day.

The good news was that the cave was high enough up the slope from the stream bed that it was out of the cold zone at the bottom of the canyon. The bad news was that no matter how far up the slope the cave was, the night was going to be sub-freezing and we had nothing but our clothes to keep us warm. No tent, no sleeping bag, nothing. As the last daylight left the canyon floor, ice was already starting to form along the edges of the stream. Before morning, the entire stream would be frozen over.

I could almost imagine the headlines; “Would-be survival instructor and his wife found dead of hypothermia.” This was not the way I wanted to start my career. There was only one thing to do — I had to use the last minutes of sunlight to get a fire going and turn the cave into a suitable survival shelter. 

Well back from the mouth of the cavern, we picked a spot for a hot rock bed. While Becky scooped sand out of an area of the floor measuring about 6 feet long by 4 feet wide, I collected firewood. Then I gathered up a bunch of stones and placed them in the hollowed out depression that Becky had finished. The firewood went in next, and soon we had a blaze going. 

We let it burn for about an hour, then made sure all the coals were dead before scraping the sand back over the bed of hot rocks. We slept on that warm spot of ground, and it kept us comfortable all night. Well, maybe comfortable is too nice a word, but even though we had to roll over constantly all night long, at least we were warm, which beats the heck out of making the headlines.

That was our introduction to the cave in The Gulch. We’ve come to think of it as our cave, although I’m sure many other people have taken shelter there over the centuries. We found no evidence of Anasazi presence there, but who knows.

After that trip, we returned home to make final preparations for our year in the wilderness. It was a year of immense adventure for us. Not an adventure the size of Mt. Everest, or the depth of the Amazon jungle. But for our small family, living totally alone in the wilderness with a one-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter, chasing lizards for lunch, it was the greatest adventure possible. It changed our lives forever. 

If you really want to know what the wilderness can do to your heart and your spirit and your mind, you must go yourself.

It's The Details That Will Get You

We have become a society that depends on various forms of the power grid to give us light and heat, the ability to cook and bathe and live above the level of a caveman (apologies to the big hairy guy on the Geico commercials). To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter how far out of town you live, as long as you rely on someone else to deliver power to your dwelling.

Case in point: Friends of ours live at the end of a dirt road that has been carved through the dense Pacific Northwest rainforest. This is a wild and beautiful part of the country but when winter storms blow through, it’s not uncommon for the power to get knocked out, leaving folks fumbling around in the dark. 

Being a preparedness-minded individual, our friends bought a power generator capable of keeping the refrigerator and freezer cold and the lights glowing in the house. Proud as a new mama, Denise showed me her acquisition, tucked securely in the corner of the garage just waiting for the next power outage. 

Time went by, and the following winter a big storm came along and knocked trees down. Unfortunately, the trees fell across power lines, tearing them to the ground. The next thing I knew, there was a knock at the door. It was Denise with a gas can in her hands. “Can I borrow some gas for the generator? The gas stations in town are without power and can’t pump.”

It was a good learning experience — which means everybody lived through it and came away smarter than before. So it served its purpose. And the lesson learned was that no matter how much you do toward preparation, if you forget the little details, you might still be without the benefit of that preparation. This applies to all aspects of emergency preparedness — success or failure is in the details.

The words “advanced” and “preparation” are nearly identical, because if you don’t do it in advance, it isn’t preparation. It’s panic, it’s scrambling, it’s confusion, it’s a lot of things but it is not preparation. Being prepared means you’re ready, you’re stocked up with what you need, you have the equipment and you know it runs, you have learned what you need to know, you have practiced, and so now you are confident and competent. That’s what it means to be prepared. Preparation is the act of becoming prepared. And doing it in advance of the catastrophe is absolutely required.

On The Lighter Side

The legendary power of zucchini has been proven in Frenchtown, Montana. Apparently, zucchini is a powerful weapon in that part of the country, as the following AP news clip indicates. (I am not making this up!)

FRENCHTOWN, MONTANA – Police say a Montana woman fended off a bear attack with an unlikely weapon -- a zucchini. Missoula County Sheriff's Lt. Rich Maricelli says a 200-pound (90-kilogram) black bear attacked one of the woman's dogs just after midnight Wednesday on the back porch of her home about 15 miles (25 kilometers) west of Missoula. When the woman, whom police did not name, tried to separate the animals, the bear bit her in the leg. Maricelli says the woman reached for the nearest object at hand on the porch's railing -- a large zucchini that she had harvested from her garden. The woman flung the vegetable at the bear, striking it and forcing it to flee. Maricelli says the woman did not need medical attention. Wildlife officials were trying to locate the bear on Thursday.

Just for the record, I don't recommend getting between your pet and a bear. Nor do I suggest using garden vegetables as a weapon of choice when confronted by a bear. Just wanted to make that clear. 

Are You Ready?

One small mistake, and your life is over. One decision made the wrong way — turning left when you should have turned right — going when you should have stayed — passing up the gas station — ignoring the oncoming signs of a storm can lead to disaster. Life is fragile, and it's easy to die.

Sixty-seven-year-old Louis Rogers decided to drive a remote road from the Flathead Lake area in Montana to Calder, Idaho. When the road became too snowy for his Cadillac to safely negotiate, he decided to turn around and return home. That's when his car got stuck.

Rogers had a history of heart problems, so he decided to wait in the car for someone to come along and rescue him, rather than straining his heart trying to hike out of the mountains. But rescue was slow in coming. For the next 4 days, Rogers melted snow to drink, and turned on his car engine so he could use the heater from time to time. By the 4th day, feeling sure he was going to die, Rogers wrote a "good-bye" letter. Then, as luck would have it, Scott and Penny Kalis of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho happened to drive by in their four-wheel-drive vehicle and rescued Rogers.

Nice ending to a survival story, don't you think? But the interesting thing is that during the time Rogers was stuck in the snow, more than 200 friends, relatives, and several law enforcement agencies had been searching for him. So why didn't all those rescuers find Rogers? And what would have happened if Scott and Penny Kalis had decided to take another route, or not to travel at all that day? I’d say Rogers was one lucky guy, and maybe he ought to buy a lottery ticket.

But surely there is a better way to ensure our survival than depending on blind chance. Actually, if we pay attention to what’s happening around us, and make proper preparations, we can shove dumb luck to the back burner and take greater control over whether we live or die.

Let’s explore some aspects of this incident, plugging you into the driver’s seat to evaluate your state of survival readiness. Use these questions as a checklist to find areas you might be able to improve.

• Do you check the weather before taking a trip? 
• Do you understand the limitations of your car on snow-covered roads? 
• Do you enhance the capability of your vehicle by carrying chains that you have practiced installing beforehand? 
• Do you let people know where you’re going, which route you’re taking, when you expected to arrive, and what to do if you don’t show up on time? 
• Are you equipped to call for help — cell phone (with a power cord to plug into the 12-volt outlet in the car), SPOT Satellite Messenger, or a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB)? 
• Do you dress to survive whatever kind of weather might happen? 
• Do you carry emergency survival supplies and equipment in your car that will allow you to live for an extended period without outside help? 
• Are you physically capable of self-rescue? 

If you find yourself answering any of these questions in the negative, it's time to reevaluate your level of preparation and take steps to improve your chances.